Dish du jour — 24/05/2013

It’s been more than a month since I reviewed a meal at Daglan’s own Le Petit Paris, so it’s time for another look.

In this posting, I’m going to display a total of four dishes, but I’m showing them in reverse order — starting with a dessert and then moving backwards to  a couple of main courses, and ending up with an entrée — because today’s dish du jour is an appetizer.

These selections are from the lunch that my wife Jan and I enjoyed yesterday with friends Suzanne and Mark, as well as Mark’s parents, who are visiting from Scotland. All six of us began with the special (and highly recommended) Champagne cocktail served at Le Petit Paris, which includes orgeat, a sweet syrup made from almonds.

Then we diverged widely, some of us choosing from the regular menu and others from the special l’idée du moment choices. (The nice thing at Le Petit Paris now is that you can mix and match as you wish — choosing a “regular” appetizer, for instance, and then picking your main course and dessert from the special menu that changes weekly.) All the dishes I’m featuring today are from the l’idée du moment menu.

We’ll begin at the end of the meal, with Jan’s dessert — a visual delight. Chef called it a clair de lune (French for moonlight), and fashioned a frozen dessert (like the Italian semifreddo) into a crescent moon, and then decorated the plate with some fresh strawberries. Here’s how it looked:

A crescent moon of a dessert.

My plat principal was a dish of linguine with mussels and pink shrimp, and was absolutely delicious. The light sauce was flavoured with fennel and dill, and had a somewhat sweet taste.

A slightly sweet sauce was perfect for the pasta and seafood.

For her main course, Jan ordered a fricassée of chicken with paprika — like the Hungarian classic dish, chicken paprikash. It was to be served with blinis, but because of Jan’s allergy to gluten, Chef substituted a nice portion of white asparagus. Here it is:

A chicken-and-paprika dish served with white asparagus.

Now for the dish du jour. Jan and I thought that the star of the show was our entrée — an appetizer that began with a thin base of cold  ratatouille (zucchini, tomatoes, onions) that had been minced very fine. It was surrounded by a delicious puddle of parmesan cream sauce, while perched on top was a boiled egg — already partially split open to allow the creamy yolk to run out. Finally came a crispy slice of pancetta. This was absolutely delicious:

The boiled egg brought it all together, perfectly.

In the past, if there was a criticism of Le Petit Paris, it was that the menu didn’t change often enough, and offer enough variety. But I’d say that’s outdated now. We couldn’t have been happier with our meal.