Maison: When French Cooking Remembers the Season

There are restaurants that impress you by showing you something new, and there are restaurants that remind you why the classics became classics in the first place. Maison, the French neighborhood restaurant on King Street, largely belongs in the second category.

French cooking is a dangerous undertaking for a restaurant precisely because so much of it is familiar. Foie gras. Escargot. Duck confit. Steak tartare. Pommes frites. These dishes arrive carrying decades, sometimes centuries, of expectations. There is nowhere for a kitchen to hide. You cannot distract a diner from mediocre duck confit by explaining the concept. The technique either works or it does not.

At Maison, sometimes it works beautifully. Sometimes it does not quite get there. We approached the menu as we usually do when I am eating with people willing to cooperate with my pathological need to try everything: order broadly, share aggressively, and see what the kitchen can do across as much of the menu as reasonably possible.

We managed a respectable eleven dishes: salmon rillette, foie gras torchon, steak tartare, leeks vinaigrette, Burgundy escargot, crispy flounder, monkfish, duck confit, rabbit en croûte, field pea gratin, and pommes frites. This was not a tasting menu. We made it one.

The meal did not begin perfectly. The salmon rillette came with lemon, everything spice, and rye, and unfortunately the “everything” part of that description got a little too enthusiastic. There was simply far too much caraway seed. Caraway is one of those flavors that does not politely share the room. Here, it overwhelmed the delicacy of the salmon rather than complementing it. A rillette should be rich but delicate enough that you still taste the thing from which it was made. Instead, the caraway kept announcing itself. The balance was just off.

The foie gras torchon itself, however, was terrific. Silky, rich, and beautifully executed, this was the kind of classical French technique I had hoped to find at Maison. The problem was not the foie gras. The problem was everything they asked it to hang out with. The brioche was sweet. The stone fruit preserves were sweet. The foie gras is already extraordinarily rich so sweetness on sweetness on richness needed something to interrupt the conversation. Acid. Salt. Bitterness. Something. Instead, the accompaniments seemed determined to agree with one another. The foie gras deserved a better foil because the foie gras itself was excellent.

Then came the steak tartare, and this was wonderful. Maison takes tartare in a less traditional direction with shiitake vinaigrette, mimolette, and Marcona almonds. On paper, that sounds dangerously close to one ingredient too many. Tartare is another dish that can be ruined by a chef who becomes more interested in what is surrounding the beef than in the beef itself. Here, it worked. The combination was interesting and flavorful without losing the essential character of the tartare. It demonstrated something important about Maison: this kitchen understands the French canon well enough that, when it chooses to play with it, it can do so successfully.

Then came one of my favorite dishes of the night. The leeks vinaigrette were fantastic. Leeks are not a show-off ingredient. Nobody sees “leeks” on a menu next to foie gras, escargot, duck confit, and rabbit wrapped in pastry and immediately thinks: THAT is going to be one of the best things I eat tonight. Which is exactly why a dish like this tells you so much about a kitchen. Maison paired the leeks with vichyssoise, hazelnut, and truffle vinaigrette, taking a humble vegetable and building layers of flavor and texture around it without losing the leek itself. This was French cooking doing one of the things French cooking does best: taking something ordinary and making you wonder why you have not been paying more attention to it.

The Burgundy escargot, unfortunately, did not inspire the same enthusiasm. Escargot with ramp butter and baguette sounds almost impossible not to love. Butter. Herbs. Bread. Snails. This should be one of those dishes where the only remaining question is how shamelessly you are willing to mop the plate. It simply was not that compelling. Not one of us fought for the last snail. Someone grudgingly ate the last one so as to not waste food. There was nothing dramatically offensive about it. It just was not particularly good, which may actually be more disappointing when you are talking about a dish built around the nearly foolproof proposition of putting things in butter and handing me bread.

The larger courses continued the uneven pattern. We tried both the crispy flounder with ratatouille and yellow pepper coulis and the monkfish chop almondine with Carolina Gold rice pilaf, capers, and brown butter jus. Both sounded compelling. Both were okay. That is not an insult. There was no culinary catastrophe. Nothing needed to be sent back. But “okay” becomes noticeable when the same kitchen has already served you fantastic leeks and wonderful tartare. The monkfish dish was particularly interesting conceptually. I love the idea of treating monkfish almost like a chop. It has the density and structure to withstand the kind of treatment usually reserved for meat, and almondine, brown butter, and capers place it squarely within the vocabulary of classical French cooking, while Carolina Gold rice brings the dish home to South Carolina. I liked the idea more than I loved the dish.

