With its classic Parisian-style decor, the French eatery Caravin in Sydney offers an escape from the everyday. Image courtesy of Caravin. It is 6pm and 26 degrees. On a narrow street on the outskirts of the city centre, in front of an open doorway, half a dozen tables are sprinkled across the footpath, each occupied by two or three fashionably dressed young people drinking butterscotch-coloured wine and picking at plates of tarte au comté. Inside, a chandelier casts a Sunkist glow over the compact kitchen and two-storey dining room.
Despite appearances, this intimate venue, Caravin, isn’t in the French capital’s 11th Arrondissement. Rather, it’s a new-ish Parisian restaurant and wine bar in Sydney’s Potts Point. Caravin’s owners, Greg Bampton and Phil Stenvall, say the Ward Avenue property’s structure and location was influential in deciding the style of cuisine but, serendipitous origins aside, Caravin’s existence (and perennially crowded tables) is part of a surge of French-inspired eateries and drinking holes popping up across Australia.
“There is definitely an element of escapism at play,” Bampton says of the trend. “I still see Sydney having a pub-orientated drinking culture, but French or Parisian venues offer guests the opportunity to exist outside of their everyday — especially if they couldn’t swing a trip to Europe that year, and even if just for a few hours.”
French cuisine’s versatility might also have something to do with it being “back in fashion”, posits the Australian-based French chef, author and television presenter Gabriel Gaté. “In an Italian restaurant, there might be three or four fresh pastas and the tiramisu,” Gaté says. “With a French restaurant, we are not always sure what it’s going to be because I think there’s a little bit more of a variety — depending on where the chefs come from or their experience.”
For Gaté, cuisine is, in one sense, a language. “The chef will have their own interpretation of dishes, and with their own twist,” he says.
Fellow culinary icon Stephanie Alexander is an Australian cook, restaurateur, food writer and frequent traveller to the European gastronomic capital. Why does she believe Australians can’t get enough of French dining? In short, it’s the singular correctness.
“In French, you talk about something being ‘correct’,” says Alexander. “There’s an atmosphere, there’s a warmth, there’s an attention to what they see as important. The tables will look beautiful, there will be flowers somewhere. There will be somebody smiling at you. There will be a sense that you are expected to have a totally beautiful, relaxing evening. It is just an expectation that you’re going to have a good time. And so you do.”
Perhaps the answer to this riddle will reveal itself by going straight to the source: Paris’s 11th Arrondissement. On Rue Saint-Maur sits Camille Fourmont’s petite La Buvette, a one-woman wine bar that specialises in natural and obscure drops and simple plates of food. According to Fourmont, what makes the venue special is its sense of personal intimacy. “Light globes, furniture, silverware were my very own belongings and choices, just like I would have opened an extension of my living room,” she says.
“It is a very local-friends-neighbourhood place,” Fourmont continues, with La Buvette creating an “attractive mood” for diners, as if they were “just visiting and stopping by”.
