A classic Parisian brasserie, they call it, except
that it’s round the corner from Trafalgar Square – does that not disqualify it
from being Parisian? Or is, as the French would surely have it, that being
Parisian is an esprit, not a
geographical condition? Never mind. They are certainly trying very hard to look
the part – the décor is very fin-de-siècle, and not the last siècle, but the
one before that; dark wood, old lamps on gilt poles, faded mirrors, the bread
served in red, upturned baskets that look like the sort of hats one sees in
sixteenth-century paintings of religious dignitaries. It looks very much like
the kind of place that would have turned away George Orwell in Down and Out in London and Paris, like
Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère. I screw my eyes half-shut and see the room
bustling with arrogant bankers and impoverished young men of high sensibilities,
characters from the pages of E.M.Forster.
Enough
of the décor. N1 was lured here by the promise of the snail and bacon pie, and
I must say, for a so-called starter, it was a generous pie well-studded with
the little de-shelled gastropods (surely something with the name gastropod was
made to be eaten – must not gastronomy be the art of eating snails?). Also
starting, lamb sweetbreads were accompanied by mushroom-filled vol-au-vents.
Nice enough, sweetbreads and vol-au-vents, but didn’t seem to do anything for
each other.
We
shared a big main of Andouillette de Troyes. I haven’t had an
Andouillette that smelled so, shall we say, rustic (in the sense that
some fine Burgundies can also be very euphemistically rustic) since I
was last in Lyon some years ago. A big, fat, smelly sausage interlaced with the
undulations of wandering intestines, with a beurre blanc sauce and
frites on the side. For those who dislike tripe, this dish might be a repulsive
mystery, a weird gastronomic challenge destined for Japanese gameshows, but at the
end of our little pre-theatre the score was very decidedly N+N: One,
Challenging French Sausage: Nil.
I started off liking the ambience, but somehow it waned;
by the end of lunch, it had all come to seem somewhat overwrought. Les Deux
Salons treads a fine line between real charm and feeling like Café Rouge on a
mission to conquer the upper end of the market.
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