Maybe it was just a bad night, but for all the owner's passion for food, La P'tite Folie's meal was a serious turn-off
IT'S very rare that this job becomes onerous, but this week is one such occasion. Last year I met Virginie Brouard, the owner of La P'tite Folie. She was delightful company, and incredibly passionate and knowledgeable about French cuisine. Ever since
then I'd stored away her pair of Edinburgh restaurants for a dreary night when I needed cheering up. Yet, instead of reinvigorating me, the visit to the Randolph Place branch of La P'tite Folie left a really sour taste in my mouth.
I should probably preface this review by emphasising that I haven't heard any desperate reports about La P'tite Folie. So maybe I just caught them on an off-night – a wet Thursday in February isn't exactly peak season, after all. I hope that's the case because from the moment we arrived at the front door, the experience rollercoastered from the merely mediocre to the truly dire.
The evening didn't get off to an auspicious start when we turned up at the allotted hour to find the place dark and seemingly empty. I pushed the door and "helloed" into the void, but there were no signs of life. Puzzled, we walked in and climbed the stairs before pushing open another door, entering a large, nicely appointed and highly welcoming first-floor room clad in warming tongue-and-groove and with roughly half of the dozen or so tables full of chatting diners. This looked like somewhere I could happily while away a couple of hours.
Although they couldn't find our booking at first, we were soon shown to a nice window table and given the menu. Our waitress was back in record time looking for our choices, taking our wine order and chivvying us along from the get-go. The go-fast show wasn't bad enough to be truly irritating but, particularly during the first half of the meal, it was unmistakable: wine was sloshed in right to the rim of the glasses, and both the waitress and food arrived with indecent haste. We were in and out before the table next to us, who were already on their main courses when we arrived.
I started with the steak tartare, which was minced less finely than I'd ideally like, and which came without an egg yolk, although both are largely a matter of personal taste. However, Lucinda's lobster and scallop gratin was served in a bisque that was so rich, so full of cheese and cream that it overpowered the lobster and the scallops, which was a pity because there was plenty of both, and they had been cooked perfectly.
If the jury was out on the starters, the judge would have been wearing a black cap when it came to handing down the verdict on our main courses. The pan-fried monkfish medallions in a matelote sauce were again perfectly cooked, but the sauce had clearly been kept on too high a heat and had thickened disastrously so that, once again, it completely overpowered the subtle tones of the fish.
So far so bad, but the worst was yet to come. My seafood lasagne was a disaster zone. There was so much cheese on top that it had crusted hard and could have been lifted off in its entirety and used as a Frisbee; beneath that there was plenty of pasta and just enough seafood to warrant its inclusion in the title. It repeated on me for most of the next day.
I rounded off with home-made profiteroles, which turned out to be stuffed with ice-cream and served with a lukewarm chocolate sauce. If that just about passed muster, the cheeseboard was a certifiable disgrace: if you tried serving three small pieces of sweaty cheese (a blue cheese that our waitress couldn't identify but which tasted like common-or-garden Danish blue, some Port Salut and a sorry-looking piece of saggy brie) and a mountain of oatcakes to the average Frenchman, the explosion would be volcanic. It was undoubtedly the low point of the meal.
I was lucky enough to spend three nights in the Serre Chevalier region of the southern Alps last month and ate better than I had ever dreamed possible, with each of the incredible meals I enjoyed around the town of Briançon costing less than my evening at La P'tite Folie.
Perhaps that juxtaposition heightened the sense of disappointment. Or, thinking of the cheeseboard, perhaps not. Either way, I left Randolph Place feeling short-changed, slightly queasy and with a rare feeling of dread at penning this review.
Vital statisticsLa P'tite Folie Tudor House, 9 Randolph Place, Edinburgh (0132 225 8678,
www.laptitefolie.co.uk)
Out of pocket Starters £3.95-£8.85; mains £14.95-£21.95 (vegetarian option £8.95); puddings £3.95–£4.50; cheese £4.80
Rating 3/10
The full article contains 833 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
