But it's too late to fret about the unfortunate paint job. And frankly, it became quickly irrelevant once I tasted Held's sophisticated French cooking - because Rouget has become a worthy dining destination indeed. Over the course of three meals ranging from stuffed quails to seared tuna with braised beef cheeks, house-made charcuterie, and freshly churned blueberry sorbet, Rouget's kitchen turned out some the best food I've eaten in Bucks County in the last decade.
The heady aroma of truffles that lingers in the air is enough to snap your senses to attention when you step into the dining room, which is an otherwise elegant 60-seat space with romantic pillow-strewn bay-window nooks (like table 13), and an airy, glassed-in porch overlooking a long green lawn. The walls are hung with black-and-white photos of famous chefs, from Paul Bocuse to Fernand Point, Freddy Girardet, Charlie Trotter and Alice Waters.
Held, 39, a Culinary Institute of America grad, has a ways to go before he reaches that pantheon. But it was clear from my first bite of truffle-laced mushroom soup, poured tableside from a carafe around a mound of fresh morels, snappy leeks, and the crispy puff of a toasted brioche round, that he means to pay those great ones homage.
Few young cooks hold on to and evolve the canon of culinary school classics with quite as much fervor as Held, who recasts them with a light but artful touch. His beef "a la mode" is a rarely seen paragon of throwback bistro goodness. The thick slice of French pot roast made from flatiron steak is braised to a melting softness, dabbed with horseradish, scattered with asparagus tips, and set beside a creamy gratin stack of shaved root vegetables.
