So I really really wanted to eat a cool fancy meal in Paris because I adore French food and so does Morgan so we put our heads together and mustered all that we had and went to Google. Google always knows the way. We found a few prix-fixe joints and after whittling down the list by price and reservation availability for our group, we landed on L’Agrume, for a €45 5-course tasting menu. I had a friend studying abroad in Paris call the restaurant for us and put us down for the party of 5 on the Friday of our trip. This is the only post I will make that’s explicitly foodie-like. Sorry not sorry. I don’t even know much about cuisine anyway; I’m just in it for the eating bit. This is the menu as I recalled it the next day and wrote it down. We had a good white to go with it all. I would’ve liked red but there was a lot of fish. Oh, how seafood gets in the way of things always! It was a French wine OBVS.
1st course: Dorade tartare with lemon and green apple
A little mound of tartare topped with julienned green apple with an oil spruced with lemon at the bottom. The apple was a nice crunchy texture to counter the slickness of the fish in the tartare, which was also a good salty to go with the sourness of the lemon and green apple. Since the fish was pretty smooth, the portion size felt small but it was a good sized portion.
2nd course: Smoked eel and cauliflower soup
Don’t poo-poo it because it has eel and/or cauliflower. The presentation was nice. First came the bowl with the cauliflower and the eel and a few other bits of food I can’t recall, and then the server came back with the soup. The soup was a nice density, not too heavy because this is just a tasting menu, and it was delicately flavored and a perfect amuse bouche. I adore soups as amuse bouche’s. They literally warm up your palate and stomach for the following courses. Yum-o! The cauliflower and eel were smooth and matched well with the soup.
3rd course: John Dory with asparagus in a chicken jus
I’ve never had John Dory before so I don’t know if the amount of salt was right, if the skin could’ve been left on or not, how big the piece of fish should be, but it tasted fine to me and I liked the way it was cook with a nice crisp, no skin. Skin is always risky business. I would have liked more, but that’s because I’m always hungry. Damn tasting menus. The asparagus was cool, and the chicken jus was appropriately salty. This course was nothing spectacular. Plus its fish. Where’s the red meat? ME NEED MEAT.
4th course: Chicken filet with carrot mousse and grapes
This was another course that actually wasn’t too exciting. The mousse worried me because at first I thought it was meant to be a puree, but the menu read mousse so I guess it was okay but I really felt a puree would go better. But I’m always used to having mashed potatoes and the like alongside all my proteins. The mousse was not bad at all but a chicken is a lighter protein so you might as well go heavy with SOMETHING. I don’t think I like savory mousses in general though. I had one in Vienna and it did not go over well. The cooked grapes on the mousse were a nice sweetness along with the carrots against the savoriness of the chicken.
Dessert course: Vanilla whipped cream on a cherry syrup with a tuile crisp and pineapples
The whipped cream was more like a mousse which was great because it wasn’t a savory one! Cherry syrup at the bottom was mega good and the crisp was nice and bittersweet. The sour of the pineapples and cherry, the bitter of the crisp, the fluffy texture of the cream, all made for a wonderful dessert.
Ugh, this whole post was so pretentious. How relieved I am to be done. And hungry. I’m gonna go eat now.