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The duck confit, however, was another strong dish. The duck was tender and deeply flavorful without being fatty, which is an important distinction with confit. Done poorly, the richness can overwhelm everything else on the plate. Here, the meat retained everything you want from confit without leaving you exhausted by it. But I especially loved the lentils. Lentils are another humble ingredient that French cooking has a remarkable ability to make indispensable, and these were more than something placed beneath the duck to catch the jus. They were delicious in their own right and gave the richness of the duck exactly the earthy counterpoint it needed. Like the leeks, this was a dish where Maison showed restraint. Nothing needed to shout. The duck was tender and flavorful, the lentils grounded it, and the whole plate simply worked.

And then there was the rabbit en croûte. Rabbit. Succotash. Tomato. Black truffle. This was the dish of the night. The rabbit was unctuous and deeply savory, enclosed in pastry and unapologetically rich. That description could easily end with a dish that becomes exhausting after three bites. It did not. Because Maison surrounded all that richness with summer. The vegetables mattered. The succotash, tomato, and fresh summer vegetables running through and around the rich rabbit and pastry gave the entire dish life. They were not decorative concessions to seasonality. They were not there because somebody in the kitchen decided the plate needed something green. They were what made the dish work. Richness met freshness. Classical French technique met a Southern summer.

And suddenly rabbit en croûte became much more interesting than simply putting rabbit inside pastry. This was the dish where Maison showed me exactly what this restaurant can be at its best.

The foie gras showed technical skill, even if the accompaniments did not find the right balance. The tartare showed creativity. The leeks showed restraint. The duck showed how satisfying a classic can be when you simply execute it well. But the rabbit put the whole idea together. It was unmistakably French. It was unmistakably summer. And it was absolutely delicious.

Because apparently foie gras, duck confit, rabbit wrapped in pastry, and multiple applications of butter did not seem sufficient, we also ordered sides. The field pea gratin sounded like something I should have loved: field peas, spring onion soubise, and Gruyère. Instead, it was oddly under-seasoned. This is especially puzzling in a dish whose component parts promise so much savory depth. It did not need reinvention. It needed seasoning. The clarified-butter pommes frites with béarnaise aioli were fine. They were potatoes. We ate them. I would not tell you to cross town for them.

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The beverage program presented another problem, at least for those of us who do not necessarily want alcohol with dinner. There was no unsweet tea. The standard nonalcoholic choices were Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, and ginger ale. There were two mocktails available, but both leaned heavily sweet. That left me drinking tepid tap water for most of dinner. I recognize that unsweet tea is not exactly a fixture of the Parisian café tradition, but we were, in fact, still in Charleston in July. More importantly, a serious restaurant should be able to offer a diner who does not want alcohol something interesting to drink that is not sweet. A thoughtful nonalcoholic beverage program does not require twelve elaborate zero-proof cocktails, a smoke machine, or someone tableside explaining the provenance of the juniper. It simply requires recognizing that “nonalcoholic” and “sweet” are not synonyms.

Service throughout the evening was okay. Competent enough, but not a defining part of the experience. And perhaps that is where Maison becomes interesting to evaluate. Because this was not a mediocre restaurant occasionally stumbling into a great dish. There was too much genuinely good cooking for that assessment to be fair. The tartare was wonderful. The foie gras itself was terrific. The leeks were fantastic. The duck confit was tender and flavorful, with lentils I would happily eat again. And the rabbit en croûte was exceptional. Those are not accidental successes. They are evidence of a kitchen with real technical ability. But there was also a surprisingly wide distance between Maison’s best dishes and everything else. The salmon rillette was overwhelmed by caraway. The accompaniments fought rather than balanced the excellent foie gras. The escargot disappointed. The fish was merely okay. The field peas needed seasoning. The frites were unremarkable. The nonalcoholic beverage choices seemed almost like an afterthought. Service did its job without adding much to the experience. Maison was not a flawless meal. But flawless and interesting are not the same thing. In fact, I would rather eat at a restaurant capable of making me think about a plate of rabbit days later than one that serves eleven perfectly competent dishes I have forgotten by the time I get home. Maison is a very good restaurant capable of exceptional cooking. Its best dishes reveal not only technical skill, but something more interesting: the kitchen seems to be at its best when it understands that richness needs contrast and classical technique does not require slavish devotion to the past. The salmon failed because one flavor overwhelmed everything else. The foie gras pairing struggled because richness and sweetness needed contrast. The leeks succeeded because the kitchen knew how to elevate an ingredient without burying it. The duck succeeded because tender, flavorful meat and earthy lentils did not need unnecessary embellishment. And the rabbit was exceptional because Maison took something deeply rich and classically French and let a Southern summer into the room. That is the version of Maison I want more of. Because when this kitchen finds that balance, it does not merely reproduce French food. It reminds us why the classics became classics in the first place, while giving us a reason to keep eating them now.