5.0 Le Café Véry, in the middle (N-S) of the Tuileries, 2/3rds towards the Concorde/Jeu de Paume/Orangerie side, 01.47.03.94.84, open everyday from 10 AM, has been here for years my RFC (real food critic) friend tells me, but it’s recently been under the supervision/advice/ guidance of Gilles Choukroun, he whom I loved at Le Café des Delices and loved/hated at the l’Angl’Opera.
In any case it’s one of a kind, sort of half-café, half-high end snack-food, half-really good stuff, so it winds up being 150% OK. We, being un-French-customized, started off with bottles of Chat. Delanoye and a Touraine.
The menu has 1sts of tabouli and smoked salmon, 2nds of cod, salmon and veal and some desserts from Pierre Hermé – but we had none of those, instead they brought out everything at once, which was a bit disconcerting, but it was the waitress’s first day, she had never opened a bottle or poured a glass of wine (amazing in this day and age, but….)
In any case the RFC had cheese balls in a Mason jar a la Aux Lyonnais with a piece of toast with tapenade (not bad) followed by a tartare MBC (ah hah, even he didn’t know what that was – turns out it stands for mango, basil & coriander) equally not bad.
I scored tho’ I think, better, with two starters really – a so called exceedingly long chicken spring roll with a side basil sauce and a wonderfully spicily-again dressed pile of greens and a so called gazpacho which was really a dense, terrifically spicy tomato salsa into which one dipped spicy radishes, with a rondelle of butter on a strip of bamboo that I thought was something else until I bit into it – ohmagawd! Heaven.
The bread and coffee were so-so but to sit there in the gardens, besides the sculpture, talking food, tennis and culture with my favorite RFC – it should count as a 10.
The bill, ah, here my friends, we must do a bit of dissembling because the devil made us have a second bottle, so for ordinary human beings it would have been a mere 67.60 E.
One caution, for some reason, the earth outside, if one sits there, is not packed but powdery and if you set your bag, backpack, etc down, you’ll regret it.
Should one go? Under the circumstances stated above, do it, but it’s not haute gamme nor a destination place. It is what it is and Gilles has redeemed himself in my book.
*Originally publisted in June 2007
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