Gineste de Saurs
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The Gineste de Saurs family of wine producers has lived in southern France since the fourteenth century. The family château, situated in Lisle-sur-Tarn 50 kilometres northeast of Toulouse, was built from 1848 to 1852 by Eliezer Gineste de Saurs and serves as the headquarters for the family's Château de Saurs wine business, headed by Marie-Paule Burrus and her husband Yves.
In 1959, Paul Gineste de Saurs established a restaurant in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, near Porte Maillot, offering but one main dish: the traditional French bistrot meal of steak-frites, or steak-and-chips. The beefsteak used was the cut of sirloin known in French as contre-filet or entrecôte, and accordingly the restaurant was named Le Relais de Venise – L'Entrecôte. Where most restaurants served steak-frites with herbed butter, Le Relais de Venise instead served the dish with a complex butter-based sauce containing tarragon, marjoram, dill, rosemary, thyme, paprika, anchovies, and a variety of other condiments and spices. A simple salad of lettuce topped with walnuts and a mustard vinaigrette was offered as a starter, and it was not until the end of the meal that diners finally had a choice to make, from a dessert list of profiteroles, crème brûlée, and various confections in which ice cream, chocolate sauce, meringue, and whipped cream figured prominently.
Despite the limited menu, the restaurant flourished.
Following the death of Paul Gineste de Saurs in 1966, three of his children carried on in the business. One daughter (Hélène Godillot) took over the original restaurant Le Relais de Venise – L'Entrecôte at Porte Maillot, and her branch of the family subsequently opened additional locations under that name in Barcelona (in 2003) and London (in 2005). A second daughter (the same Marie-Paule Burrus who heads the family's Château de Saurs winery) established her group of restaurants under the name Le Relais de l'Entrecôte in the 6th and 8th arrondissements of Paris and in Geneva. And a son (Henri Gineste de Saurs) opened his group of restaurants outside Paris, under the name L'Entrecôte, in Toulouse (in 1962), Bordeaux (in 1966), Nantes (in 1980), Montpellier (in 1990), and Lyon (in 1999).
Although the three children of Paul Gineste de Saurs operate their groups of restaurants under slightly different names, they all adhere precisely to their father's formula: the same lettuce-and-walnut salad as a starter; the same steak-frites with the same butter sauce as the main course, presented in two services; the same assortment of desserts; and a wine list consisting primarily of wines from the family's own vineyards.
