Friday, January 23, 2009

Le Loup Blanc

Ok, yea, I know I just made a post about how I never go out to eat but now I'm going to write a post about a place where I went out to eat, so just stop judging me. Thanks.

My friend Bruno's boyfriend was in town and had just had his anniversair so Bruno made reservations at Le Loup Blanc: restaurant atypique. When we arrived we ordered drinks to start. I got a pêche Kir which is a flavored white wine. Some olive tapenade with super skinny breadsticks were brought out to snack on in adorable little ramekins laying neatly on a black slate platter. Our menus were brought out and I think we all got a little shock when we first attempted to open them and realized that they were bound with sheets of metal. Upon lifting the metal slab I was greeted by a list of meat dishes, followed on the next page by the seafood, and lastly a whole page of vegetables. There were 4 froids (cold) options and 4 chauds (hot) options.

Now, next to the meat & seafood dishes there were three prices listed. Technically, the vegetable dishes were counted as sides, so the idea was to choose your protein and then pick either 2, 3, or 4 side dishes to accompany it with the price increasing for each additional side. There was also a note that if you were a vegetarian, you could simply choose 4, 5, or 6 sides as your meal. I was reading this all in French and I was pretty sure I understood, but in the back of the menu they had everything printed in English so I read through it quickly to make sure that I had it all figured out. Of the froids dishes, everything sounded delectable. There was one that was just tomatoes served several different ways, including tomato sorbet, there was a melon salad with coconut milk and lime sauce, mandarin and greens with a rosemary sauce, and a quinoa tabbouleh. For the hot, it wasn't too hard to find my selection, it was Fondue of something and the something didn't really matter. I passed on the mashed potatoes, artichoke and I can't quite recall the last one.

I generally feel a little silly ordering in front of a large group of French people, but imagine the horror of listing off six different items. It's not that it was any more difficult because of the amount of words involved, it was more like humiliation of being the greedy American boy who was ordering almost 1/3 of the entire menu. I will say, it was all worth it if for nothing more than that amazing tomato sorbet. Lucky for me, I even got to finish off somebody else's who was a little offput by the nonstandard preparation of the most delicious fruit/vegetable around.

5 comments:

  1. just read the dessert menu for this place== oh man!! (did anyone order dessert??) everything looked amaaazing!!!

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  2. actually, i purposely didn't mention dessert because i was bitter about the fact that i didn't order any. everything that i saw looked gorgeous and was devoured quickly.

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  3. i just checked the menu as well and it has changed since we were there, but i can assure you that if the "four roses" had been an option there is no way i could have walked away without it.

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  4. right??? (that's the one I was eyeballing... ... ...) Come home-- and we'll re-create the dessert menu!!!

    xoxo

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  5. reading your blog allows me a temporary escape from these 60+ hour work weeks...merci!

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