Happy 30th B’day To Chez Nous

Three decades later, it’s still pretty hard to guess what inspired a French chef named Gerard Brach to take one look at Humble TX and say, “This is where I will build my culinary empire!” Or even “This will be an outpost of la belle France!” Yet thanks to a young couple of food and wine Francophiles, who also happen to be a couple, Brach did and Chez Nous still is. We stopped by last night to help Stacy and Scott Simonson celebrate the restaurant’s 30th birthday, but the party actually goes on all this month. Chez Nous is more than a blast from France - it’s also a blast from the past. Seldom has more love been poured into any project than Stacy and Scott pour into their former pentacostal church on a residential side street that now is home to leather-bound menus, waiters in tuxedos and a wine list that’s mostly from the Mother Country. Surely, day to day, the newest and least French thing about Stacy and Scott is their role reversal - she being the chef running the kitchen (as Gerard Brach taught her to) and he running the dining room. To love the food at Chez Nous - like this medium-rare duck breast or this medium-rare rack of lamb pictured above - you really need to love French cuisine. But unlike many other “ethnic” cooking styles, loving French does not mean you have to love “curry” as with popular notions of Indian food, soy sauce as with popular notions of Chinese and even red sauce as with popular notions of Italian. French cuisine is such a huge and overarching body of food knowledge that almost anything that isn’t overtly something else is, quite persuasively, French. The latter truth is seldom truer than when it comes to dessert at Chez Nous. In general, diners want tradition in their mouths for this final flourish of a celebratory meal - despite the wacky desserts we see around us in some chef-driven restaurants these days. Not so with the walnut tart served here (how very French, to sneak in all that fresh fruit) or with the lush cheesecake. Still, if it happens to be your celebration as well as the restaurant’s, you really should give the kitchen its 25-minute headstart and let them make you and serve you a souffle. I can think of few things in any restaurant more timeless than that!