Saturday, July 3, 2010

La Fourchette Parisienne

Earlier this week, we decided to try a restaurant we’d never been to before. It’s located in a part of town that was and still is populated by the families of diplomats and embassy officials, so we were afraid it would be a bit expensive. The fact that it claimed to serve French cuisine also added fuel to this feeling. However, it was Canada Day, so we thought if there ever was a day to live a little, this was it.

La Fourchette Parisienne, offering “la gastronomie française”, is a converted villa with both indoor and outdoor dining. We chose indoor because it was the rainy season and we wanted to avoid the humidity and mosquitoes that are part of the outdoor dining experience at this time of the year. We succeeded in terms of the humidity because the dining room has air-conditioning and we sat right in its airstream. But we didn’t do so well with the mosquitoes because the staff left the doors wide open.

The large dining room walls are painted with scenes from Paris, including the Eiffel Tower, the glass pyramid at the Louvre, la Défense, and more. These are not professionally done, but are good enough to definitely contribute to the ambience of the place. Avoid, however, sitting where you have to look at their attempt at the Mona Lisa. She looks more like a long-faced, mournful hound dog than a Renaissance woman with a mysterious smile!

The menu was significantly more limited than most restaurants, and even more so when the waitress told us that several of the dishes on the menu were unavailable that evening. We chose to split a salad and then each ordered a filet au poivre vert. This last is a pretty common dish in Ouaga, but we figured that this being a French restaurant, they might offer something that was a little higher quality. Well, the salad was nothing special, and our filets were a thick little piece of meat that was pretty mushy in the centre despite our request that it be well cooked.

Our verdict? Lots of promise, but little deliverance on the goods. We’ll give them to the end of the year before they’re out of business.

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