Chez Christine

La Première

Whew.  I can breathe now.

I spent the last two nights catering dinners for 6, my first real cooking gig since graduation.  Luckily, it was the same menu both nights and I got to do all the planning.  I used many recipes from school, doing little twists on them and trying to come up with something French but seasonal and fairly light.  I was slightly nervous because expectations are so much higher once people find out you graduated from a culinary school.  Trust me, I felt some pressure and my hands were shaking a little when plating in the beginning!

The giant beef tenderloin I purchased yielded plenty of nice trimmings for the sauce.  Since tenderloins are larger at one end, it worked well that I could divide it into two pieces, use one each night, and not worry about uneven cooking times.  One person the second night didn't eat beef, so I did a pan-seared salmon steak with lemon-chive-butter sauce instead.

Timing was the main issue I had trouble with, since I've never done a formal plated dinner for 6 before, only buffet-style dinners.  I had  to remember that it always takes you twice as long to do things than anticipated, yet I also struggled with trying to do things too early.

But it turned out well and seemed to be well-received.  I've got two more dinners coming up, hopefully they go smoothly also!

Strawberry Tomato Gazpacho
Amuse Bouche

Instead of serving a soup course (low on burner space), I made a cold amuse bouche instead.  Sweetness from strawberries, tartness from tomatoes, spiciness from onions and Serrano chili, coolness from cucumbers.  It was made yesterday so that the flavors could come together overnight.  Served in shot glasses, no spoons required!

 

 

Warm Goat Cheese & Bacon Salad,
Red Wine Vinaigrette

A classic French bistro dish.  I used fresh goat cheese, but semi-aged goat cheese works even better.  The goat cheese is sprinkled with dried herbs, wrapped in thin bacon, placed on bread (baguette in this case), then broiled until the bacon is cooked.  I served it over a mesclun-frisee mix with a red wine vinaigrette dressing.  I love warm salads, and bacon on anything makes it better!

Roast Beef Tenderloin with
Truffle Salt and a Port Reduction,
Gratin Dauphinois, Asparagus

Tenderloin roasted whole to a medium-rare, sprinkled with a truffle salt from Italy, and served with a Port reduction.  The sauce was composed of a jus made with tenderloin trimmings, mirepoix, veal stock, and port.  It was finished at the last minute with Plugrá butter.  I wish I had real truffles, but hey, I was on a budget!  Potatoes dauphinois with garlic and sauteed asparagus served as garnishes.

Warm Raspberry Tart

Chef Terrien's famous warm raspberry tart.  I'm lucky that I live near the Berkeley Bowl and can get bulk almond flour.  Otherwise, you end up paying $15 for a 1/2 pound branded package!  I didn't change the recipe one bit, it's wonderful and deserves its reputation.

Madeleines

I haven't broken out the madeleine molds in over a year.  I used to make them every few weeks!  A perfect accompaniment to coffee or tea.  I made them earlier in the day and warmed them up in the oven before serving.  (Madeleines are best served fresh.)

I've learned a lot over the past two days about mise en place, timing, and plating.   It's hard to believe that a year ago I was a naive amateur cook about to immerse myself in the French culinary world.  Thank you chefs at LCB Paris!

Bon appétit!

Cooking School & the Vegetarian

Let's answer some questions asked of me recently regarding cooking school (esp. LCB Paris) and vegetarians / those with food allergies.

I'm a vegetarian.  Do they make you taste the dishes that include meat?
The purpose for the tastings at the end of class is so that you know how a well-prepared dish should taste.  It is also so that you can replicate the recipes appropriately.  If you're vegetarian and choose not to taste, remember that this can affect how well you cook.  Guesswork  doesn't really cut it if you don't understand the finished product.

My question back to you who are vegetarians: why are you going to cooking school?  If you don't want to taste any meat and don't plan on cooking it, find another program that tailors to your diet.  (Keep in mind that it's difficult in France.)  But if you plan to work in a restaurant and are fine knowing that you will be cooking meat, consider tasting the plates in the beginning to really build a foundation for what reduced sauces and stocks taste like.  Remember that you don't have to actually eat what you make in practical class, and there are plenty of people you can give the food away to.  Just taste!

