Dinner at Le Clos Bourguignon

After a relatively quiet day at work and a quick stopover at home, I headed out to meet a friend that I had been partying with back in Chicago last year, who was passing through town today. She used to live in Paris (that’s how I met her), so dinner involved a bunch of her other friends, who were all really lovely folks.

The restaurant we ate at was called the Le Clos Bourguignon, which was pretty good, well-priced and very “authentic” (your mileage may vary). The focus was on the Burgundy region of France, so there were lots of good red wines and lots of meat on the menu. We got a bit of foie gras, some saucisson de Lyon (a coarse-grind sausage, usually with bits of garlic or nuts inside), and some melon-jambon cru (think prosciutto) as appetizers, which we shared among the 5 of us (the 6th person showed up late and missed the first course). For the main dish, some of us had the hachis Parmentier, which is very similar to a Sheperd’s Pie, but with slightly different set of ingredients for the minced meat. I (and a few others) had the langue de chat de boeuf à la sauce Périgueux, which involved a rectangle-shaped cut of beef (I couldn’t figure out from what part of the animal, but it tasted like sirloin), some fries, and a lovely sauce that combines truffles and foie gras with a bit of cream (yes, not something you can eat every day). The beef was saignant, perfectly bloody in the middle but with a tasty, seared crust on the outside. My only complaint would be that they didn't let the meat rest very long before bringing it out, as my first cut into the meat released a ton of liquid, which then diluted the sauce.

For dessert, I had a clafoutis poire, which is a variation on the more common clafoutis made of cherries. It’s very similar to a spongy pound-cake with large chunks of fruit inside, although it’s baked in the shape of a tart or thin cake, rather than as a loaf. Either way, lovely. Also, I think those pears had been soaked in rum.

Anyway, I had been braced for a long night, since there were at least a few things going on in the techno scene (including the second-last Freak’n’Chic night at Batofar). I had to get up at 6h00 the next day for a “class trip” with the UofC students to Poitiers, but I was ready to pull an all-nighter to mark the one-night visit of my friend. Mercifully, she was also tired, too, so we just went our separate ways home. Hooray sleep! Nonetheless, my body clock is still used to my Berlin schedule of getting up at noon, so I wasn’t able to make my body sleep until about 1h00.