The "broth" with the Prince Edward Island mussels comes laden with cream, and an au poivre burger is served with a lavish cream-cognac sauce.
Though a scallop risotto was fabulous — a row of four giant diver scallops, optimally browned on top, arrayed on wild rice (note to chef: this is not risotto) with a lavish truffle cream sauce — pan-seared red snapper suffered from the thick and leathery vegetable raviolo that came with it.
His first store, narrow and chocolate-colored, has a glass-topped counter running its length that is filled with dazzling pastries lavished with cream, robed in chocolate and bejeweled with berries.
The lavish sauce contains cream, saffron, almonds, raisins and rose water along with ginger, garlic and curry spices.
Chocolate pudding, moistened with rum and sherry and packed with bits of walnut and coconut, seems unbeatable: a moist, blackish tower of strength lavished with coconut cream and a glistening chocolate sauce.
A slice of lemon chiffon pie has exactly that mouthwatering smoothness in its lavish brushstrokes; ice-cream is shapely yet deliquescent, the paint melting ever so slightly as it describes the lush scoop; Thiebaud's pigment can be as radiant as lemon curd, rich and stiff as royal icing.
I've never had better soft shell crabs with baked cheese grits; scrambled eggs, buttermilk pancakes and country ham for breakfast; and lovely, pale yellow buttermilk pie tinged with lemon and lavished with whipped cream.
At the far end of a corridor is a lavish bedroom in pink, cream and gold sari material, and a bathroom with a large white tub, marble walls and Art-Deco fixtures.
El Materi, keen "to assist McDonald's to enter Tunisia", served a lavish dinner with ice cream and frozen yoghurt brought in by private plane from St Tropez, where he and his wife, Nesrine, one of the president's daughters, had just spent a two-week holiday (although their favourite destination is the Maldives).
