Thursday, 1/15/09

The main course:

In the interest of observing the fusion of world cultures through food, we dined one afternoon at a Franco-Japanese restaurant called Usagi, on the rue de Normandie in the third arrondissement.  The experience was more a window into nouvelle cuisine than fusion.  The food was good, but the portions were tiny, while the prices were anything but. 

The first thing I noticed was that the restaurant was filled with rabbits.  This makes some sort of sense now, since it turns out that “usagi” means “rabbit” in Japanese.  At the time, the shelves of plush rabbits, the waving rabbit adorning a table, the painting on the wall of rabbits, and the rabbit bottom-shaped bathroom lined with books about rabbits were mostly just a bit unsettling.  The menu was entirely Japanese, and the extent of its French-ness was no greater than at the Vietnamese restaurant we ate at before. 

I started off with a seaweed and cucumber salad, while others tried eggplant or red beans.  My main course was a salmon bento box, which was good, but not especially flavorful.  We finished off with some avocado ice cream with maple syrup.  The ice cream was good, but the syrup was overpoweringly sweet.  The avocado taste also wasn’t very strong.  In all, the lunch was good, but it wasn’t delicious enough to warrant the approximately 40€-per-person price tag. 

K.B.