Around the world, many restaurants featuring steak dishes use the word entrecôte as their name or part of their name. In particular, the name L'Entrecôte has come to identify three iconic groups of restaurants owned by two sisters and one brother of the Gineste de Saurs family, which specialise in the contre-filet cut of sirloin and serve it in the typical French bistrot style of steak-frites, or steak-and-chips:
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In 1959 Paul Gineste de Saurs purchased an Italian restaurant called Le Relais de Venise (the Venice Inn) in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, near Porte Maillot. A descendant of the Gineste de Saurs family in southern France, he was seeking to establish an assured market for the wines produced by the family's Château de Saurs winery in Lisle-sur-Tarn, 50 kilometres northeast of Toulouse.[1]
In place of the previous Italian menu, he decided that the restaurant would offer the traditional French bistrot meal of steak-frites as its only main dish, with no other option. Where most restaurants served steak-frites with herbed butter, Le Relais de Venise instead served the dish with a complex butter-based sauce. A simple salad of lettuce topped with walnuts and a mustard vinaigrette was offered as a starter, and not until the end of the meal did the menu offer some choice, from a dessert list of fruit pastries, profiteroles, and other confections consisting mainly of ice cream, chocolate sauce, meringue, and whipped cream.
To highlight the dish that the restaurant was now serving, he added the words "Son entrecôte" beneath the name Le Relais de Venise on the neon sign outside. In keeping with the original plan, the restaurant had a very limited wine list and nearly all the wines offered came from the family's Château de Saurs winery.
In serving steak-frites as the sole main dish, he was modelling his restaurant after the Café de Paris in Geneva, which had been serving steak-frites in this way since the early 1940s. The butter sauce itself is often referred to as Café de Paris sauce.
Despite serving only one main dish and offering a very limited selection of wines, the restaurant flourished. It became a Paris institution, whose patrons ignored the sign and typically referred to it as "L'Entrecôte", or "L'Entrecôte Porte-Maillot". Eventually, the restaurant's name was formalized as Le Relais de Venise – L'Entrecôte.
Three separate groups of restaurants, each operated by one of Paul Gineste de Saurs's children, carry on the formula he established.[2]
Following the death of Paul Gineste de Saurs in 1966, his daughter Hélène Godillot took control of the original restaurant at Porte Maillot. Her branch of the family has a second location in Barcelona, as well as four additional locations operating under licence, two in London,[3] one in Bahrain,[4] and one in New York.[5] The licence-holders for the London, Bahrain, and New York locations are Steven and Michael Elghanayan.[6]
In 1962, his son Henri Gineste de Saurs opened a restaurant similar to his father's in Toulouse, 50 kilometres from the family vineyard at Lisle-sur-Tarn. He subsequently opened additional locations in Bordeaux [1], Nantes, Montpellier, and Lyon.
Another daughter, Marie-Paule Burrus, adopted the name Le Relais de l'Entrecôte for her group of restaurants. Her branch of the family has four locations of its own, three in Paris and one in Geneva, as well as six others operating under licence, three in Beirut run by Premier Leisure[7], one in Kuwait City, one in Doha, and one in Dubai.
The Geneva location occupies premises that once housed the Bavaria, a brasserie established in 1912 which became a favourite haunt of international officials during the early years of the League of Nations.[8] The Bavaria was used by Ian Fleming as the venue for a brief episode in his 1959 James Bond novel Goldfinger.[9]
Since 1981, Marie-Paule Burrus has also headed the family's Château de Saurs winery with her husband, Yves Burrus, a scion of Switzerland's Burrus family of industrialists.[10]
The founder's grandchildren are taking an increasingly active role in the business, in particular Patrick-Alain Godillot[11] in the Relais de Venise – L'Entrecôte group, Valérie Lagarde and Corinne de Roaldès[12] in the L'Entrecôte group, and Paul-Christian Burrus[13] and Géraldine Burrus[14] in the Relais de l'Entrecôte group.
Although the descendants of Paul Gineste de Saurs operate their groups of restaurants under slightly different names, they all adhere precisely to his 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 at the Paris and Geneva locations a wine list featuring wines from the family's own vineyards.
The key to the main dish is the butter sauce. The Paris newspaper Le Monde reports that it is made from chicken livers, fresh thyme and thyme flowers, full cream, white Dijon mustard, butter, and water, plus salt and pepper.[15] According to Le Monde, the chicken livers are blanched in one pan with the thyme until they start to turn colour. In a second pan, the cream is reduced on low heat with the mustard and infused with the flavour of the thyme flowers. The chicken livers are then finely minced and pressed through a strainer into the reduced cream. As the sauce thickens, the butter is incorporated into it with a little water, it is beaten smooth, and fresh-ground salt and pepper are added. The London newspaper The Independent, however, reports that Hélène Godillot has dismissed the Le Monde report as inaccurate.[16]
The restaurants' atmosphere is a key part of the formula, and is as important to their success as their cuisine. Each group has some decorative touch to distinguish it from its siblings: the Relais de Venise – L'Entrecôte group has mural paintings of Venice and sconces whose lampshades depict Venetian gondoliers; the Relais de l'Entrecôte group features early-twentieth-century posters advertising spirits such as Amer Picon [2], Wincarnis [3], and Cherry Chevalier [4]; and the L'Entrecôte group has a colour scheme of yellow-and-black stripes and plaids. In all three groups, though, every restaurant has the typical look of a French brasserie with wood panelling and wall mirrors, closely spaced tables, and bench seating in red upholstery. All the servers are women, dressed in black uniforms with white (or yellow) aprons, and no male staff are visible. And the restaurants do not take advance bookings, thereby ensuring that all tables can be fully in use at all times. At most of the European locations, this typically means that patrons must queue on the pavement outside for half an hour or more before they can be seated.
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