4.5 La Meduse, 177 quai de Valmy in the 10th, no telephone but they respond to reservation request emails very quickly, (Metro: Louis Blanc) open 7/7 sounded really nifty when Le Fooding and Figaro wrote it up and my Franco-Romanian/Romanian-French friends agreed that the write-ups made it sound right up our alley: music by Brubeck & Simone, food by O Divin & Mary Celeste and service "gentiment hipsterique" (NB Julot).
The place is so cool it only has one red and one white wine, each 28 E; we chose the Loire and two of us had 6 oysters apiece. Now it's difficult to screw up raw oysters but they managed to by adding harissa to the shallot/vinegar, aka mignonette, sauce, thus ruining the power of the bivalves - once scraped off, they were fine though. Our other friend had the sautéed encornet stuffed with a taboule of chopped-to-infinity cauliflower and almonds with a caper-lemon sauce that was "so what." At this point, my one pal, who had just survived a week of Brit-food started to get grumpy.
So he thought, as did we all, his magret de canard would right his dingy, but it, coming with a "tarama" of beets, radicchio and raspberry-pepper sauce only increased his colere and our sautéed St-Jacques, sliced in half with heliantis (again), nuts and passion fruit were weird and made no sense as a dish. At this point, he began a diatribe about French food critics all being sheep and how one could only trust the British press and so forth. Well he had a point.
We skipped dessert and as usual picked up the bill for past favors - but I added up the items and with two bottles of wine and no bottled water but OK bread and terrific butter and coffee, it should have come to 141 E for three or 64 E.
Go? Did you really read this? Heavens no despite the noise level of 86.4, great location, good ingredients and hipsterish service and clientele.
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