Paris restaurant selling roast chicken for $181 with 'steakhouse' splendor from French chef
As millions of people all over the world focus on the Olympics right now, poultry remains perched on a pedestal high above Paris all year long.
Le Coq & Fils – The Rooster & Sons – is a bright, sleek modern restaurant with a magnetic midnight blue façade in Paris' picturesque hilltop artists' village of Montmartre.
"Just like a rooster would have climbed to the top of a pile of hay in a farmyard," the eatery says in a release of its location.
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Whole-roasted chicken and other fowl fly off the menu at Le Coq & Fils, known in English as The Poultry House.
Its rare-breed birds strut across the Paris dining scene like the cock of the walk, treated with the regal splendor of fine French bubbly from Champagne, just east of Paris.
"Chef wants to be the steakhouse of poultry because he loves poultry and, for him, it is the most elegant meat that exists," Patricia Grunler-Westermann said in a phone interview, speaking in English on behalf of her husband, celebrated restaurateur Antoine Westermann.
Le Coq & Fils specializes in whole roasted, heritage-breed birds, raised by small farmers around France.
The royal-treatment roosters come with a princely price tag.
The most expensive option on the menu during a recent visit by Fox News Digital costs €167 – about $181 for the juicy bird on the bone in U.S. legal tender.
They are suggested to feed four people. But two hungry adults could kill the bird with one sitting.
Listed on the menu under "birds to share," the whole-roasted chickens come with an array of sides to choose from and are sourced from France's most prestigious poultry producers.
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Westermann rose to international prestige with the Michelin three-star restaurant Le Buerehiesel in Strasbourg, France.
The Westermanns ran the New York City restaurant Le Coq Rico, also fowl-focused, from 2016 to 2018.
The restaurant provides tasting notes about the birds and the farms that raised them, while the maître d' presents the pullet at your table for approval, like a sommelier would offer a bottle of fine wine.
It's much more than just a hum-wing-and-drum chicken dinner. It's an elevated dining experience normally reserved only for beefy steakhouses and stylish wine bars.
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The $181 white Gauloise bird was raised in Bresse, an area of central-east France not far from the Switzerland border. Bresse's fame for fabulous fowl dates back centuries.
"The queen of poultry, the poultry of kings," Gallic gourmand Jean Anthelem Brillat-Savarin proclaimed of Bresse birds in his landmark 1825 food treatise, "The Physiology of Taste."
Bresse birds enjoy the "appellation d'origine controlle" (AOC) designation, which protects historical regional products with brand names in the marketplace.
Only birds raised in Bresse can claim to be Bresse birds, much like only bubbly made in Champagne can call itself champagne.
"Son gout est elegant, sa chair tendre, sa peau, croustillense et gouteuse a la fois," reads the restaurant's tasting notes for the chicken celebre.
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In English: "Its taste is elegant, its meat tender, its skin crispy and delicious at the same time."
The bird is served around its backbone but deconstructed into legs, wings, thighs and breasts, plated with its thick, crispy, ruddy brown, decadently savory skin and plump cloves of purple garlic.
A small metal tag touts it as a legitimate Bresse-raised bird.
Even the untrained eye can see the difference between heritage-breed birds and commercially raised chickens.
Notably, the breasts of the Bresse bird are small relative to the rest of the body, compared with plump-breasted mass-produced birds found in the supermarket.
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Commercial-grade chickens have been bred and fed to plump up their coveted white-meat breasts.
The $181 price tag, Grunler-Westermann said, is a function of many factors.
Heritage-breed birds are raised for up to 160 days, compared with 30 days for commercial birds that are fed and fattened for efficiency, not flavor.
The chickens – quail and squab are on the menu, too – come from the most exclusive farms in France. They are slow-cooked at the restaurant with a technique Westermann has developed for decades.
"It's about slow growing and slow cooking and about focusing on one meat," Grunler-Westermann said.
"There are a lot of restaurants where you can find, for instance, only fish, or you have steakhouses where you know that they specialize in steak. We focus on chicken."
The chickens on their menu cost much more to raise and to feed, take much longer to mature and are grown by farmers they vet for the quality of their agricultural practices.
The Westermanns hope to elevate the public's perception of chicken with their poultry pageant in Paris.
"Nobody thinks twice when they order a steak at a steakhouse. They know that it's expensive, but they know that the meat is exceptional and that they'll enjoy a real experience," Grunler-Westermann said.
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"When you eat the whole bird, there are really so many different flavors – the dark meat, the white meat, the taste and texture of the skin and all the delicious meat between the bones," he also said.
"It's a meat festival."