Les Bouchons, 7 Ann Siang Road

If you're a meat loving carnivore/omnivore who has bouts of craving for flesh of the bovine kind, this is a heads up to read on. Les Bouchons is a small French restaurant located along the first floor shophouses at 7 Ann Siang Road. This small restaurant is decorated in the interior with quaint french posters of cigarette advertisements, old theater plays, alcoholic drinks and unrecognizeable whathaveyous on the walls, painting a rather cozy and pleasant atmosphere. Akin to the little street side restaurants that one might find in Paris.

The menu of this place appears to be limited in selection with the majority of the offerings leaning towards meat. The dinner tonight is largely focused on a specialty of the restaurant known as Côte de Boeuf, a kilogram slab of prime rib for two. Gash your teeth and keep your pants on. Althought the price of the beef was stated at $37/per, that beef platter serves two. And multiples of two. The meat is pre-portioned.

The restaurant serves a free flow of small roundish hard loaves to their diners. It's a regular tasting loaf and wasn't even heated. It actually goes quite nicely with their pâté entree The selected appetizers were the Burgandy Escargots with Garlic Butter and the Terrine "Maison".

Burgandy Escargots with Garlic Butter

Terrine "Maison"

The escargots could do a lot better with more garlic butter. Apart from that, the snails come scalding hot and tasted quite decent. I found the Terrine "Maison" which is something like pâté to be much more interesting. Wonderful infusion of peppercorn with a coarse finish, it tastes good by itself or with bread.

On to the main dinner platter.....the Côte de Boeuf.

It tastes pretty much as good as it looks. The meat was actually a little dry, so its not succulence of good prime rib. However the rich beefy flavour is sealed in the meat and I think it appeals to the raw animalistic red meat cravings that I have sometimes which only can be satiated by cow meat. I'm sure there's a whole lot of people out there that share the same sentiments regarding beef so if you think you want to exercise some of that beastly urge for large quantities of medium rare beef, you'll know where to look.

Orders of beef come with a basket of fries and a salad each. For this case of the Côte de Boeuf, it's 2 portions of the rather pleasantly chilled salad.

Le Bouchons doesn't have much of an array of dessert for selection. Apart from ice cream, the only other sweets made in this place are a rather nice Creme Brulee with Grand Marnier and the Ile Flottante. The creme brulee here is pretty good and there's enough Grand Marnier in the dessert to be distinctively identifiable but not overpowering. It's one of the uncommon renditions which I thought was not bad.

Ile Flottante means floating island? My French is very rusty and the translation is in the courtesy of Babelfish. It's a soft meringue topped with almonds and drizzled with caramel, afloat on a creamy milky erm...sauce? The meringue holds firm by itself, yet easily disintegrates in the mouth. It's not too bad.