One classmate was vegetarian not for ethical reasons, but because her body didn't digest meat well.  She still tasted to understand the final product, especially sauces that were stock-based.  Every recipe we made during practical in the Cuisine program included meat of some kind.

At our official class dinners, the sign-up sheet always included an option for vegetarian meals.  However, there wasn't an option for vegans.  Talk to the people in charge of coordinating these dinners if you need a special meal.  Don't be afraid to ask- after all, you've paid for the dinner and should enjoy it!

I'm allergic to XYZ.  Will I still have to cook with it?
First of all, understand your food allergy before you begin classes.  Are you allergic to peanut oil or just peanuts?  Are you allergic to just the raw form or all forms?  What do you do if you accidentally eat it?  If you don't understand your allergy, you can't expect others to understand or help you.

Figure out how to politely say "I am allergic to XYZ" in French or whatever language your cooking school is in.  At LCB, if you informed the chefs of your allergy, you didn't have to cook with that ingredient.   If you tell the chefs when you first get there, some can be quite accommodating and will prepare a tasting for you that doesn't include what you're allergic to.  However, this doesn't work if you're allergic to lobster and the main ingredient is lobster.  In that case, just cook it and don't taste!  Even if you can't eat the result, at least you spent more time in the kitchen and gained some experience.

If you are extremely allergic to something, be cognizant of the fact that there is a lot of cross-contamination between ingredients in the kitchen.  Some people still cooked with ingredients they were allergic to but wore gloves (and obviously didn't eat the finished product).  Err on the safe side and don't eat anything you're suspicious about.

Know what the offending ingredient looks like.  This may sound silly and obvious, but if you are allergic to all nuts, know what a blanched and a roasted almond looks like.  This way, you don't accidentally eat it because of ignorance.

Last but not least, pay attention during demonstration.  An offending ingredient might not be in the recipe, but the chef might be spontaneous and decide to add it into the recipe.

Hopefully I've covered the questions thoroughly.  Let me know under Comments if I can further clarify!

Bon appétit!

Final Thoughts on LCB Paris

It's time for a serious post.

I've had two weeks to reflect on my courses at Le Cordon Bleu since graduation.  After responding to an eGullet forum here, I became even more motivated to share my thoughts on the whole experience.  Here's the question that many readers pose to me: "Should I go to Cordon Bleu?"

To blindly recommend or not recommend a school isn't something that I'm comfortable doing.  After all, it depends on your personality, your background, what you want out of it, and countless other factors that are unique to each person.  The question I usually want to ask is, "What do you want out of a cooking school?"  Once those factors are laid out, you can make a more informed decision.

So what I can do is lay out some observations and my own opinions, then let you decide for yourself.  A warning- this post will be long, but thoroughness is what I will strive for, not brevity.  And feel free to pose more questions in the comment section or email me directly- I know I can't address every possible thing you might want to know.

To understand where I'm coming from, here's a little background on me:

• Chinese American, 25, from the SF Bay Area
• No professional cooking experience, just a few months as a Sur La Table volunteer in their cooking classes and some private catering gigs
• Big-time restaurant goer, my passion is food of any kind
• I live to eat and travel, and my past jobs in the corporate world just didn't allow me to do enough of both!
• Didn't speak French- only a quick beginner's class at a community college before moving to Paris
• What I wanted out of LCB? To learn the French techniques from the ground up, to learn sauces and stocks and knife skills, to learn how to be creative with food.  Eventually hoping to make a career out in the food industry, not necessarily as a chef, but in related fields such as food writing, recipe testing, and food styling.
• Why not pastry and just cuisine?  Pure and simple- money.  I could only afford one diploma, and baking is something I already did a lot of at home.  Handling a whole fish?  No experience whatsoever.  Choice was easy.
• Why Paris?  Why not Paris?  I loved the city, wanted to learn French, and figured that if I was going to go back to school, to choose a completely foreign place where I could discover more of myself & another culture.

