Bistro Bagatelle’s lobster-tajine-made-easy

Lately, one of my favorite online food reads has been Gael Greene’s Insatiable Critic. I love the personality she gives to her reviews–they unfold like good stories–and she’s never steered me wrong. In sort of a Julie and Julia (lite) way, I feel like if Gael and I were to have dinner together we’d totally order the same things.

This week, Gael took on Meatpacking District mainstay Bagatelle. Given my aforementioned critic crush, it was fun to see how similar her take was to Camille’s and mine when we went not too long ago: We’d assumed that the buck stopped with the exhausting scene. What we discovered was that–while there’s no shortage of sparklers and champagne–the restaurant can also be warm, down-to-earth-friendly and awfully cozy on a winter night. As for the food, courtesy of Chef Nicolas Cantrel (veteran of more than one Alain Ducasse outpost), it was the kind of stuff you’d imagine having grown up with–if Julia Child were your grandmother. 

To give you a sense of what I mean, I asked Chef Nicolas for a recipe to share here. What I love about what he came up with is that–while “lobster tajine” sounds incredibly hard to pull off–if you go through the ingredients and steps, the dish is shockingly straightforward. Further, you’d think something this decadent would be weighed down with added fats. But it isn’t. Instead, there’s rich flavor from a few key components. Below, the essentials…

Nicolas Cantrel’s Lobster Tajine

Ingredients:

1 lobster
1 piece of salmon around 6 oz
¼ red bell pepper, julienned
5 pieces of baby Bok Choy
¼ bunch of cilantro
1 can of coconut milk
1 spoonful of curry

Preparation:

1) Boil the lobster for 4 minutes  in salted water, then transfer to ice water. After a few minutes, take it out and remove its shell.
2) Blanch the Bok Choy for 1 minute in the (same) salted water, then transfer to the ice water.
3) In a pot on the burner, boil the coconut milk and the curry until its reduced to about ¼ of the original quantity.
4) Pour the reduction into a Tajine (or other lidded, oven-safe dish), and add the salmon cut in 4 pieces, the lobster, the Bok Choy, red bell pepper and the cilantro.
5) Cover and cook for 10 minutes in the oven, already pre-heated to 400 degrees.

*Serve with a side of Jasmine rice