5.4 (He 6, me 4.8, everything will be iluminated) Invictus, 5, rue Saint-Breuve (not a Saint/Sainte at all, just named after another critic) in the 6th, 01.45.49. 07.22, closed Saturday lunch, Sundays and Monday lunch was a place that's gotten a lot of press, albeit not totally exuberant; I was dying to go (1) Because of the name - I loved the movie - but it turns out it's named after the poem by the unknown (to me) William Ernest Henley that the movie was named after, because (2) Chef Christophe Chabanel spent 6 years in South Africa after he left the wildly successful and greatly good (3) La Dinee located at the end of the #8 line (Balard) which our gang frequented. The menu here is a pretty simple - 3/3/3 but nothing called to me - first bad sign.
My pal from the depths of Cambridge (MAA as the car boys would say) ordered the egg au gratin with cauliflower that was pretty good; but my terrine of duck was underpar.
Then he had the very dull merlu a la vapeur with a ton of nice looking veggies but an intense tomato sauce; while I suffered through the palid palette of pork with lentilles and an OK sauce (no could finish Papa).
But my friend, 24 hours off the plane from snowland, looked raring to go, so he had the so-called fromage blanc with mirabelle halves and I had the vanilla creme brulee which was really super, redeeming an otherwise lost meal.
Go? Boy, we must have gone to La Dinee 8-10 times and I so wanted to return to those days of yesteryear, but.......... Oh the rating. Well, at the end of the meal I asked him his number having settled on about 5 (average) for me and he said 6-7, but on the way home to our respective flats we both revised them down - he to a flat 6, me to 4.8 so it wound up as 5.4.