Marinated Mushroom Salad

Chantal Restaurant

11712 San Vicente Boulevard
Los Angeles, California

1968 – 1981

In 1968 Auguste Rossi and his son, Paul, opened Chantal Restaurant in the Brentwood neighborhood of West Los Angeles. Auguste, a veteran of such top-tier L.A. restaurants as the Escoffier Room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Le Petit Café, and The Tower, was a skilled and fastidious chef; Paul was the gracious and easygoing presence in the front of the house. Notwithstanding their Italian lineage, Chantal was a cozy little French restaurant (“endearingly shabby,” as a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times once described it) with pink walls, yellow tablecloths, and candles on the tables at dinner. The food was so good that Chantal quickly acquired a devoted following.

In 1977, with nearly a decade at Chantal under his belt, Paul decided to open a second restaurant, La Brasserie, in Orange, with chef Joseph Vieillemaringe as his partner. In 1981 the Rossis sold Chantal, and it soon was replaced by Donatello’s Ristorante. But Auguste, who was approaching 70, wasn’t about to retire. “I’m not going to die watching TV,” he vowed.

He was true to his word. Within a few years he’d opened his own restaurant, Papa Rossi, also in Orange, and this time—for the first time—the dishes he turned out were Italian through and through. He died in 1992 after putting in a busy day at the restaurant.

One of the most popular items on the menu at Chantal was its Marinated Mushroom Salad. Right after the restaurant opened in 1968 the Los Angeles Times’s restaurant columnist noted that the mushrooms in the salad, flown in from Virginia, were “white and crisp as apples, voluptuously drenched in a vinaigrette, fragrant with chervil.” Here is Auguste Rossi’s recipe, though it calls for tarragon, not chervil.

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Marinated Mushroom Salad

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One of the most popular items on the menu at Auguste Rossi's Chantal Restaurant in Los Angeles was its Marinated Mushroom Salad. Right after the restaurant opened in 1968 the Los Angeles Times’s restaurant columnist noted that the mushrooms in the salad, flown in from Virginia, were “white and crisp as apples, voluptuously drenched in a vinaigrette, fragrant with chervil.” Here is Rossi’s recipe, though it calls for tarragon, not chervil.