L'Air de Famille: A Toulouse Bistro With a Menu Written in Chalk
Book a table at a Michelin-listed bistro in Toulouse and you expect the canon of the southwest: duck, confit, cassoulet. But the chalkboard that stands in for a menu here in the evening had something else on it - smoked herring from the English Channel, crozet pasta from the Savoy Alps, vegetables "à la grecque".
L'Air de Famille is a small family bistro in the center of Toulouse that keeps no fixed menu: the French dishes of the day are chalked up on a board each morning, depending on what the market has turned up. And half of France fits on it.
What L'Air de Famille Means and Who Cooks Under the Name
Un air de famille is the French phrase for a family resemblance - the shared trait that gives relatives away. The bistro made the idiom its whole approach and paired it with the motto "en famille, comme à la maison": as a family, just like at home. The name belongs to chef Georges Camuzet, who opened the bistro in 2005, at twenty-four, together with his partner Maud. Before that he worked his way through the Paris kitchens of the Bristol and Taillevent, cooked in Tahiti and under chef Michel Sarran, whom he calls a father figure - at a bistro named after a family resemblance, that line reads almost like a second etymology. After eleven years the place moved into a former coal store by the Marché Victor Hugo market hall, then Camuzet took a year and a half off and in 2019 came back to the original address on rue Jules-Chalande.
The Menu the Market Writes Every Morning
There is no fixed carte at L'Air de Famille. In the morning Camuzet does the rounds of his suppliers - charcuterie from the Garcia butcher shop, fish from La Marée Toulousaine - and builds the day's offering out of what he brings back, and all of it then lands on the board in chalk, the ardoise, as the French call it. You will find one hanging in just about every bistro in the country, though it usually carries only a few daily specials next to the printed menu; here it is the whole menu. This is exactly the kind of cooking the Michelin Bib Gourmand rewards: an award for kitchens that cook exceptionally well and keep the menu under 45 EUR. With thirty-six seats inside, booking ahead is a must.
Half of France on a Single Board
The board can be read as a map, too. Duck terrine with pistachios belongs to the southwest, where duck is the star ingredient. The veal from Ségala - the hill country on the border of Aveyron and Tarn - carries the Label Rouge as well as a protected geographical indication, and it is the most local item on the whole list. Right next to it, though, were smoked herring, a specialty of Boulogne-sur-Mer in the north of France, crozets - little squares of pasta otherwise eaten baked with cheese in the mountains of Savoy - and vegetables à la grecque, where the only Greek thing is the name: it is an old French technique, vegetables simmered in olive oil with wine and lemon and served cold. The menu at L'Air de Famille is a family gathering of dishes from all over France, not an Occitan canon - which means the bistro's name ends up describing its own board.
Six Courses on a Saturday Night
We came to L'Air de Famille on a Saturday evening and every table in the bistro was taken. The board was charming - and all the harder for us to translate. The staff barely spoke English, but they still patiently talked us through it, item by item. We ended up with three starters: the house duck terrine with nuts and pickled vegetables, then the vegetables à la grecque, light, refreshing and with exactly the right bite, and finally smoked herring with apple - an odd couple on paper, the most interesting combination of the evening on the plate.
The main course came down to a 2-1 vote at our table: a veal steak from Ségala with a pasta salad of crozets, parmesan and a sauce of Iberian chorizo. The veal was cooked properly but did not stand out - we had been spoiled by the beef from our earlier visit to Le Genty Magre. The salad, on the other hand, was the best thing on the table, and if you ever come across crozets, order them. Two desserts arrived: a small tarte tatin with delicate cream ice cream and excellent caramel, and a mille-feuille, three layers of puff pastry and two of vanilla cream, put together without a single flaw. The name of that dessert was first written down in 1733 by the cook Vincent La Chapelle; French cookbooks have known the layered pastry itself since 1651, so even the youngest recipe on the table had almost three centuries of practice behind it. The two-course evening menu cost 35 EUR, the three-course one 38 EUR. The hardest course of the evening was the board.
L'Air de Famille