A few facts about the school:

• There are LCB schools and schools that offer LCB certificates and diplomas.  The difference: LCB schools are actual schools, run by LCB chefs, and there aren't that many of them.  In fact, the US only offers certificate and diploma programs at technical schools.  What's the difference?  I honestly can't tell you since I've only experienced one side of the coin, but I do know that LCB school chefs are highly experienced and trained, travel the world, and offered me a lot.
• You have to track through the program their way.  No matter how experienced you are, you cannot skip Basic classes and jump right into Intermediate & Superior.  In a way, it's annoying- professionals will be bored and wish there was a technical test that they can take so that they do not waste time & money learning things like basic knife skills.
• You CAN fail the classes.  It happens more in pastry than cuisine, but if your mousse doesn't set during the final exam and you've missed a few classes, you fail.  And that means that you have to retake the class (& repay the course fee) or just quit altogether.
• The format is a demonstration class followed by a practical class where you go into the kitchen and make what the chef just showed you.  For Basic & Intermediate, demo classes are translated into English, but there is no translation in the practicals.  Not a big deal if you know a few words of French- you'll pick up the terms quickly.  In Superior, no more translation, but you should be comfortable enough at that point to understand the cooking terms.  Not many people had trouble in Superior, even if they had poor French speaking skills (myself included).
• It's expensive.  No matter how you look at it, in dollars or Euros, a Cuisine Diplôme will cost you at least $25,000.  Included is a knife kit, uniforms, and all food costs.  A student bar night and a student dinner is also included in each course.
• Check the schedule to see how long the breaks are between courses.  I somehow ended up with a 2-month gap, which afforded me time to travel.  However, the school should have told me that I could have taken Intensive classes during that time period to speed up my diploma.  This would have given me the option to shorten my stay in Paris should I have wished, and would save on 2 month's living expenses.  A normal gap is about 1.5 weeks between courses.
• Housing is not provided, the school has some resources and references, but you might be on your own for the search.

Here are my observations (call them gripes, compliments, or what you will):

• The Paris school is overcrowded.  When I first started in August 2005, we were the largest class the school had ever seen (about 70 in Basic Cuisine + Pastry).  Now each class is approximately that large, with extra tourist and intensive classes thrown in there.  Factor in only 2 demonstration rooms and 4 kitchens, and there are just too many students to handle. 
  This means not enough lockers, bad scheduling, and not enough chefs to staff the practical classes.
• Bad scheduling.  Because of overcrowding and probably because of lame French scheduling, your schedule changes EVERY DAY.  You would think that a constant number of classes per week (3 demos, 3 practicals) would make it easy for them to provide a set schedule, but that does not happen.  Instead, you can have one class at 8:30AM Monday morning, then not another one until 6:30PM on Wednesday evening.  This makes it very difficult to hold part-time jobs or take language classes.
• The proliferation of "fake" chefs.  In Basic Cuisine, we always had a real LCB Paris chef in our practical classes.  In Superior Cuisine, we constantly had temporary chefs, "fake" chefs, who came from outside restaurants or were freelance chefs, whatever that means.  These chefs had no idea how things were done in the school, yet were expected to evaluate and teach us.  It was extremely frustrating, especially when your chef for practical is a 23-year old girl who has never run her own kitchen but just happens to work in a famous restaurant in Paris.  (For example, it turns out she had learned to turn mushrooms a few hours before class from another LCB chef and was now teaching us!)  I paid a lot of tuition money, and I don't think it is unreasonable to expect to have a real chef in my class.  If this had happened once or twice, I would chalk it up to a temporary staffing shortage.  However, the fact that it happened frequently was just plain unacceptable.
• Bad ingredients. Towards the end of Superior, we got rotten potatoes.  Rotten potatoes.  I say again, rotten potatoes.  More than once.  How a school who sources directly from produce buyers, who go through loads of it every day, can get rotten potatoes is beyond me.  Many times we moaned and complained over baskets of ingredients that were moldy, bruised, or just plain subpar.  While the meat and fish were usually of a good quality, it was frustrating to get such unpredictability in our ingredients.
• Chefs. The real chefs at LCB are extremely talented.  Yes, we sometimes thought their plating ideas were a little strange or their methods a little outdated, but I learned a lot from them.  They really love food, most really care that the students are learning, and they encourage questions.  They were also typically French and quite chauvinistic, but overall, I enjoyed my interactions with them.  They were just as frustrated as we were with the overcrowding of the school and the quality of the ingredients.
• Techniques.  Knife skills, butchering skills, filleting skills, sauce skills.  All taught masterfully, and you leave confident enough to do so much more than what you knew to begin with.
• Facilities. The school desperately needs new facilities.  In the last few weeks of my time there, the ventilation system was barely working, refrigerators in the kitchens were out, and sometimes even the stoves would short.  I cannot imagine those poor students slaving away in the heat wave we are going through right now.  Get a new building!
• Recipes. Basic Cuisine taught us a lot about classical French food.  A great building block, but Intermediate Cuisine was a lot of forcemeat and cabbage.  Superior Cuisine didn't offer an outlet for creativity that I had hoped for- in fact, some of the recipes were so simple we finished in less than 1.5 hours.  We were allowed to be creative in the final, yet had never really practiced experimenting on our own and were never given any ideas on how to put together composed plates.  Plus, they never showed us how to plate 4 identical plates at the same time (like we have to do in the final).  It was a figure-it-out mentality, which I feel is completely against the purpose of having the school there.
• Communication.  It's great before you arrive at the school.  Once you're there, random signs, emails, or announcements during class are made for changes in the schedule or upcoming events.  My advice: make friends who will tell you if you've missed something, otherwise don't count on the school to have a consistent method of telling you what's going on.
• Grades. The grades really don't mean anything.  Trust me.  From a purely analytical standpoint, there is no way that 50 students can all be judged on the same plane if they all have different chefs staffing their practical groups at different times, all with different grading methods.  Some chefs never gave 5's (the highest grade) out of principle, some gave them out consistently.  Yes, you get ranked at the end, but the rankings always held an element of surprise.  I've heard stories of people who didn't know how to take the breasts off a pigeon in Superior Cuisine (which ended up on our Final Exam) placing in the top 5 of the  class.  Forget being competitive- just go there to learn.
• Stage placement.  Getting an internship through the school was easy for some, frustrating for others.  The school has great connections with top French chefs, and know of classmates staging at Guy Savoy, Jöel Robuchon, and Pierre Hermé.  A great stepping stone for those who want to work in Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris.

