L'Escargot 1903 in Puteaux: Excellent Food - Too Many Waitfolk, Too Few Chefs

 

L'Escargot 1903 in Puteaux is another of those places like Pere Lapin, L'Escarbille and all those great places in Levallois-Perret that go unvisited by visitors because they're outside Metro 1-2 Zones.  And yet, they won't suffer; today L'Escargot 1903 was jam-packed with locals.

The "menu" is an easy 37 E for a great choice of items and we quickly settled in with a relatively new expat who is, like Hemingway, Baldwin and Fitzgerald, using Paris as a place in which to write her great American novel.

After a startlingly-spicy (for the French) amuse of tapenade on their great bread (toasts), Colette what was called a presse of sauteed vegetables with burrata and parmesan and the other two of us had the porchetta (a rollatine) of rabbit on a tabouli-like grain with a splendid lemony sauce. So far so good; I mean

we had our fine bread, nice carafe of water and bottle of wine and good company and lots of waitfolk and, but, still, yet, no main courses appeared for too long a time.

However, I should stop complaining because once they arrived, our mains were wonderful; my lady companios both had the rougets, which was inadequately described, it was in fact a cocotte of various seafoods and fish and paella-like rice with peas, and I had the similarly minimalistically described stuffed tomato - stuffed with veal breast, zucchini, and mushroom cubes and risotto - delicious!

For desserts we had respectively: an oeuf a la neige with banana/passion sauce, a lemon meringue tarte and a soup of strawberries and orange slices that set each other off perfectly.

Hummm, wonder what they use the Weber grill for?  Our bill with two bottled of that Syrah, no bottled water and three coffees was 168.50 E or 112.33 E a couple.