The food, moderately priced, is the usual bistro-brasserie fare, but there were a few surprises, like an ostrich special one night and a menu item of a pounded and breaded pork chop topped with caramelized onions and a Waldorf salad of greens, apple, celery and walnuts.
Sandwich and hamburger shops — not chains — seem to survive happily in a place that also supports an array of fine-dining choices, establishments like the Bluemoon Bar and Grille, a gallery-style restaurant known for its cosmos, and Everyday People Cafe, where we found elegant twists on the usual American bistro fare.
Belcourt's menu is more ambitious than it has to be: given the room's pleasing ambience (walls of huge windows, mint-green woodwork, smoky mirrors, a few modern vases here and there, so that it doesn't all seem too derivative), the usual array of bistro favorites would have done.
In an unassuming square flanked by the usual boutiques and bistros, a truncated naked torso protrudes from a flowerbed; between its legs is a broken red pod, home to an unexpected tropical bird.
IN the alternate reality of outlet malls, the usual meals are factory-bistro: the tabletops are bare, the brass is shiny, the reproduction antiques plentiful, the French fries previously frozen.
Oh, yes, my buddy and new friend, Chef Laurent Quenioux of LQ Bistro, showed his usual brilliance with a rabbit loin stuffed with veal sweetbreads!
But pretty ricotta-stuffed zucchini flowers had little flavor, and Bistro salad brought the usual romaine, tomato, cucumber and carrot mix awash in blue cheese dressing.
In this culinary postcard, Patricia Wells, long the voice of France for American home cooks, gives her usual ultraprofessional mixture of dernier-cri bistro and haute cuisine dishes, with briskly evocative descriptions of neighborhood shops and markets.
It's filmed on high-definition video, which looks dull and a little cheap on a normal television set, and the camera flits across all the usual tourist stops: the barges on the Seine, the spires of Notre Dame, the bistros in St.-Germain-des-Prés.
