Fibilou

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I ate there about 13 years ago while on a culinary holiday with college. M. Besson cooked for us himself. We had a terrine of foie gras and rare beef with a xeres vinaigrette; zander in brioche and caramel ice cream It says something for his cuisine that I can still remember every nuance of the meal today, from the caramel bubbling when he made the ice cream to the unctuousness of the foie gras. And his excitement telling us about his expeditions truffle buying, and his highly secure truffle store. Absolutely spot on, classic cuisine. I would LOVE to go back

What I can't understand is why they seem to be getting so defensive over it all. As in Mr Simon's opinion, clearly it's crap and as France is full of knowing gourmets they will steer clear with bargepoles so they will not have to be offended by the lack of imagination or pizzazz. Leaving only us poor, uneducated ignorant Tourists to suffer Gordon's copycat 70s style cuisine. And as we are so ignorant, then the French can all rub their hands with glee thinking about the poor fool non-French ignorami chowing down on 2nd quality food. Or, more likely, are they so frightened that their precious fabled food industry is about to be tested ? What a disaster for French Cuisine to be challenged by a man from the Land of Deep Fried Mars Bars if the restaurant is popular with the French. How embarrasing if they are faced with the fact that..... .......the French are not the only nation that can cook

my favourite has to be the Japanese "Pocari Sweat"

ritter courivaud if you're trade

We had a wonderful lunch at Bruneau in April. Fantastic value and a beautiful terrace to sit out on

the food looks like crap. why fuck up a nice lobster cooking it with what looks like a bland creamy sauce and pasta ? If I were paying £1000 for a meal I'd expect a jolly sight more than that uninteresting, colourless looking selection of food. I think they coudl possibly afford to splash out on some decent espresso cups as well, that haven't got "illy" written all over them. Espresso looks awful as well - where is the crema ? Maybe these overpaid twats should be contributing to the Northern Rock Disaster Sorting Out Fund rather than getting it in bonuses And WOWEE a glass of Billecar Salmon Rose. They really pushed the boat out there then, didn't they

thanks all.

Further to the above, damn that site - fiddlehead ferns ! Hopefully the bank manager will extend my overdraft Doh ! Just realised I was looking at the USA one. I love fiddleheads.

Thanks Erica, just the ticket. I would dearly like to try growing some.

We live in Eastbourne. I love crosnes (chinese artichokes) but could not find them anywhere last year. I really want to get some, does anyone have any ideas where I could find them in the Sussex area - I would be prepared to go to London for them as well. Alternatively, as we have an allotment, does anyone have any experience of growing them ? clearly I meant off-topic there...

Thankyou both for your eminently sensible advice. And darn that I never had a gold plated caviar truffled flaming fois gras course

This dilemma comes from another board I post on, I thought this would be the best place to get an answer. Here is the girl's post "my h2b is French and so a lot of very french people will be decending on our generally quite english wedding and i'm very conscious of making sure they dont think its bad because its not the french way. i'm finding plenty of ways to encorporate bits of their traditions but we've hit a stumbling block with the menu. in england you have sweet and then cheese course. in france you have chees and then sweet. now while in itself this sounds silly both h2b and i know it would feel 'wrong' to us to reverse how we are used to eating the courses. so my options are as follows: 1 - do it the english way as it is mainly and english wedding 2- do it the french way as they will be the ones in a foriegn country and i want them to feel at home 3 - ask the venue if they can serve some cheese and some sweet and then vice versa so everyone can have it their way round. i want to do 3 really but h2b is concerned the venue staff may get confused and that it may look like thy got it wrong to the guests when half have one course and half have the other." What would you advise she do ? Here is the link to the whole discussion http://forums.confetti.co.uk/index.php?sho...2entry1294972

What is it all about ? Is Marco actually cooking again, or is it another addition to the portfolio ? Is it only open on match days ? And finally, has anyone been there ? sorry for all the questions ....

If someone tells me they have allergies I am very conscientious about checking ingredients etc, so far as bringing a packet of hash browns out to a customer on one occassion to check the ingredient list. I certainly don't want to be responsible for someone dying on me, or have someone collapse wtih anaphylaxis.

How funny, I was just doing a blog entry on it. I thought it was astonishing ! Really enjoyed it.

Oh dear

I think the main problem is that there isn't really a happy medium which normal people are happy to buy - neither the worst common denominator or the £20 a pop pricebusting poulet d'or with a certificate of its forfathers back to the Vikings. How can anyone on an average wage (and I'm talking about £15 - 18k here, which appears to me to be the average working person's wage if you look in the Job Section at bog standard building society, admin jobs) be expected to purchase these wildly priced birds as a regular food ? but then, if we think back 50 years, chicken was a luxury meat which was saved for highdays and holidays and eked out for several meals after the roast. Rissoles anyone ? Only since the advent of, guess what, battery farming, has chicken become a cheap and cheerful meat for mass production Personally I think that farmers should be looking into a middle ground between battery and organic fancy pants chicken, so that ordinary people will think "that's good value, i'll buy it". Maybe around the £6 mark. I blanch at £15 for a chicken, and as yet I only have 2 people to feed out of my budget. There is no way I could afford to feed a family of 4 on those prices, even with two well paid adults in the household.

