Pre: You know you're off to a bad day when it's raining and your shoulders ache and the driver asks "why where you're going is it called Notre Dame de Lorette?" and you stammer, "ah Lorette, it's a town somewhere, in Normandy, the Loire, why do you ask?" "You're French" he says. "Streets are called Victor Hugo or ..... " And that was only the beginning. He keeps talking, I say I'm deaf, stand-off.
So in the journalism dodge, you're taught to put the most important thing in the first line, and let the editor cut up from the end, so the best thing about this restaurant was the speculos cookie with the coffee at the end. After that is was downhill or backwards or whatever.
4.5 La Sirene de Lorette, 47, rue Notre Dame de Lorette in the 9th, 01.45.26.66.66 (Metro: St. Georges), closed Sundays and Mondays, and in part, I went because of the news in lesrestos.com that:
“La cuisine est confiée au chef Arno Sainsot qui à travaillé à "L'Arpège" avec Alain Pasard et qui réalise ici de bien jolis plats. Selon la saison la carte annonce les huîtres ; ............ les Eperlans frits ;”
I said - "that's it, 6 Utah Beach oysters and fried eperlans," my dream meal, I'm going." Well, not so fast John!
OK, so I enter but my wonderful tri-city, bicontinental pal is held up in traffic. No problem, plenty of time to regard the carte. Hummm, no eperlans. "Madam, could you ask the chef if he has some eperlans tucked away in the back of the frigo? She asks the front-guy, not the chef - "No." Hummm, "Anything else fishy fried?" "No."
OK. My friend arrives. Looks at the menu. Tomates tardives? What's that? Late tomatoes, tomatoes that missed the truck from Sicily, confited tomatoes? How? Salad? Ok. "How were they?" "Fine." Oh oh, meanwhile we had had a very nice amuse of chopped smoked fish with a mussel. And I had 6 Utah Beach #2's with vinegar which had no shallots, OK.
We both had ordered sauteed cepes in a mushroom mousse, and we waited, and waited, and waited - just like the refugees in Casablanca, and they finally arrived. Big, thick, impressive looking cepes. "A bit mushy don't you think," she said. Mushy? They were inedible. No one asks "why didn't you eat them?"
I'm unfulfilled, so I order the chocolate ganache and the front room guy brings out this precious thin bottle to pour on part or all of it, that I figure is some sort of elixir of platinum or plutonium, but no, it's olive oil. Ok. Lordy me.
Our bill - 108.50E for a bottle of water, two coffees. a bottle of red wine and two other glasses of Chardonnay - wait a minute, we didn't have 2 glasses, but OK, I'll grant them 5E for keeping us waiting so long for mushy mushrooms, if we'd had them. It was loud as hell, the music was awful, and the db's = 74.7 amazingly.
Go? I used to say to my wonderful American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology team, don't put in a grade until you've examined 2 or 3 candidates so you sense the top and bottom. Well, here we see the bottom.
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