This and That

So did I ever talk about this French restaurant that my friend and I recently tried out? A couple of weekends ago, we had gone to the town to attend this arts festival and decided to have lunch there. 

We got there around 1PM, when the place was not too full; lucky for us, since it started filling up pretty quickly once we had placed our orders. The interiors were very evocative of an actual boulangerie with solid wood everywhere - ground-to-ceiling open-faced cabinets that housed freshly baked bread behind the main counter, tiny wooden tables and chairs for diners, and organic preserves, jellies and spreads in the glass cabinets that served as a partition between the sit-down area and the main counter.

But apart from the posh location and the fancy interiors, the restaurant did not quite meet our expectations. To begin with, the service, between the waiters and the host/esses, is highly unsatisfactory.  And while its a pleasure to read the menu, the food itself, at least the stuff we ordered, is not much to talk about.  I'm sure there are specialities that this restaurant prepares brilliantly, but unfortunately for us, they weren't the ones we selected. Overall, the value for money for us was below average. 

The hostess made us change our table once we had already been seated. Then, they sort of just forgot about us, until we had to beckon one of them to take down our order. The complimentary bread basket (I love this concept) contained only one variety of bread that was really good. The other two were just average.The drinks (I had ordered a lemonade and my friend had asked for a watermelon juice) were good.

I had ordered a Grilled Asparagus tartine (a French open sandwich) - with asparagaus, tomatoes and ricotta, with parmesan shavings. The asparagus, unfortuanately, was tough, chewy and stringy, and the tomatoes were too little to have made any difference to the sandwich. The bread they used for the tartine did not  go very well with the ricotta cheese and the stringy asparagus did not make matters any better.  The sandwich was supposed to be grilled but it was served absolutely cold. There was no flavour, whatsoever. While I'm no expert on tartines, I do feel that the choice of bread must be dependent upon the ingredients you are using; or else, it ends up being a boring sandwich, which is precisely what this one was. In this case, they could have either used slices of a slightly crustier bread or could have lighly toasted the sandwich a bit to add some texture to it. Or they could've added some sun-dried tomatoes, in a quantity that would've imparted  some flavour to the sandwich. In any case, someone should have checked on the kind of asparagus being used in a sandwich where the principle ingredient IS asparagus. 

Grilled Asparagus Tartine

I had also ordered a bowl of their French onion soup - this was also much below my expectations. I like my French onion soup with crusty bread, not with bread that becomes all soggy and limp even before the soup hits your table. I mean its a French restaurant, for God's sake and nothing I ordered was exactly rocket science.

French Onion Soup

My friend was slightly luckier; she had ordered a tenderlion steak with thyme and prune sauce.  While she found the steak to be a bit chewy, the thyme and prune sauce was great. I tasted a bit of it and it was just perfect.

Tenderlion steak with thyme and prune sauce

On the whole, I don't think I would like to eat at this restaurant again, especially with so many choices available to you in that part of the town.