An old colleague of mine, Jerome Ponchelle, is head chef at Wiltons - which offers classic British fare. I've not eaten there myself, but if Jerome's at the helm, it will be very good, he's a real stickler for perfection. He was HC at the Connaught before Ramsay/Hartnett took over. http://www.wiltons.co.uk/home.php Might be worth a look, especially if anyone else can offer a review.

Maybe I could design a small 8 megapixel digital camera, with a high ISO setting to deal with low light conditions, and disguise it as a knife. Do you think it would sell well on the restaurant blogging scene ? In really really good restaurants I do sometimes take a picture of husband pretending we are celebrating something, and make sure to include the plate in the picture

We had the set lunch with an additional cheese course (shared), 2 glasses of dessert wine, 2 bottles of water, 2 coffees and a bottle of New Zealand Pinot Noir. Bill came to £160 (ouch). The restaurant is comfortable and very dramatic. Chairs are the standard restaurant chairs - unfortunate as I infinitely prefer club armchairs, which seem to be pretty standard in the continental michelin experience. I do wish more restaurants here would adopt them. Menus were presented at the table. Three menus are available for lunch - the set lunch, the a la carte and the full tasting menu. Champagne is presented on a liqueur trolley, by the glass from a selection of bottles, but we had already had G&Ts in the Caramel Room so passed on that. Amuse Bouche was a cauliflower soup with a froth served with very long, thin cinnamon biscuits. Very nice. 4 types of bread were served; white, sourdough, wholemeal and potato. They were all wild yeasted breads in the French tradition and were served in slices, not rolls. They could have been more generous with the butter, although it was replaced shortly after it ran out. The bread service could have been improved by having sea salt flakes on the table as I love to sprinkle them on unsalted butter like a tartine. I chose the rabbit salad, which was consisted of 3 styles including a ballotine, a terrine and was served with a lyonnais salad. It was very tasty, although the addition of a hot element would have been nice. David had roasted quail with sweet adn sour red cabbage. The starters were nice, but nothing out of the ordinary and to be honest, quite forgettable. For main course we had best end of mutton; this was delicious and extremely tender. I have not had mutton for an extremely long time and I will now be seeking some out, as I thought it had a much better flavour than simple lamb, while retaining quite as much of it's tenderness. A really good dish. We shared a plate of cheese after the main course; the trolley has a good selection of different milks and sets; we chose mainly blues and goat milk cheeses, which were accompanied by a choice of water biscuits or breads (raisin or walnut). They are a bit stingy with the grapes (he gave us 4 between us) and we had to ask for more. Husband chose Custard Tart for his dessert which was really, really good. Unctuous and particularly well flavoured with some spiced pears. I chose prunes with amontillado foam and chocolate sorbet. Again this was very good; these flavours are all very rich and it would be easy to to an overkill. The portions were very small and therefore avoided that "can't possibly eat any more" feeling. The female sommelier made 2 good pairings of Vin de Constance by Klein Constantia for me and a vendages tardives for David's custard tart. The bon bon trolley consists of 6 different chocolate truffles - the standard milk chocolate ganache; salted butter caramel filling (a triumph); plain with a soft passionfruit jelly like filling; white chocolate with blackcurrant; Malibu, coconut and lime (far too sweet and my least favourite of the fillings, I did not think this was particularly sucessful) The service here is very polished, the staff are very professional but it feels a bit soulless. I have always enjoyed eating at the Gavroche at lunchtime as there is always a real buzz there, but I didn't feel that there was any real joy at Petrus. It was busy, indeed almost all the tables were full. The food was very good, if not exceptional, but it just felt as if something was missing. It feels almost like a formula of how to get michelin stars, but someone forgot to bring the passion. They were clearly having a recruiting day as a trail of hopefuls kept walking to and fro to the kitchen through the restaurant. I do not think this is particularly professional, although it provided us with some entertainment. Certainly I would not have employed the one who looked a mess and said, quite loudly "well, if we get the jobs we can start right away", in full hearing of the whole restaurant ! i would be interested to go for dinner service to see if the restaurant livens up a bit in the evening. Sorry, I forgot to add, we followed our meal with nachos (disgustingly prefabricatedly deliciously tacky and covered in jalapeno) and fries (cold and not at all nice) at the SPICE GIRLS concert at the O2 - which was fantastic !

oops, simupost

My experience (a few years ago) is that, while the better restaurants are reasonably happy to buy organic/free range chicken as they can make it a selling point of the dish, and that the better farming methods lead to infinitely better meat (eg. corn fed chicken breast), they are not so happy to buy eggs, as there is no obvious link between the quality of the eggs adn the end product in, let's say, a batch of shortbread. The eggs are merely a component part. It would be my guess that not many restaurants are prepared to stomp up the extra cash for free range eggs when you may use 60 eggs simply to make a batch of ice cream for a dessert service. "Pecan Pie served with Vanilla Ice Cream made with Free Range Eggs" isn't worth the extra spend as generally most people don't correlate pastry items with battery farming. Would you think about the provenance of the eggs used in a glaze for a beef en croute ? Probably not. In short, trade customers will use free range if it is directly obvious and sellable to the consumer. If nobody is likely to be bothered, they won't

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.