I don't consider myself a negative person.  In fact, if you read what I've been writing about the school in past entries, I'm quite positive about many things.  I held off writing this diatribe because I wanted to finish my LCB schooling, do some reflection, and really compose my thoughts before penning it.  Hindsight always helps, and to be honest, many of my classmates share a lot of the opinions and observations I've made above.

I look at my time here in Paris to include the fact that I'm living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  I fell in love with Paris the first time I stepped foot in it, and the chance to live here and cook was something I couldn't resist.  The school has problems, many just technical ones that a good consultant or manager can come in and fix, but it captures a love for the French lifestyle and cuisine that you can't find anywhere else.  I know nothing about the other cooking schools here in Paris, so don't ask me to compare it against Lenôtre or the Ritz (Cindy of Food Migration has thoughts here)- you're better off talking to others who have gone there and draw your own conclusions as to the best school for you.  Better yet, visit the schools yourself if you have a chance.

I might still do a few entries on things regarding school, but I thought this a fitting conclusion to end my journey here.  I have absolutely no regrets about choosing LCB Paris.  But then again, I'm not a regrets kind of girl.  Good or bad, you learn from whatever situation you're in.  A wiser person you will become.

As to the future, it's anybody's guess.  I plan to keep up this blog from wherever I'm roaming off to.  There's no better appetite than one for travel and food, at least in my book!

Bon appétit!

Stay with Me

Breathe.
Sleep.
Write.

My life in the last week and a half consisted of a crazy 4-hour cooking exam, a trip to Fontainebleu, the arrival of 10 people from home (including family), graduation, two apartment moves, multiple trips to the Eiffel Tower, and translating menus and ordering for 12 people at 4 dinners.

Yesterday family & friends left in the gloomy Paris weather.  Today I settled into the apartment I'm subletting for the next 24 days.

Any surprise that I'm exhausted? And unfortunately sick, which is a sure sign that my body needed to slow down.

Unpacking and taking a 3 hour nap finally helped to clear my head.

