I enjoyed my brunch so much that I was finally able to try Tesse for dinner.
I am now officially a huge fan of Chef Raphael Francois and I love his traditional French cuisine, which strangely seems so new and novel in Los Angeles given the plethora of either “fusion” type restaurants or Italian, Italian, Italian.
We started with a loaf of country bread (served with delicious butter from Normandie) and a pate platter. We loved the pate platter. You get to choose which pates you want and we chose chicken liver parfait (actually a parfait, not a pate, but whatever it was, it was delicious), duck and fig terrine and pate du chef. They bring out the platter with great ceremony and the waiter uses tongs tableside to put pickled vegetables from a big vat onto the platter. He mentioned that the pickles were from a traditional recipe of Chef’s grandmother.
We also ordered smoked poblano beignets with emmental and tomme to start. Not earth-shattering, but very nice with a nice bite from the poblano.
By this time we were getting rather full, so for entrees we split the bucatini with duck prosciutto and bone marrow and an order of duck fat fries. The bucatini was good and the duck fat fries were amazing. To me, duck fat fries have in the past been one of those things that sounds great in concept, but often fall flat in execution. These were perfect and the side aioli was excellent. Would love to come back and just have a burger and duck fries, but would definitely need to skp the pate platter because no way could I eat that much food.
Finding a wine was a bit of a challenge for me. It’s a fairly long list, but there was no somm on duty and the list was heavy on wines with which I was not familiar and short on wines from my favorite French and Italian regions. I marched myself into the adjacent wine shop (you can buy a bottle there and have it sent to your table and I think they add a $25 fee or so). I am really big on low alcohol wines and the gentleman in the wine shop seemed dubious they had any wines with less than 14% alcohol. But after nosing around, I found a bottle of Nebbiolo which was only 13% alcohol. The gentleman in the wine shop was a little concerned I might not like the wine, because of the acidity – he said something about most of their customers preferring “smoother” wines (which may be true because the average customer in the restaurant seemed to skew '20 something or early '30 something, so perhaps they have just graduated from college keggers). I assured him that acidity would not only be fine, but was preferred in wine. We ended up liking the wine and it went well with the food.
Speaking of '20 something and early '30 something diners (I was clearly the oldest person in the restaurant), while the restaurant brings out a paper menu for wine and cocktails, we actually had to scan a barcode on the table to see the dinner menu on our phones, which I found highly annoying and uncivilized. I guess it is okay for the younger Instagram generation. 
It does save money and I know restaurants run on razor thin margins, but perhaps they could have paper menu optional for the oldsters such as myself.
Anyway, I would definitely return to Tesse. Loved, loved the pates. Everything old is new again.
