Paul Magu-Lecugy, chef and owner of Rêve in Lafayette, brings classic French cooking to Lamorinda with dishes made from scratch using carefully sourced ingredients. The restaurant, which opened in 2016, emphasizes traditional techniques, house-made sauces and minimal food waste.
“Fall is my favorite,” said Paul Magu-Lecugy, the chef and owner of Lafayette’s Rêve, the seriously French restaurant tucked away in downtown Lafayette.
That means, among other things, that Magu-Legucy can prepare his cassoulet de Castelnaudary (more on that later) one week a month for the regulars who have made the restaurant a Lamorinda favorite since 2016.
And those regulars know that when they visit Rêve, no matter what they order, they will get a taste of France. Magu-Legucy grew up in Paris and was classically trained at some of the top restaurants in the city. He came to California, worked at The Ritz-Carlton and The St. Regis, and eventually made the move to Lafayette.
And once there, he brought that fine-dining experience to a cozy, unpretentious setting in a strip mall just off Mount Diablo Boulevard – and diners in search of classic French cooking, and classic French sauces, have found their way there ever since.
“We make all our sauces from scratch,” said Laura Magu, who runs the front of the house, “and each dish has its own sauce.”
Those sauces, of course, are based on veal, fish and vegetable stock, which are painstakingly prepared at Rêve. “We get offered shortcuts all the time,” said Laura Magu, with premade stocks, but not only would Magu-Legucy balk at serving something he didn’t make, it would also run counter to one of the principles of Rêve’s philosophy.
“We have a respect for minimal waste,” said Laura Magu. “We don’t throw the carrot tops away. The fish bones go into the fish stock”
All that, of course, takes time and technique to get the most out of each fish head, but Magu-Legucy is much more concerned with quality than time.
“We have very high standards,” said Laura Magu – for example, the mushrooms and truffles are sourced only from Wine Forest Wild Foods in Napa because “Paul trusts them.”
Those high standards can be tasted in every dish on a menu drawn from all over France, and though that menu obviously contains French classics such as steak frites, moules frites and coq au vin, it also includes items that aren’t easily found.
For example, île flottante, or “floating island,” is a classic dessert with soft meringue floating on crême anglaise (a liquid custard) that is enhanced with a caramel sauce and topped with toasted pistachios.
Rêve also features a French-heavy wine list, with many offerings from small producers that the Magus have developed relationships with over the years. And not surprisingly, those wines won’t be easily found anywhere else.
Which brings us back to cassoulet de Castelnaudary, a legendary dish that dates back to the Hundred Years’ War. The story goes that while the city of Castelnaudary was under siege in 1355, the beleaguered citizens made a stew of white beans, duck, goose and sausage that inspired them to halt the English attack.
Alas, history reveals that the city actually fell, and that the white beans associated with the dish didn’t arrive from the New World until 1553, when Catherine de Medici introduced the beans that are the basis of the dish.
But when Rêve first opened, Magu-Legucy did not serve cassoulet until he found just right the beans from Napa. “The texture just wasn’t right,” said Laura Magu, but once the beans met the chef’s exacting standards, the dish became a fall regular, showing up on the menu for one week each month starting in November.
But Francophiles will want to know precisely which cassoulet is being served, as there are three different versions that stir up culinary passions in the south of France to this day.
“We serve the cassoulet de Castelnaudary,” said Laura Magu, “with no tomatoes.
“If you want it with tomatoes, go somewhere else.”
Which, in a way, exemplifies what Rêve is about. There are no compromises, no shortcuts, no backtracking from what makes French food French.
So from the classic French 75 cocktail (just $10 on Tuesdays) to the île de flottante to the duck confit, and yes, the cassoulet de Castelnaudary, Rêve is a small slice of France transplanted to Lamorinda.
Laura Magu puts it this way: “It feels like you are in France” – and it tastes that way too.
Visit Rêve at 960 Moraga Road, Suite F, Lafayette or call 925.385.0793.