So now it's time to write.  Are you ready?  Here comes a wad of restaurant reviews, final thoughts on Le Cordon Bleu, and my silly plan to hit as many Parisian outdoor markets as I can before I leave.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Bon appétit!

 

Finished

It's official.

I now have a ridiculously oversized diploma, a gigantic medal, a tiny pin with the school logo, and a grade sheet with my final course grades.

How come?

Because I'm a Le Cordon Bleu Cuisine Diplome graduate!

Bon appétit!

The Final Stretch

Spring has officially sprung in Paris!  If I walk outside and close my eyes, I feel like I'm lounging around in the SF Bay Area.

Well, until a little old lady with a shopping cart tries to run me over at the market, I get stuck on the metro with many people who don't understand the concept of deodorant, or suddenly get a craving for dim sum and remember that none of the old ladies here push dim sum carts and yell at me to eat more.

C'est la vie. I can't complain.  I get to live in Paris.  Well, at least for another month.

Notable pictures from the past couple of weeks:

The park behind Notre Dame.  It's picnic weather!

Mont St. Michel
Part of a weekend spent in Normandy
(ironically, we were there on May 8th)

Why I love Chef Didier (and want a giant immersion blender).



Miss GlaGla's are back.  Back with a vengeance!



Deboning a lamb saddle.  Awesome.

My life for the next few days will be prepping for our final exam at school.  We basically get a market basket of goodies, within which are 4 mandatory items (pigeon, fresh peas, foie gras mousse, and poivrade artichokes).

Our test is to create our own recipe for the pigeon, make 2 composed garnishes (or complex), and 1 simple garnish.  Oh, and instead of cooking and plating one plate like we normally do, we get to plate 4!  Normal practicals run 2.5 hours- we get four hours total but are basically making about double the amount of food we normally make.

Today we had 6 hours in the kitchen with our market basket to practice and experiment.  Although I still have not finalized the menu yet, I managed to finish my plate at just over four hours. I'll have to hustle during the exam though- today we only had to present one plate to the chef for a critique.  Doing four identical plates will be quite a challenge.

So what I did I make?

I ended up roasting the pigeon whole until very rare, then removing the breasts.  The breasts were glazed with a reduced sauce of honey, balsamic vinegar, garlic, ginger powder (we don't get fresh ginger!), soy sauce, lemon juice, star anise, and black peppercorns.  Over the glaze were toasted sesame seeds, then the breasts were popped back into the oven at the last minute to heat through and become a beautiful medium-rare (French term rosé).  Turned out quite well today, the perfect degree of doneness!

The sauce was a jus of pigeon, flavored with a little of the glaze, glossed over with butter at the end.  Turned out a little sweet today, have to tweak it some more. 

The garnishes were:
- Flash fried carrots and baby artichokes sliced on a mandolin.  Tiny artichokes are a pain to turn!
- Fresh pea puree.  Peas were shelled, boiled, passed on a tamis, then heated through with butter and cream.
- Millefeuille.  Sauteed chanterelle mushrooms with onions and shallots, with the addition of chopped chervil.  (top and bottom layer)  The middle layer was a slice of foie gras mousse topped only with salt and pepper.  The millefeuille was created with crispy brik pastry (French egg-roll like wrappers that can be baked or fried).

My practice plate for the exam.

I'm still thinking of some other garnishes, the order to do things, and more plating ideas.  It's fun yet a little crazy at the same time!

Bon appétit!

Cars & Bubbly?

This is what happens when a bunch of culinary students go off on a trip to Champagne. (photo from Independent.co.uk)

We visited Pommery and Moet & Chandon and took their cellar tours, stopping for lunch and a look at the immense cathedral in Reims in between.  Too bad lunch was a yawn- but what do you expect from a place called the James Joyce Pub?

As for the champagne tastings, I didn't find anything spectacular that I wanted to buy.  If I ever return to Reims, I'd probably want to visit Bruno Paillard instead.  We popped a bottle in celebration of the completion of my first market tour, and I can see why Joël Robuchon stocks his restaurants with this champagne.

Psssttt...when we couldn't finish the entire bottle, it went into Pear Mimosas later.  Sounds a little weird, I know, but we had fresh pear juice purchased directly from the bottler when we visited Avignon a few weekends ago.  Nothing beats fresh juice, no sugar added, from a beautiful sun-drenched part of Europe!

