Restaurants in Paris

With all this intensive schedule I haven't really had the time to visit as many restaurants as I would like but I've been to a few good ones and I would like to highlight three.

The first restaurant I would like to talk about was a tip from Alex, which apparently goes there every time he comes to Paris, is the le Relais de L'Entrecôte - a restaurant in the fancy St Germain side of Paris (there are others Relais de L'Entrecôte around Paris) which only serves one dish: Steak with Pommes Frittes Alumette and their secret green sauce.

I went with the usual gang, Diane, Alex and Erdem and I had the pleasure of having my life companion and love Katharina visiting me, so she hopped along. The restaurant only offers you a choice of how you would like your meat, and after a discussion with the waiter in which I tried to get a medium-rare steak - which she replied to with "No. Rare or medium?" - I ended up ordering the meat sinon (rare) and was pretty happy with the result. I was so happy, that I forgot to take a picture of the dish! The only thing you're seeing in picture is the nice salad with nuts and a mustard vinaigrette that's served as entrée, sorry! The steak is served in two times, you get half of it first with a dose of potatoes and lots of green sauce (which was yummy btw!) and after you ate all that delicious steak they come to you with the other half and another portion of fries and sauce. So awesome. To finish the dinner we ate the house's profiteroles with hazelnut ice-cream inside and chocolate sauce on top. To die for.

This week, we went to another restaurant which was a tip from one of the girls from the school staff. The restaurant is also in the 7th and is called Café Constant and is owned by Christian Constant, a famous french chef, which also owns other two restaurants in the same street (they're actually literally adjacent to each other). Oh my, what a feast we had. The price was nothing out of this world (11€ for entrées, 16€ for the main dish and 7€ for the dessert) and the food was really, really good. Apparently it's a restaurant that's very popular with locals. The interior couldn't be more modest, it looks like the regular parisian café in the corner, but the food was delicious. I'll leave you with the pictures of the dishes and two happy customers (Alex and Erdem).

Click on picture to enlarge

Yesterday, Alex and I decided we were too tired to go home and study. Instead, we thought we deserved a reward for all our hard word so we took ourselves to a restaurant pretty close to school that I've had my sight on for a while. It was a really really nice restaurant with great food and even nicer staff! It's called Je thé... me and they consider themselves to be a Restaurant du Terroir. No pictures, but we ate the house's Terrine de Foie Gras de Canard, Veloutté de Chataignês as entrées, for the main dish we had Un Mulard, Une Orange (basically Canard à L'Orange) and Terre et Mer de St Jacques (scallops in a bed of white bean purée) and to finish off a cheese plate and a Tarte Tatin. To help the food slide down our throats we had a delicious wine from the Languedoc region which unfortunately I can't remember the name. The cherry on top of this dinner was getting to visit the TINY SMALL KITCHEN of the restaurant, which is way smaller than my kitchen back home. The chef, who cooks alone, manages to do around 50 covers/seats per night. We were amazed. We had a nice chat with him about the school and the things we are learning, about how's working in a professional kitchen and other things food nerds talk about. At the last moment, I found out that the waiter was portuguese also and a previous portuguese Le Cordon Bleu student had worked in that restaurant's kitchen also! Small world :)

Now, time to study some more... written exam is tomorrow. Ciao!