This was the most profoundly disappointing meal we had in our three week stay in Paris. The waitstaff were pleasant and enthusiastic, but their enthusiasm was more focused on moving us swiftly and efficiently through our meal and out than on attending to our comfort or anticipating our wishes. The back dining room was cramped in a way th…
This was the most profoundly disappointing meal we had in our three week stay in Paris. The waitstaff were pleasant and enthusiastic, but their enthusiasm was more focused on moving us swiftly and efficiently through our meal and out than on attending to our comfort or anticipating our wishes. The back dining room was cramped in a way that these days only the ones catering mainly to tourists seem to be … just a bit tighter than some of our favorite places but there’s a line between feeling that one is building a ship in a bottle when being seated and having more sense of what one’s neighbor is saying than of one’s partner across the table. The food was a very short menu and competently prepared (one dish was even excellent, a simple pork chop plainly cooked, wonderful because the meat was perfect even even without any discernible seasoning or jus; and the gratinee may well have been the best onion broth I’ve ever tasted, and the cheese melty and flavorful, but it wasn’t gratinee at all, just a sort of ill-defined malleable golf ball of cheese drifting on top of bread that had mostly absorbed the broth…for anyone old enough to recall the last days of Les Halles’ salamander-crunchy hockey puck of cheese atop a miraculously still-crusty slice of baguette atop a hearty rich bowlful of broth it was pretty sad). But the problem with the food was its assembly-line quality … great bistro fare somehow remains vital and fresh while this seemed kinda rubber-stamped.
Quite literally everyone in the room was speaking English and that got me to thinking about what’s wrong with that…it wasn’t that they (we) were loud or loutish…we were no worse than an effusive local throng. In fact, the problem with a restaurant geared to tourists is that there’s special magic about a place that is cooking for, and filled with, regulars rather than one that knows it will basically not be seeing any of tonight’s guests again. It affects the menu, the preparation, the relation between waitstaff and diner. The best places can somehow capture that spirit and make everyone feel like a regular. Places aimed at tourists are like turkey legs at Disneyland … surprisingly good to eat but institutionalized, routinized. There are some places that can take cooking for tourists and turn it into the sort of evangelical experience that Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki created for Apple computers in the early Mac days, an approach to retail that Kawasaki identified with the Nordstroms department stores and that in restaurants is the way that hospitality gets expressed … that’s vanishingly rare these days, though, and was sadly missing here for us.
What a pity. Based on many of the other comments, i may be just a crank. But so many other suggestions here have been superlative that I’d approach this one with caution.
This was the most profoundly disappointing meal we had in our three week stay in Paris. The waitstaff were pleasant and enthusiastic, but their enthusiasm was more focused on moving us swiftly and efficiently through our meal and out than on attending to our comfort or anticipating our wishes. The back dining room was cramped in a way that these days only the ones catering mainly to tourists seem to be … just a bit tighter than some of our favorite places but there’s a line between feeling that one is building a ship in a bottle when being seated and having more sense of what one’s neighbor is saying than of one’s partner across the table. The food was a very short menu and competently prepared (one dish was even excellent, a simple pork chop plainly cooked, wonderful because the meat was perfect even even without any discernible seasoning or jus; and the gratinee may well have been the best onion broth I’ve ever tasted, and the cheese melty and flavorful, but it wasn’t gratinee at all, just a sort of ill-defined malleable golf ball of cheese drifting on top of bread that had mostly absorbed the broth…for anyone old enough to recall the last days of Les Halles’ salamander-crunchy hockey puck of cheese atop a miraculously still-crusty slice of baguette atop a hearty rich bowlful of broth it was pretty sad). But the problem with the food was its assembly-line quality … great bistro fare somehow remains vital and fresh while this seemed kinda rubber-stamped.
Quite literally everyone in the room was speaking English and that got me to thinking about what’s wrong with that…it wasn’t that they (we) were loud or loutish…we were no worse than an effusive local throng. In fact, the problem with a restaurant geared to tourists is that there’s special magic about a place that is cooking for, and filled with, regulars rather than one that knows it will basically not be seeing any of tonight’s guests again. It affects the menu, the preparation, the relation between waitstaff and diner. The best places can somehow capture that spirit and make everyone feel like a regular. Places aimed at tourists are like turkey legs at Disneyland … surprisingly good to eat but institutionalized, routinized. There are some places that can take cooking for tourists and turn it into the sort of evangelical experience that Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki created for Apple computers in the early Mac days, an approach to retail that Kawasaki identified with the Nordstroms department stores and that in restaurants is the way that hospitality gets expressed … that’s vanishingly rare these days, though, and was sadly missing here for us.
What a pity. Based on many of the other comments, i may be just a crank. But so many other suggestions here have been superlative that I’d approach this one with caution.