Champagne Pommery
5, place du Général Gouraud
51100 Reims, France
Open daily, tour reservations available online

Champagne Moet & Chandon
20, Avenue de Champagne
51333 Epernay, France
Tel: 03-26-51-20-20
Open daily in the summer, M-F in the winter

Bon appétit!

Top 10

As school comes to an end in a few weeks, some reflecting must be performed.  Gone are the wide-eyed Basic Cuisine students that we once were, to be replaced by slightly cynical but much more competent cooks-to-be.  Yes, we have learned classical French techniques, but more interestingly, we've learned to be creative with our leftovers.

Here are the top 10 things you can do with leftovers from practical class at Le Cordon Bleu:

10. Salad it: Take whatever protein was cooked (meat, fish), heat up (optional), and serve on a bed of seasonal greens with homemade dressing.  Perfect in warm weather.
09. Sandwich it: The same thing as #10, but on a fresh baguette or bread from the bakery.
08. Frittata it: A personal favorite of mine- cut leftovers into small pieces, heat in a skillet, pour seasoned beaten eggs on top and cook until set.  Optional- top with fresh herbs or cheese to fancy it up.
07. Leave it: Let it sit in the refrigerator until mold takes over and you cannot distinguish it from other leftovers from class.  For those who like to live dangerously.
06. Give it away: Whether to other classmates, the dishwashers, or the homeless kids out on Rue de Vaugirard, everyone appreciates a little taste of classical French cooking!
05. Drop it: So what did I do with my artichoke puree and stuffed guinea fowl breast from last week? Knock it out of the refrigerator, out of the plastic container and onto my slippers.  It was worth it for the sheer comic value.
04. Garbage it: Throw it away before even leaving the classroom.  Yes, sometimes the food is THAT unappetizing.  You know it's bad when no one pipes up when you say, "Who wants my leftovers?"  Mushy fish sausage with orange sauce anyone?  I think I'd have to be lost in the woods for a week before touching that.
03. Throw it: I know of no better way to stun the annoying pigeons in the park than tossing a piece of meat baked in bread dough at them.  Hey, I need pigeons to practice on for the final!
02. Trade it: Trade with a pastry student so that you can consume massive amounts of butter and cream in a sweet form instead.

and last but not least...

01.  Eat it as is: On those rare times when everything we make in class is excellent!  Trust me, those times are rare- how do think I've managed not to gain weight while in culinary school?

*A little caveat- I'm not saying that everything we make at school is gross.  It's just a lot of repetition and a lot of heavy food that most people aren't used to.  But both the palate and the brain need to have a little fun once in awhile, and the leftovers problem keeps the mind sharp!

Bon appétit!

Pavillon Ledoyen

Now for the last of the 3-Michelin stars: Pavillon Ledoyen. 

This restaurant was for the Le Cordon Bleu Superior class dinner.  During each term, there is a class dinner that is included in the course.  The restaurant for Basic Cuisine was dreadful: Chai 33, a too-hip, too-trendy, more about the scene than the food kind of restaurant.  Since our class was the largest the school had ever accepted, they scrambled and found a restaurant that would accommodate a large group.  Unfortunately this meant a hike out to Bercy and food that looked like it had been dished by cafeteria ladies.

For Intermediate, we ate at the Park Hyatt Hotel, a step up from Chai 33.  The setting was nicer, it was two blocks from my apartment, and the experience was more upscale overall.  The food was also better, but we didn't actually eat in the restaurant- it was a multi-purpose room downstairs.  I was still slightly unsatisfied because I felt that a cooking school, especially one which charged me a gigantic tuition, could have found a better restaurant.

I was relieved when we found out that the Superior dinner would be at Pavillon Ledoyen, a legendary 3-star restaurant in Paris.  From talking to some other students, I discovered that this was the usual place for the Superior dinner.  And after going to a special Chef Invité at school featuring the Ledoyen chefs (photos below), I knew that the food would probably be spectacular.

Did Ledoyen meet my expectations?  The food yes, the service no.

