I hadn’t made dinner plans for our first night in Paris because I thought that we may pass out before then, but it turned out that we had plenty of energy to walk to a very nice dinner at L’Affriole, which is in the 7th, near Les Invalides. With a charming, rather sunny interior thanks to an emphasis on yellow, L’Affriole was the perfect spot to settle into a casual meal of creative French cuisine with an emphasis on fresh produce; it’s also reasonably priced… for Paris, at least. Not every dish fit my taste, but something about the spirit of the restaurant tells me that I’d love to go back and explore the menu more.

I especially liked cleverly simple and functional plating of the dishes. For me, it’s important that a beautifully presented dish remain beautiful for its duration; if an arrangement of food collapses into a mess after the first bite, then why fuss over it in the first place? At L’Affriole, the food kept its integrity.

Olive butter, salt, radishes.

Cream of Fennel Soup with Mussels and Parmesan. The fennel flavor was a little too mild — overall, it was a rather muted dish, though probably accessible for fennel and mussel novices. I don’t like foams, so I didn’t appreciate the one on top of my soup. The slightly pepper-y parmesan crackers on the side were fantastic, especially dipped in the creamy soup.

Fried Blood Sausage with Caramelized Onions. These were excellent, even for the people at the table who hadn’t known what they were in for.

Btw, I also liked the mosaic table a lot.

Peppers Stuffed with Brandade and “Riboulette” (?). It’s a shame that this is out of focus, because I think it’s composed rather creatively while still having a clean eatability effect. The sauce is a little messy. A great combination of flavors, though, and even textures, within a certain range.

Veal Sweetbreads with Fava Beans and Bacon. I also like the sort of herb gauffre. The sweetbreads nicely caramelized and tender, and the cream sauce to dip them in was a nice touch, even if it was topped with foam. The fava beans and bacon were a little too sweet. And btw, “ris” means sweetbreads, and “riz” means rice. Lesson learned.

Roasted Monkfish with Tomatoes.

I translated this as a Tuna Risotto with Olives, which is pretty misleading, since the tuna is on top of the risotto. The tuna was amazing — seasoned like a steak, but still with the texture of a rather juicy tuna. The tomato salsa was another touch of brilliance.

This was sort of like a pie made with young rabbit (lapereau), and the spinach was just barely wilted with a warm vinaigrette. Fantastic.

Raspberry Crumble.

Beignets with Apples. Perfect.

Plate of Chocolate Hazelnut Cream, Chocolate Sorbet, and Chocolate Souffle. Perfect.

Vanilla, Chocolate, and Coffee Custards. We didn’t actually order this, and sightings were made of the server being corrected by another server after he put this on our table. It stayed nonetheless, and was very good.

We got a bowl of apricots after the meal, which would have been great if they hadn’t been mealy and bland.

And we had a very nice wine. We also happened to visit Chateauneuf-du-Pape while we were in Provence, but I’ll get to that later.

L’Affriole
17 rue Malar, 7th
Paris

01.44.18.31.33

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 at 8:37 pm and is filed under Highly Recommended, Paris, Restaurants, Sampling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.