Nestled in a small strip on the North side of Bordeaux sits L'Oiseau Bleu, a contemporary and creative restaurant known for its attention to detail and finest ingredients. The French menu caused some initial difficulty, but our adorable waiter did his best to translate. I personally found it fun to pick my dishes with slight uncertainty of every culinary flourish - but I knew we wouldn't be disappointed in the outcome. And we weren't!
We began with my new favorite wine of the summer: a 2009 Pomerol from Chateau du Couvent. The ruby red flavor was smooth as ever.
Mom, Dad and Hannah started with a cold carbonara (pasta). We laughed at their plates, because they looked NOTHING like the traditional Italian plate one would expect. A molded cylinder of squid ink pasta sat on a gorgeous layer of white asparagus pureé and white truffle oil. A single uncooked spaghetti noodle added height to the unthinkable presentation.
I decided to be out of the box and try the shrimp appetizer, which arrived as a soup, to my surprise! It of course exceeded my expectations. The slightly sweet cream base had large pieces of wild prawn, chives, baby croutons and some other unknown ingredients. I was infatuated by the flavors.
The key words of our entreé course: "foam overload." We were hysterical over the abundance of different foams on our plates, but it indeed was an interesting concept!
My entree was a gorgeous fillet of redfish with a foam (duh) and sweet potato mash. Dad and Hannah loved their Royal trout with Ethiopean eggplant cream and marinated pepper. My mom's was the winner, though: tender fillet of pork (cochon) with a single swirl sweet potato chip and potato cake made of dozens of layers of paper-thin potato. The skill behind each dish was phenomenal.
We didn't have room for dessert, but baby rum cakes, marshmallows, and jelly candies accompanied our bill.
L'Oiseau Bleu was beautifully original and consistently strong. It was my favorite in Bordeaux, if not all of France!