Pre: "How do you find these places, John?" I'm asked. Sometimes, it's premonitions in the blogosphere, sometimes whispers from trusted sources and sometimes I keep hearing about a resto that sounds familiar and yet unknown (to me.) The latter is the case here; it may be 7 years old with a cheffe who passed thru the House of Ledeuil but since its renovation, it has created a soft buzz that needed to be heeded.
7.8 L'Escient, 28, rue Poncelet in the 17th, 01.47.64.49.13, (Metro: Ternes), closed Sundays, means "wisdom" in English and it certainly is that. The renovation has resulted in a beautiful display of their wines as well as a look at their original brick walls.
One of us, lucky guy, started with luscious microtomed slices of Jamón Pata Negra Belotta with a tomato-garlic sauce and the rest of us enjoyed crispy gambas with a honey-soy sauce and perfectly lovely greens, really lovely!
Then the table split on the mains: half having the mi-cuit tuna (which was not mi-cuit) and the other half lamb chops (one of which was ordered blue if not raw, haha, which it wasn't) with petit pois. Somehow because of the great food and superb service we let the cooking order reversals slip by.
Our desserts were raspberries and pureed mangoes, both with perfectly offsetting ices.
Our bill, with 2 bottles of Sauvignon Touraine and Château Ollieux Romanis Alice plus 3 coffees and a tea, was 203 E or 101.50 E a couple. dB's = 66.5 (calm)
Go back? The food was sooooooo good that we forgave the mixup in preparation.
The jamón doesn't look like "pata negra" but "cebo", it comes to pigs that doesn't eat acorns ("bellotas"). It's of lower quality.
And it's cut very bad.
This is a true jamón pata negra:
https://www.enriquetomas.com/es/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/xcomo-presentar-un-buen-plato-de-jamon-2-1024x684.jpg.pagespeed.ic.LOyVSVa1s_.webp
Regards, a spanish reader.
Posted by: Ignacio | May 02, 2019 at 09:14 PM