Wednesday, July 30, 7:00 p.m.
Members $90, guests $115

It takes enormous confidence, a large dose of brio, and just a bit of lunacy to open your first restaurant on the same site as a beloved dining establishment—and then to give it the same name. Well, almost the same name. Yet that’s exactly what executive chef and partner Jean-Robert de Cavel did when he opened the doors to Jean-Robert at Pigall’s in Cincinnati. Pigall’s, for those of you unfamiliar with the city’s dining scene, was the onetime jewel in Cincinnati’s gastronomic crown.

But de Cavel had a simple plan: prepare French-American cuisine so sublime that the memory of the original restaurant would fade. And that’s just what happened. Within days of opening, the buzz about town was that not only did the new incarnation top the old, but de Cavel had even outdone himself, from the days when he was executive chef at the five-star Maisonette. In less time than it takes to make a bouquet garni, accolades were accruing. In her “On the Ground” column, Amy Zipkin of The New York Times noted that “Maisonette’s former chef…is challenging its culinary supremacy.” According to Polly Campbell of The Cincinnati Enquirer, French was never so comprehensible: “The food is always French and always haute, but not stiff. Even with many elements in a dish, the ingredients are always understandable.” Dawn Simonds of Cincinnati wrote, “Jean-Robert is a five-star chef no longer confined to the limits of stars.” Out of a possible score of 100, the magazine gave the restaurant an astounding 96 points.

Born in France, de Cavel began his career as most great chefs do: apprenticing. Upon graduating from Le Féguide culinary school in Lille, he was handpicked to work under master chef Michel Rostang at La Bonne Auberge, a three-star Michelin restaurant in Antibes, France. Rostang, seeing de Cavel’s potential, sent him to the Malihouana Hotel in Anguilla, British West Indies, and, later, to New York City, where he took up residence at Le Régence at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée. Stints at La Gauloise in New York City and at the famed Maisonette in Cincinnati followed. As if that weren’t enough, last year the two-time James Beard nominee was awarded the prestigious medal of the Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite by the Consul General of France.

The wines for this evening will be provided by French wine importer Robert Kacher. The Wine Advocate’s Robert Parker wrote that Kacher’s “name on a bottle of wine is as close to an endorsement of quality as one is likely to find in the complicated world of wine.”