Flipping foul French food

Well, I finally made it to our local French restaurant for a feed other than breakfast. I was working from home last week and feeling a bit peckish and we were monkey free, so we decided to have lunch as a couple.

Le Grande Bouffe is a lovely place to sit in - the decor is good and the layout is interesting. The staff are also not too bad. Pity about the food.

To start with, it's a very difficult place to take a vegetarian for lunch, even one that eats chicken (a chookatarian?). Apart from a salad and a soup, everything on the menu had lots of meat in it. Or fish. Vegetarians could starve in places like this. I guess there aren't many vegos in Frogland.

I was not that hungry, so I went for two entrees - the soup and a terrine. The soup was a consome of tomato with a few parcels of pasta like stuff in it, sprinkled with truffle oil and shredded basil. It was nice, but not to my taste. It was also a silly thing to eat when the temperature was around 38 degrees.

The terrine was not bad either, but not good. It was just plain boring. I doubt there was any herbs or seasoning in the meat mixture, and if there were, they were very subtle. Too subtle for my worn out tongue. It was served with a small pot of onion relish, which was quite tasteless as far as relishes go, and the relish was garnished with two small cornichons, which were also pretty tasteless.

In short, it was like working your way through a plate of cardboard. Not bad cardboard, but cardboard none the less.

J had a salad of walnut, blue cheese, pear and rocket-type greenery, and it looked alright. It was the only thing she could eat on the menu. There seemed to be a lot of it, and she didn't complain, but we aren't going back.

It's put me off French food a bit. We have another frog place nearby called Vatel, and we have never eaten there, although everytime we drive past we say, "We should eat there". Now I am not so sure.

Ah, what the hell, we'll give it a go.

PS - lunch at Le Grande Bouffe set us back quite a lot when you consider that we had 3 entrees and tap water. It was an expensive failure.