Ludo Lefebvre’s Roasted-Carrot Salad

“I used to cook for critics,” Ludo Lefebvre said, standing next to the narrow open kitchen at Petit Trois in Los Angeles, where producers and script wranglers and people who go on auditions eat steak frites with béarnaise sauce, then lurch back to studio lots for meetings and naps.

Lefebvre used to be known primarily for high-wire haute cuisine, for foie gras basted with hoisin sauce, for guacamole sorbet, for curry panna cotta, for octopus gelée. These flavors brought him fame and eventually a spot on the competitive cooking show “The Taste,” on ABC. He was the chef at L’Orangerie in West Hollywood and the proprietor of the much-lauded pop-up restaurants known as LudoBites, where fine dining met the experimental.

He still cooks for critics at Trois Mec, the restaurant he opened in 2013 with the chefs Vinny Dotolo and Jon Shook, next door to Petit Trois. (Smoked eel with white-chocolate mashed potatoes — three stars!)

But at Petit Trois, he says, the focus is on simplicity, on the execution of French classics. “I’m getting older,” he said with a shrug. “I want to cook for people.” So, a fresh, crusty baguette with salted butter, a perfect rendition of Burgundian escargots, that steak frites or a croque-monsieur, perhaps a sole meunière with a small platter of austere and impossibly delicious rice pilaf.

And this salad: plump little carrots roasted in a hot oven with garlic and thyme, almost limp with sweetness beneath the barest hint of crust, then left to cool. A pillow of crème fraîche fragrant with toasted cumin and a breath of lemon. A vinaigrette of blood-orange juice, the acidity tempered by the bass thrum of olive oil. Some ribbons of red onion, a few sections of blood orange, a spray of herb leaves and a sprinkle of roasted almonds.