Steak frites: does what it says on the box

If you’re after a clas­sic and hearty meal, then we heart­ily recom­mend you hoof it to Le Met­ro­pol­it­an on Cuba Street. In fact, we sug­gest you go there on Monday March 14 espe­cially when they’re hav­ing a fun­draiser for Christ­ch­urch. How about I tell you about the din­ner I had there recently in order to whet your appet­ite?

A man friend of mine had recently had a some­what crappy­ass week, so I told him I’d take him out for din­ner, and sug­ges­ted Le Met­ro­pol­it­an because I had a massive crav­ing for their steak with bone mar­row sauce. As it happened, that’s no longer on the menu, but that’s how things go.

We star­ted out with two aper­itifs and some olives for $18 (that’s a sav­ing of $6 for those of you look­ing at the menu prices). It was a shame that the eager young French waiter delivered our drinks to the wrong table, and then when he real­ised his mis­take, he had to con­fis­cate the olives that the oth­er couple had thought were gratis. Their loss was our gain. The olives were nice mar­in­aded, without any par­tic­u­lar one fla­vour. The Madame Rouge aper­itif was indeed porty, and the one whose name escapes me tasted like Peach Schnapps should taste if it was­n’t all chem­ic­ally. I wish that the drinks had been served ice cold instead of on ice, or at least that the ice had been big­ger, because it melted very quickly and watered down the taste some­what.

Ahh well, onwards and upwards. We chose a Côtes du Rhône Shiraz to drink, even though we were warned it was­n’t a par­tic­u­larly bold wine, fig­ur­ing we’d get some­thing more bois­trous halfway through our mains, and ordered gar­lic bread and mains. The gar­lic bread came on sour dough, cut into thick bat­ons and soaked through with but­ter. It went per­fectly with our wine and crude con­ver­sa­tion.

For a main course, I went with the Entrecôte de Boeuf sauce poivre, which you might know bet­ter as 300grams of prime Angus Scotch Fil­let with a green pep­per sauce, and fries. As you can see by the pic­ture, it was exactly that. Served on the rare side of medi­um rare, it had a lovely char­grill on, and the fat was espe­cially suc­cu­lent. The fries were crispy and salty and deli­cious. My friend went with Lap­in d’ag­neau pique, which is pan roas­ted anchovy-stud­ded leg of lamb on a fri­cas­see of cour­get and basil with Per­nod jus. I’m not an anchovy per­son, but the mout­ful I tried seemed nice enough. The wait­ress sug­ges­ted the lam bwas a fairly small por­tion, so he also ordered a side of roas­ted kumara ala Legion­naire. I believe that trans­lates into “deli­cious­ness with a shit­load of but­ter”. Des­pite my moun­tain of frites, I felt it neces­sary to keep per­form­ing qual­ity con­trol on the kumara, espe­cially as we could­n’t fig­ure out what spice it was on them.

After that hot pro­tein injec­tion, we knew we needed more, espe­cially since we still had half a bottle of our second wine to drink, anoth­er Côtes du Rhône, this time a blend, and like the oth­er one an easy $40. Nat­ur­ally, we called for fro­mage. The wait­ress rattled off about sev­en kinds of cheese, not all of which I knew. It would have been nice to have been able to view the cheeses like they do at Ambeli, but instead we took her word for it that the camen­bert was about to start crawl­ing, that the roque­fort was creamy, and then we asked her to just pick a hard cheese to com­ple­ment our selec­tion. We ended up with a nutty Comté, which was deli­cious. In fact, all the cheeses were. Picky me might have pre­ferred a simple crack­er to the bread the cheeses were served, giv­en that it was after din­ner, but I can­’t com­plain about the mus­ca­tels.

Nor­mal people would have stopped there, but if you’ve ever had Creme Bru­lee from La Met­ro­pol­it­an, you’d know that it’s impossible not to order it. Behold:

The chocol­ate mousse my friend had was made from good-qual­ity chocol­ate, but lack­ing the splash of alco­hol that makes chocol­ate mousse truly great. Luck­ily though, he had sherry and I had an Armangac XO in order to cor­rect that imbal­ance. At $250, it was­n’t a cheap night out, but it was def­in­itely mem­or­able. We recom­mend it – and if you’re daun­ted by the price, it might help to know that if you stick to the ‘Clas­sic Selec­tions’ on the menu, you can get three courses for $45.