Les Ambassadeurs (June 28th, 2006)

The Hotel de Crillion in Paris has a couple restaurants, the star of the show being Les Ambassadeurs overseen by chef Jean-Francois Piege, a Michelin Guide two-star restaurant.
The decor of the restaurant was quite ornate with luxurious fabrics and lots of gold. You know the whole French over the top thing. A nice little touch was the footstool-like device next to the lady's seat. A purse-rest, naturally.
Way too many service people were at your beck and call (also with Philippe Rochat), but this place was done discreetly. It was just a well-oiled machine, and if they were a little too early to make their entrance, they'd wait around the corner where you couldn't see them (I only noticed, because I was closer to the corner and caught them before they had pulled themselves back from sight). At Philippe Rochat, it was just ridiculous. I hope that it's only because of the set up, but it was more than obvious when they would casually walk by...only to look out the window, change the order of chairs at an empty table or add wine glasses to a table which didn't need any. It was just silly. Don't pretend that you had something else to do. I'd rather you walk by, see that you're not needed, and walk out. Don't waste your own time doing useless things. Sigh.
I do have to saw that all of the men and women working at each of the restaurants were very gracious hosts and super nice. Chatting with them was fun.
Oh I forgot to mention that Philippe Rochat came out to meet us (at his restaurant, not Les Ambassadeurs obviously). It's always nice to
be able to give credit to a great meal to the chef in person instead of just passing your compliments along. And not really related, but I noticed that his team is quite young. I wonder if that's normal. Maybe once they're older, they'll move on to their own restaurants.
Instead of Badoit or San Pellegrino, we opted for Chateledon as our sparkling water of choice. I was also brought a non-alcoholic cocktail which I wasn't too impressed with. It was too much orange, and not even a high quality orange taste. Oh well.
The butters were sorta special too. The domed one was salted and the other one was light. I don't really like salted food, so it was pretty obvious which one preferreded. There was a great assortment of breads as well (also the case at Philippe Rochat).
Anyway, again, I'm not going to try to give some great restaurant review or anythinbecausese I don't know enough about what I was eating. And in this case, I can't even tell you the fancy names of the dishes because we had a degustation and I don't have enough of a memory to remember the amazing descriptions that were told to us.

So, in the order that courses were presented:

This was the amuse bouche. Highlights include the molten green liquid filled fried ball, ham cream cigar, and truffle butter bonbon. Not shown is the tabouli drink that came with it. The lighting in this picture is so different because I had forgotten to take a picture of my own, and send my camera with the host to the kitchen. Maybe I should have done that for all of them. I didn't want to use the flash at the table, and so the lighting provided for not great pictures.

This was a crab meat dish and the sauce that went with it was really yummy as well. Jeez. This is bad. I'm not giving this restaurant justice with these descriptions. I was just going to do a post with pictures titled: "What a meal costing ______ looks like". But then I didn't for some reason. I guess I could always go back and change it.

I'm drawing a blank. I know it was described (oh, I'm also doing translations in my head for some of these) sushi-like, but you can see that from the picture. I wasn't really into the creamy tartar sauce that went with it.

This was a mushroom dish that was well contained in its crispy little package. Really good mushrooms though...yummy. I do have to say that here in Europe, I've gotten to try a bunch of different fancy-schmancy mushrooms. Most of the dishes came dry with small artistic flairs on the plates, and the service staff would spoon out (with great flair) the sauce to go on top.

Oh sweet bread. This one I don't think I could forget. The two pieces on the bottom were cooked two different ways. I liked the one on the right better. Above it was a cylinder of pasta with a rich gorgonzola filling and bacon on top. I managed to eat most of the brown cooked sweet bread, tried the one on the left, scraped off the bacon and unrolled the pasta and ate it after trying it all as a whole. It was just too rich for me. And it was clear that the chef really liked using foams in his sauces.

As if the last dish wasn't rich enough, we then had the cheese course. I'm really trying to work on my disliking for cheese, but it's just not natural to me. I'll taste it, but it's often too much. This was just one of the two carts, and I ended up trying a little bit of every type of cheese they had (15!). They only had French cheeses and they were divided into two groups...goat cheeses and Camemberts. Or wait. Maybe the second one was Roqueforts. I think I liked the Camembert the best. It tasted most like the Swiss cheese I've been exposed to (Gruyere I think?), strangely the waitress said that it was the strongest of the cheeses on the non-goat cheese plate (she said to eat it last so as not to overpower the other ones). And I don't like strong cheeses.

And of course...the desserts.

First, they brought out popsicles. I guess the haute gastronomie version. They were chocolate covered abricot sorbet.











And then strawberry was the theme. A hamburger (that's the word they used!) containing a strawberry mousse and a meringue cage around a strawberry cake. Yum!





The petit fours...and there was also a box of friandises that I guess I didn't get a picture of. Lotsa desserts!





Along with being able to order different coffees or teas from a menu, we could have fresh tea from the cart. I decided to go with something that I'd never heard of (as usual). It was very similar to citronella. The leaves were picked, washed and then put into the teapot. We also had a selection of three different honeys. I went for lavender.












So I guess that was the meal! On our way out, we were sent home with a brioche to eat for breakfast the next morning, which was super buttery and good.