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Community Corner

Foie Gras Festival Comes to Evanston

Local restaurant Bistro Bordeaux will offer the controversial dish all week in many different preparations, from foie gras poached Alaskan halibut to seared foie gras and chocolate tart.

Love it or hate it, foie gras is coming to Evanston for a week-long festival at Bistro Bordeaux.

Pascal Berthoumieux, 38, who owns the French restaurant at 618 Church St., will be featuring the liver of a duck or a goose on all aspects of his menu starting Monday night through next Sunday. Foie gras offerings range from the appetizer course stretching all the way through dessert.

Last Thursday, as Berthoumieux was dealing with a flooded basement due to the torrential rains, he explained how foie gras was incorporated into the culture he experienced growing up in the Bordeaux region of France.

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“It is the local specialty, so it would be hard not to like it,” he said. “You are exposed to it at a very young age.”

So Berthoumieux is trying to bring back that part of his youth to Evanston as he has seen other restaurants try similar efforts.

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“Any chef who is passionate about this industry they will have a special affection for foie gras,” Berthoumieux notes. “It remains one of the most prestigious dishes to cook and not just in the French culture.”

Still the elephant in the room, or rather in this case, the duck in the room, is the controversy involving foie gras. There have been protests concentrated on how the ducks are fed which have led to bans of the dish being served in parts of the world. The City of Chicago was one of those places where a ban was in effect from 2006 – 2008, before it was repealed.

One area in the United States where a ban still exists is in California, where the animal rights group PETA threatened to sue Orange County restaurants, looking to get around the ban. One of the owners backed down late last week.

Berthoumieux is cognizant of the controversy and he heard first hand about it. “I had someone on Facebook commenting on our page that we are forcefeeding goose Guantanamo style,” he relates.

But he says the production of any food that comes from an animal might make stomachs turn.

“There is no humane way of raising an animal when it is going to wind up on your plate, but at the same time there are so many things you could go after,” he said. “Picking on foie gras, I don’t get it.”

He adds that he does not understand the force feeding charge all that much either.

“The action of feeding them is actually a moment of pleasure for the (ducks),” he said. “They are not being traumatized at this point.”

In terms of the actual food, while foie gras is seen as a delicacy, it is not for the health conscious since it is mostly fat. “Is it healthy? No,” Berthoumieux concedes, “But there are so many things that are unhealthy.”

Even for the people who want to sample it, straight foie gras may not be the greatest taste sensation on its own, given that it can be greasy for some people’s pallets.

Berthoumieux compares it to butter and believes that what makes foie gras good is what food accompanies it. “It is usually served with something that cuts through the fattiness of it,” he said. “It gets down to how you are going to prepare it. That is what is important.”

Some of this week's foie gras preparations include a foie gras poached Alaskan halibut and even a seared foie gras and chocolate tart with fruit available.

“It’s not for everyone but you’d be surprised by how many people are excited about this,” Berthoumieux said. “Foie is something than when it is done well, it tastes like heaven.”

This is the first attempt at such a festival and if successful, there will be more in the future. 

Not only do some people want to try it, there are some who want to take a stab at cooking the product, which is a bit of a risky proposition.

“It’s not that complicated, but it is intimidating because it is an expensive item,” Berthoumieux said. “People don’t want to mess it up.”

A three-hour class had been scheduled for this past Saturday, but was cancelled. It has been rescheduled for later this May.

Whether the foie gras extravaganza will be successful is the latest attempt for Berthoumieux, who came to America after meeting his wife, Rebecca, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris when she was a foreign exchange student. They eventually returned to the United States, where she finished her studies at the University of Illinois before returning north to Chicago.

The young couple will soon move into a house in Evanston with their seven-month-old daughter Coco and a seven year old Shih Tzu, appropriately named Napoleon by his French owner.

Berthoumieux admits there are days when he finds the restaurant business frustrating, as it was on Thursday, when the heavy rains led to some electrical problems.

He also has trouble dealing with less than glowing reviews online. “Just like any other business that is open to the public, you have people that like you and people that dislike you,” he said. “When the critics are negative I thought over time I would learn not to take them personally but it tends to affect me in a very negative way. I wish I would learn not to.”

Still, Berthoumieux sees many, many positives as well, especially when he cultivates a relationship with his regular customers. “That is one of the reasons why we believe we have been successful, because we are more than a copy of a French bistro,” he notes. “When you have an independent owner like myself who is involved in the day-to-day operation from the marketing side to the cooking to the management of the place, it becomes much more personal.”

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