In a tiny street between Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Le Christine restaurant boasts that they use only fresh, quality products, and that everything is made on-site, which is obviously great, but does that mean it’s good?…

Here’s what we thought.

According to their own website, Le Christine boats ‘trendy’ interior design, which apparently means that orange is officially the new black. We’d describe it rather as low-key with a touch of colour – not terrible, but nothing outlandish either.

From the street you enter the main room, with the kitchen visible at that back, and there’s another room off to the side that overlooks the building’s interior courtyard. The vibe is classy but pretty laid back, and you’ll find the restaurant’s rather unimaginative logo – a fork – all over the place.

Average age of diners appears to be 70+, and the night we dined they were turning people away, so it seems to be a pretty popular spot.
We decided to order a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage rather than an aperitif, and within a couple of minutes some cute little breads and complimentary tzatziki arrived to freshen our palates. A nice touch.
The restaurant has no prices after the dishes, but offers a fixed price depending on whether you eat just one course, or two, or three, or three plus cheese, or the seven-dish tasting menu (prices range from 27 – 65€). It may have been simpler just to put prices on the menu.

We skipped the first course and chose our main dishes:

– Squid ink, parmesan and barley risotto
– Chicken oysters and Chasseur sauce, new potatoes, smoked bacon and onions
– Monkfish cheeks with Parmesan polenta, mushrooms, onions and sea lettuce, Vermouth sauce, and…

…one of us dared asked whether it was possible to have a vegetarian dish (there isn’t one on the menu at all, not even a salad). The waitress looked a little sheepish and said “Well usually, we give vegetarians the risotto with squid ink”. So we explained that squid ink actually comes from dead squids, which is not very vegetarian, so could she check with the chef to see whether he could prepare something else?

She left, not looking very hopeful, but returned shortly, beaming, to say they could whip up a selection of vegetables, which sounded perfect!

The dishes arrived and looked pretty great!
…apart from the vegetarian dish. It may as well have been called “chef’s revenge” judging on its presentation, with various vegetables apparently thrown at the plate in random, angry fashion.But the biggest surprise was when we tasted the dishes.

The risotto was immediately deemed ordinary (despite looking spectacular) – well cooked but lacking taste, even with extra salt and pepper – with the vegetable accompaniment being the best part.

The sauce with the chicken was perhaps better than the chicken itself, with delicious crunchy bacon bits, although we found it a little over-salted.

The monkfish was the most disastrous of all our dishes, with overcooked fish and over-salty sea lettuce containing grains of sand that crunched in our teeth. Only the grilled, moist, smoked polenta was judged a success.

And the ugly vegetarian dish? Well, you’ll be as incredulous as we were to learn that it was the best dish of them all! Each vegetable was perfectly cooked, with a great variety of tastes. An amazing surprise, and absolutely delicious.

Our main courses finished, our attention turned to dessert…
We chose:

– Strawberry mille-feuille with basil ice cream
– Chocolate fondant, mint sorbet and mint cookie
– Peach and verbena cheesecake, and
– Raspberry crème brulée

Generally, they looked great and tasted… less great (although the basil ice cream was pretty damn fine, and the chocolate fondant not bad at all). The most successful of the lot was the simplest of the lot – the raspberry crème brulée; not too sugary, firm but not stodgy and with lovely fresh raspberries. There’s no need for complicated presentation when the dish itself is great 🙂

We left Le Christine a little disappointed. Although the staff are lovely, and the food promises a lot, it’s a slightly lacking in taste (much like the interior design, we’d be inclined to say).

The restaurant must be in a lot of guide books, as 75% of diners weren’t French, so maybe the food caters for foreign palates that don’t expect a lot of exuberance from their food. We however would have loved a little more pzazz.

Le Christine (here) is open seven days a week for dinner, and weekdays for lunch (open public holidays too!)

Official site: www.restaurantlechristine.com

Online booking : here (gives 20% off the à la carte menu if you dine very early or very late any day except Saturday)

Facebook: facebook.com/restaurantlechristine

To check out all our photos the Christine restaurant, click the play button below, then click the four little arrows bottom right to go into fullscreen mode.