Upon arrival, we were shown to a patio for drinks and hors d'oeuvres.  It was one of the first warm nights in Paris- the city felt languid and beautiful, living up to its romantic and magical reputation.  Our chefs were already there- relaxed and less intimidating in their non-chef clothes.  Quite a change from the barking chefs in our kitchens just a few hours earlier.

We were shown into a private room for our dinner, where we sat at plush round tables laid out with beautiful silverware.  The whole atmosphere was more hushed, more refined than previous dinners.

I found the food great but not spectacular.  Everything was well-executed, and the portions were even larger than I expected.  To be honest, nothing stood out in my mind, but then again, it is quite a challenge for an excellent restaurant to come up with original dishes that can be served to over 70 people at the same time. 

The fun part of the evening came at the end: desserts.  The number of them was amusing- a première douceur (literally translated "first sweetness" or pre-dessert), dessert, then little plates of petits fours to follow.  If only every meal featured pre-desserts, I'm becoming rather addicted to them!

The one miss of the night was the service.  Since we had no menu options except for those who were vegetarians, the service could easily have been smooth and lived up to the 3-star designation.  But water and wine glasses remained depressingly empty, even with plenty of staff hovering about.  My table became so desperate, we just got up and took the bottles off the trays ourselves.  Some might say this was rude, but we were separated from the other non-Cordon Bleu diners and dehydration was a serious risk!

I would love to go back and try this restaurant again without being part of a group of 70 people.  The beauty of the dishes they made during the Chef Invité gave me a glimpse of what the kitchen could do.  While I thought the tastings I had then had some hits and misses, you couldn't really argue with the sheer imagination and creativity of the food.

The only remaining question is, who will take me back there?  Alas, the minuscule student budget will never afford such a treat!

Mise En Bouche
Aspic with Fava Beans


Saveurs "Terre & Rivière" Fumées et Acidulées
Beetroot and Smoked Fish (Trout?)


Côte de Veau de Lait Dorée
Cannelloni d'Herbes et Roquette
Veal and Cannelloni with Herbs & Arugula


Première Douceur
Grapefruit with Cream (Custard?)


Fine Barre Chocolat Noir, Amandes Râpées Facon Polignac
Dark Chocolate Fondant, Grated Almond Ice Cream

Café & Friandises


Macarons


Marshmallows


Canelés

Wines: Hautes Côtes de Nuits, Domaine Duband, 2003
Croxes Hermitage "Esquisse," Domaine Faugier, 2004

Pictures from the Chef Invité:

Sea Bass Wrapped in Rice Paper

Truffle & Fine Macaroni Timbale


Dark Chocolate Puff Pastry, Spun Sugar 

Pavillon Ledoyen
Carre Des Champs-Elysees
1 Avenue Dutuit
75008 Paris
Tel. +33 01 53 05 10 00

Bon appétit!

Superior Thoughts

We interrupt the series on Michelin restaurants to bring you a word from your sponsor:

So you're probably wondering why I haven't posted much on Superior Cuisine here at LCB. It's been for a plethora of reasons: trying to get as much travel in as possible, juggling a few odd jobs here and there, the weather's been so nice it's hard to stay inside to write, and life here in Paris has been a whirlwind of activity.  I apologize.

But the main reason is because there hasn't been that much going on in Superior that is different from Intermediate or Basic Cuisine.  I had expected to be given much more freedom to be creative in our dishes, but instead, they seem to be incarnations of past recipes.

For example, here is a dish from Intermediate, Monkfish Wrapped in Bacon (Chef's & my version):

Here it the dish we did just yesterday from Superior, Hake Wrapped in Prosciutto (Chef's & my version):

It's frustrating because the only chance we get to be creative is in the final.  And when I'm frustrated, I feel like this:

(Scary Monkfish from Market in Roses, Spain)

We just received our list of ingredients so that we can prepare and come up with recipes.  There isn't much variety and the items that are mandatory seem very random.  I guess it's time to stretch the old brain to find something interesting to make!  (I'll explain the final exam elements in a later post.)

If anything interesting comes up during the last few weeks of class before the final, I'll be sure to fill you in.  Until then, I'll continue to give juicy tidbits on the food scene in Paris, as I'm trying to squeeze as many restaurants in as possible before I have to leave!

Bon appétit!