Lucy Gellman Photo
Adil Chokairy serves up raclette with potatoes, pickles and onions at Wednesday’s opening.
First there was a crepe cart. Then came the galettes and steaming mugs of cafe au lait. Now, there’s hot, fragrant cheese, and a wood-paneled room to eat it in.
That’s the story behind Au Chalet, chef Adil Chokairy’s latest business venture at 24 Whitney Ave.
After a soft opening at the beginning of May, the restaurant celebrated its formal welcome to the block on Wednesday with gold-handled scissors, a brilliant blue ribbon and steamy plates of raclette, a bubbly, broiled semi-soft cheese that is one of Switzerland’s national dishes.
After beginning Crêpes Choupette with a bicycle and tiny, portable crêpe operation three years ago, Chokairy worked with Yale University Properties to open a brick-and-mortar crêperie in 2015. He returned to them last year to ask for help with a second location, this time geared toward Swiss cuisine.
Now, that “slice of Europe right on Whitney Avenue” is here, said Lauren Zucker, associate vice president of university properties and New Haven affairs with Yale University. Inquisitive eaters won’t have to go far to hop from France to Switzerland — the spot is right next door to Choupette. Motioning to the restaurant’s warm, wood-paneled interior, she welcomed Chokairy anew to the block in rehearsed French, drawing a hearty merci from him.
“I’m overwhelmed with emotions,” he said. “This couldn’t have been done without the city and with Yale … I’m so thankful to be in New Haven.”
Left: the cheese as it’s scraped. Right: Tony Chokairy watches the cheese so it does not burn.
Inside the small restaurant, Chokairy and his nephew Tony busied themselves at a small front bar, laying yellow-rimmed china plates with steamed fingerling potatoes, prickly cornichon pickles and brined pearl onions, glistening white under the restaurant’s low light. Despite Chokairy’s French-Moroccan upbringing in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, recipes are inspired by his brother Hadi’s move to Switzerland several years ago. There’s straight up raclette, which travels from broiler to plate in minutes. But the menu also boasts steamy, herb-kissed fondue, melty croute campagnarde tarts, and tartines.
As new customers trickled in, nestling themselves in wood-backed chairs and cushioned benches by the window, the scent of just-burned cheese flooded the air. Tony Chokairy lifted half a wheel of bubbling, char-streaked raclette from below a bright orange broiler and carried it to the bar, scraping it with a special spatula (racler in French means to scrape). Cream-colored raclette, flecked with brown, oozed onto the plates.
An herby fondue, if one cheese dish isn’t sufficient.
Native to the Swiss provence of Valais, raclette is a semi-soft cheese with a history. For hundreds of years, Chokairy said, it has been eaten with bread, potatoes, and vegetables by shepherds and farmers who place it close to a fire, and let it get melty. When a fondue craze hit the U.S. several years ago, American restaurants had a way of bastardizing it, putting in too many spices or weird alcohols. Au Chalet seeks to bring it back to its peasant roots. Stepping inside from Whitney Avenue, everything is covered in polished wood and light cedar, and the warm smell of cheese hangs low and heavy in the air.
Having just heralded the restaurant as part of “the case we make for progress in New Haven,” Mayor Toni Harp was one of the first to take a plate, and lift a cheese-draped potato to her mouth.
“It’s good,” she said. “It’s very good.”
Au Chalet is open for lunch and dinner seven days a week from 11 am to 10:30 p.m. To find out more, check out the restaurant on Facebook.