I have not been good at keeping up with my writing, but am now trying to catch up…
On Halloween weekend I had my bi-yearly visit with a good friend from upstate New York.
Halloween day was a very mild so we took the opportunity to visit the Chinese lantern festival at the botanical garden. It was pure enchantment…dragons…under water creatures…acrobats over water…
We tried two restaurants that weekend.
The first one: Tapeo, offers, as the name suggests, a variety of dishes in small portions, We gave the chef carte blanche and just gave them an idea of how much we were willing to spend…which got us: a sardine salad composed of sardines, fennel, caviar and croutons. Next course was an octopus salad with cocktail tomatoes, tiny green beans, mandarin oranges. Third course was scallops with lardons (bacon) that were to die for! The last savory course was skate topped with tomato juice, radicchio and sour cream and chorizo with tomato sauce. Dessert was forgettable – dull churros and some sort of date pudding thing.
Everything was tasty…but the restaurant is much too noisy to be pleasant…I would say they are victims of their success…
The second night we tried “Cuisine et dependences”, a quieter place with a nice soothing décor and large windows that offer an endless spectacle of street activities…
For the first course my friend tried chicken mousse with aragula salad with a fig/port sauce and I had scallops served in the shell. For the main course she had the duck breast with pommes dauphines, tiny onions and mushrooms, and I chose the osso bucco, which was lovely. The desserts she had was a sablé with apples and caramel and I had a daquoise with bananas.
In both places, the service seemed to peeter out and it took a long time to get the bill. I must say that neither place had desserts that impressed us…
As usual we visited a museum also. This time we caught the Warhol exhibit at the Museum of fine arts…I am glad we had a guide to explain it…. But although I know more about the man and his art now…. I still have my doubts about the artistic value of it all…granted he was an innovator…but…that does not necessarily make his work…a masterpiece…or maybe it is just over my head….