6.5 Le Dix-Huit, 18, rue Bayen in the 17th, 01.53.81.79.77, closed Sundays (Metro: Ternes but a schlep) is a place I thought of after my Franco-American-Philippine (F-A-P) friend said "There's no great chef from Philippines cooking in Paris." "Hey," I said, "there's this guy, Aaron Isip (ex-Apicius, Drouant, Ze and Pan cooking over in the 17th." "Oh yah, we're going to a benefit for the Philippines' disaster next week." "So you don't want to go?" "No, we do, because what he's doing then [we later learned, was a whole roast pig on buns] will be different. For people wanting to contribute to the fund, you can contact it/them at .
We arrived and sat in the sunlit "patio" room at the rear (good choice for vision, bad for noise - 9.2 dB) which has cool mismatched hanging lamps and perused the carte & 24 E 3-course "menu" which looked damn good. Although we are going to return for the 60 E wild duck with adobo sauce someday.
So to the "menu" we three went, with absolutely innovative and inventive combos of:
- huges chunks of tender octopus, shaved ginger, chorizo, dill, a braised scallion and a thick black squid ink sauce that my F-A-P friend kept raving about throughout the dish and the meal,
- par-cooked Beluga lentils with shredded lamb and a curried peanut sauce
- 4 superb cheeses and
- confited apicot halves with fromage blanc.
Because my friends are like the Jack Sprats, one will drink no white, one will drink no red, we ordered a bottle of each and were most satisfied.
The bill, with two bottles of wine and a digestif for our F-A-P friend and a coffee for me with great white and brown bread, was 136 E for three, thus 90.66 E a couple.
Go? As Rubin says "Trot."
