Dan Rodricks: At Tersiguel’s, the chef changes things up while keeping his French soul | STAFF COMMENTARY
After the pandemic, Chef Michel Tersiguel came up with a new format for his French country restaurant: A chef's menu just four nights a week.
No official document from the Howard County executive is necessary for the following declaration: The Tersiguel family’s French restaurant is the stuff of local legend.
Opened as Chez Fernand on Main Street in Ellicott City in 1975, it was flooded by the remnants of a hurricane just three months later. The young owners, Fernand and Odette Tersiguel, somehow managed to seat customers again within a few days. Nine years later, a five-alarm fire destroyed their restaurant. Determined to stay in business, the couple moved their operation to Baltimore. They returned to Howard County in 1990 as Tersiguel’s French Country Restaurant, moving into a charming old house on higher ground in Ellicott City. The elevation, however, did not protect Tersiguel’s from the flood that hit Main Street in 2016. Water poured into the wine cellar and ruined ovens, walk-in refrigerators and other equipment. Estimated losses: $200,000.
But the Tersiguels are resilient. They reopened again, with their son, Michel, who had earlier become the restaurant’s owner, still as chef. Business was good until, of course, the pandemic caused another shutdown.
Then Fernand Tersiguel, the gregarious immigrant from Brittany who had persevered through flood and fire, died from heart failure at age 78 during the COVID summer of 2020.
The restaurant survived, but it evolved into something radically different while maintaining its French soul. Adjusting to the effects of the pandemic, Michel Tersiguel changed his business model so that he now cooks what he wants, changes the menu once a week, wastes less food and has a relatively normal life away from the kitchen.
He charges $99 for a six-course “chef’s choice” menu, including wine, putting Tersiguel’s in the class of special occasion restaurant. The restaurant is open only four days, Wednesday through Saturday, and diners can make reservations for either of two nightly seatings, one at 5 p.m., the other at 7:15 pm.
This is a wholly different approach from the traditional a la carte menu offered in most restaurants, including the pre-pandemic Tersiguel’s. As the chef says: “In America, we’re so used to having so many choices, right? It’s a different concept for a lot of people.”
I was curious about the reason and learned it had as much to do with the middle-aged chef’s lifestyle and passions as with his need to turn a profit.
“If you ask any chef what he or she would like to do, I think what I do gets close to what any of us would like to do,” Michel Tersiguel says. “I am personally cooking everything you eat. I get to change the menu weekly, which is challenging yet pushing the envelope. With this format, there is less food waste since I have a greater idea of how much we need, and everything is much fresher.”
With nightly dining limited to two seatings, and with diners eating the same courses, Tersiguel is able to purchase and cook exactly what’s needed, even if he’s alone at the stove, and he’s almost always alone at the stove. There’s no guesswork with a chef’s menu.
“New Year’s Eve, I cooked for 70 people by myself, which I never could have done before with the a la carte menu,” he says.
The new format allows the chef, who is married with two sons, to have more of a life outside the kitchen. Tersiguel says he now works 50 to 60 hours a week instead of 70 or 80. “Sundays I usually take off,” he says. “Mondays I go to the market and start acquiring items. I will list everything I have and, by Monday afternoon, I have my first draft of the menu for that week.”
I assume the “chef’s menu” has been successful since, two years after the switch, it’s still in place. “Business has been great on the weekends but slower during the week,” Tersiguel says. “We usually book out on Saturdays three weeks ahead. One concern we have is there have been a lot of last-minute cancellations, which can make it difficult for us because we do not overbook.”
In Tersiguel’s small dining rooms, each course arrives at each table at approximately the same time, with veteran waiter Charlie Risselada describing what’s on the plate. A recent menu included a pate of rabbit; mussels in red pepper curry broth; potatoes roesti with mushrooms, tomatoes, garlic, shallots and thyme; pan-seared Scottish salmon with caramelized shallots, served with a gratin of turnips and rutabaga; grilled New York strip steak in a foie gras sauce with stir-fried broccoli. Dessert was an olive oil cake with whipped cream and persimmon, fig and date compote.
“This is the type of cooking I would do for my friends,” Tersiguel says. “Now, in a way, everybody’s my friend. They get the best I can do every day. This is the way I connect with our guests — with food coming from my soul every week.”
And it’s a French soul, he’s quick to point out.
“That’s what I always tell myself,” he says. “I’m cooking for an American palate, but I try to cook with the soul of a Frenchman.”
That’s a gift from his parents, makers of the Tersiguel legend in Ellicott City.
“It has been an evolution since we opened in 1975,” he says. “The floods, the fire, the pandemic — every time we had these challenges we were forced to change a little bit and evolve. Otherwise we would not have survived.”