Restaurant Review: La Brasserie

As you may know from talking to me (or from just having heard of the UK), that the restaurant scene is...lacking. The ever-weakening dollar does nothing to help the situation, but on the whole the restaurants in Cardiff are mediocre and over-priced. Our bills usually come in around the £40 mark ($82 as of today's exchange rate), which is just not reasonable/practical/sustainable. And I'm not talking about fine dining -- those are our bills for Thai, Indian, and Pizza Express (whose bad name belies it's surprisingly good food). Suffice it to say, we only go out once a week. This is *quite* the change from our previous lives, when at least two of Eliot's five daily meals came from Organic To Go and rare was the evening that the Whole Foods all-but-adjacent to my apartment didn't find me perusing the sushi or salad bars. Those days are gone. Now my mornings (happily) consist of recipe searches, menu planning, and wondering if the Spicy Season-All is an okay substitute for cumin. But I digress...

Eliot's coworker's birthday brought us to La Brasserie, one of Cardiff's more well-reputed restaurants and part of the Le Monde Group, which includes the eponymous Le Monde seafood restaurant. I had looked at the menu several times prior to our visit, so I knew what I was in for: meat.

We met our group at the bar, which was cozy and nicely crowded (although I was a bit worried about the porcelain jugs hanging from the ceiling, but hey, I grew up in earthquake country). I asked the bartender for a cocktail menu, but he said there was only beer and wine. That seemed strange because I was thinking a martini would be nice before my fillet (pronounced fill-ette in the UK...seriously), but no matter. I had a glass (make that two) of white wine (£4) and Eliot had a pint (make that two) of Worthington's (£3).

As is the custom with this group of restaurants, the dining room features a glass display case below a chalkboard menu from which you select your meat, fish, or skewer (which looked mighty tasty). Eliot and I both got the highly-recommended fillet (£17.95) and split the calamari starter (£5.95), garlic mushrooms (£?), and a side salad (£?), for which we received a brown "wooden" bowl to serve ourselves at the adequate (for the UK) salad bar. We were appropriately warned by our friends that the meat doesn't come with ANYTHING that you don't ask for aside from potatoes (jacket/baked, chips, or new!).

The service was very good for our large 14-person party and our starters came out in no time. The calamari was lightly breaded and tasty and the mushrooms were pretty standard -- nice, but nothing fancy. Almost all of our party got steaks of some sort and our fillets were nice plump pieces of meat -- I had no problem finishing mine (so maybe they should have been a little bigger for the price?), but it was delicious. At first I thought it was a bit tough, but then realized it was because we only had butter knives. :-)

Some people ordered desserts from the circulating dessert tray, but Eliot and I refrained and just had cookies (which I had made at the birthday girl's request). Overall, it was a very fun night and definitely a restaurant we would return to. Thank goodness we had the walk home to work off the big feast though.

I would give it a B+, although our bill was generously picked up and I doubt we'll be so lucky next time...