Couleur Cafe Review

At Couleur Cafe, get the burger. The burger is definitely very good. And most of us liked the crusty bread used as a bun: the soft interior soaked up the juices well. But be warned: this restaurant serves medium rare (mostly pink) as medium rare. You may prefer medium.

The burger is identical to that served at Chez Maman. (Both restaurants have the same owners.)

Everything else about the food was decent but not exceptional. For many dishes, we were ambivalent.

For instance, the bread that arrived when we sat down was high quality, with just the right crust and crumbliness. However, it was cut too thickly to make it easy to eat. Nor was it warm. Nor did we have plates, making it difficult to eat comfortably. Nevertheless, the butter, nicely soft and creamy, was of a quality that matched the bread. If only the little things were right...

Our warm frisee salad with bacon and a poached egg was interesting, both for the bacon-and-egg combination (which appealed to some of us) and for the mustard-y dressing on the frisee. We couldn't decide what we thought of the dish.

The warm goat cheese salad with crostini got a similar reaction. While we enjoyed the dressing, we felt it was inconsistently distributed: some bites had too much whereas others had practically none at all. Regardless, this salad received compliments for the definitely good goat cheese combined with the nicely salty crostini.

We also got a classic mussels dish: mussels mariniere (mussels with white wine and shallots). Like the salads, we had a mixed reaction. The mussels were better warm. Those at the bottom of the dish stayed warm longer. The ones at the bottom also had a nicely stronger essence of white wine. In addition, there were lots of shallots, which could easily overwhelm a mussel. On the other hand, one could easily control how many shallots one got on his fork. Finally, one person thought the mussels didn't seem fresh, and some of us agreed upon finding a few that were positively fishy, but most mussels were generally acceptable to most of us.

The fries are the last thing needing mention from the main courses. They were too salty, though were otherwise good, at least when warm.

For dessert, we split the chocolate mousse. In effect, it was a rich pudding, that, admittedly, did appeal to us. We also split the apple tarte tatin. The apple, starchy or pasty kind of like a potato, was by far the worse feature of the dish. The pastry itself under the apple was pretty decent. But really it was the ice cream that improved each bite to make it worth eating.

Couleur Cafe's dining room, a fairly typical bistro setting, was mostly empty throughout the night. We sat at a huge wooden table, even wider than a picnic table. The only unusual feature of the setting was the single flat screen television hanging from the wall showing a soccer match. Incidentally, there were many patio tables outside, which I imagine would be good during daylight hours (e.g., brunch) in pleasant weather. Sadly, the brunch menu doesn't offer the burger.

The wines by the glass were okay, like normal house wines but perhaps slightly better. The coffee was of a similar caliber: probably best described as okay or fine.

The total was $23/person including tax and tip but not including drinks.

Original Announcement

We'll head to Couleur Cafe, a French bistro that's a sister restaurant to Chez Papa and Chez Maman, two other previous destinations. It's said to be most similar to Chez Maman, of the burger fame. Its style overall is supposedly French-Mediterranean with an Arabic influence.

http://www.couleurcafesf.com/

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