Saturday, January 15, 2011

French "Touristy" Restaurant

There are a lot of tourists in Paris. That means that there are A LOT of restaurants that target tourists.  When we traveled to Italy in 2008, we tried to stay clear from restaurants that were too close to the major tourist attractions.
In Paris, this was slightly more difficult to do because most of  the tourist attractions were concentrated in a small radius of the city.
Mike and I were walking around the Latin Quarter and succumbed to eating at a touristy restaurant one night.   We also ordered from a menu geared towards tourists, and surprisingly we enjoyed the food. 
Extremely cheesy french onion soup-this was a really tasty french onion soup.
Escargot
Raclette Pan. Just think of it as a cousin to fondue.  Instead of dipping food into a pot of heat cheese, you heat the cheese on a pan, and then scrape it onto your plate.
Raclette is a type of semi-firm cow's milk cheese and also a dish originated from the Swiss.  Cheese is heated up and then scraped ("racler" means to "scrape" in French)  off the pan and served with potatoes, pickles, and cold cuts. 
A piece of my melted raclette cheese. I scraped the cheese of the pan and on to the vegetables and potatoes that were part of my meal.  Yummy!
 Steak in a Pepper Sauce and French Fries
Creme Caramel
Apple Galette
Dark Chocolate Mousse-Our server could tell that I did not enjoy the apple galette, so he brought out this extra chocolate mouse for me. 

I think the massive amount of cheese we ate during our dinner, made this an enjoyable meal. We normally do not eat a ton of cheese, so for my body's sake I was cautious and limited my intake of cheese (even though I ordered raclette).  Mike finished up the majority of the cheese in the french onion soup and my leftover raclette cheese. I warned him about consuming a large amount of cheese, but he brushed off my concerns.  Let's just say that at the end of the day, the cheese won the battle versus Mike's body and digestive system.