L’Entente, British Brasserie

Coming from a family PR & Retail Background, I love to tell a story and sell stuff. I originally arrived in France aged 19 during what in the U.K. is called a ‘Gap Year’, when students take a year off between their A-Levels and University to travel and broaden their outlook on life before taking their degree. I was supposed to come to France for six months to learn French but ended-up staying a bit longer.

Most people fall-back sooner or later into what they instinctively know, and British Cuisine is what I grew-up with, my mother is a formidable cook. I combined that with being fed-up of being permanently wound-up by my French friends that British food was rubbish, (sometimes it is, but that can also be said about all countries), with the dearth of any restaurants that are British-inspired, semi-formal, à la fois Casual yet Excellent, and so it was an obvious choice for me. In the UK there are over five hundred official French restaurants, and though there are plenty of British Chefs cooking in France and Paris today, there is only one truly British Brasserie that flies the British Flag, metaphorically speaking of course, as here at L’Entente, we try to avoid the obvious clichés such as Union Jacks, Fish & Chips and portraits of Her Majesty.

Pies are one of the often-unsung national dishes of the U.K., savoury or sweet and the combinations of ingredients are endless, we are currently changing over from Chicken & Leek to Ham & Pea. With this in mind, I wanted a logo that encapsulated British Cuisine in one image, and our Pie logo, which is a Registered Trademark, was created by Clifford Harper. The Blackbird signifies an earlier time, in the middle-ages, the C16th, for Henry VIII, with the poem “Four & Twenty Blackbirds baked in a pie, wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the King”, which is painted onto one of our walls at the restaurant. That was when once the suet-crust pie had been baked, the cooks would slip a live bird or two into the boiling pie and when it was cut-open, they would fly-out. Nowadays the symbolic blackbird is thankfully in ceramic and is used as a chimney to let the steam out whilst cooking so that your puff pastry won’t collapse.

Not being a trained Interior Designer, this is also a tricky question. It really just did happen naturally. The colour palette came through personal acquaintance of the Pastelle de Bleu de Lectoure in the Gers, (sadly no longer in existence), otherwise known as wode.

Anecdote – Well I wish I had more spare-time to keep on treasure hunting. I currently need a couple of small old wooden frames and solid, plain ice-buckets with no logos, which are harder to find than you think. The silverware though comes through three different agents, and a lot of it is British – except our knives which come from Le Train Bleu before they had their fit-out a few years ago. In an age when companies, particularly in France, are striving to cut-down on staffing costs, using machine-washable stainless-steel cutlery over silver-plate that needs to be hand-polished is of course, an obvious choice for the bean-counters. Too bad for them! (Astier & Villate mention this too in their amazing book, which gave me a grin).