L’Hedoniste

Goûteux, savoureux, service et cadre agréable.
Une vraie bonne adresse

Original, très bon service, bref un vrai moment de plaisir dans un cadre cette petit, mais chaleureux.

We stopped here for lunch after visiting Château Vincennes.
I was a little worried since the place was absolutely empty when we first arrived, but it did start to fill up after 1 p.m. or so.
The food was certainly good — especially my wife’s main course that had loads of mushrooms and smooth mashed potatoes surrounding a soft meat (beef? sorry it’s been a while since we ate there) wrapped in a pastry crust. My main course of fish over vegetables was fresh and light. Both of us enjoyed our appetizers which involved salads topped with sardines (hers) and chevre cheese (mine).
Service was good, although I think there was only one waitress/​manager/​owner/​hostess lady running the front of the room and there was definitely some waiting after the room got busy. But most European restaurants expect that you’ll want to have a relaxed meal. The concept of a rushed lunch where the waiter drops the check on the table along with your food would seem (literally) foreign to them. So relax, sit back, delete a few lines from your itinerary and accept the fact that you may have to sit and let your food digest a little before you receive your check.
I do have to say that I thought the prices here were a little high for lunch… but it is (the periphery) of Paris and the overall décor/​ambience of the restaurant seemed pretty posh.
Finally, it’s not the restaurant’s fault, but the inappropriate behavior of a couple of the other patrons did detract from our experience here. Shortly after we had begun our meal, two men entered the restaurant and chose to sit adjacent to our table and talk in English at high volume in a mostly empty restaurant about their respective medical troubles.
I am sure that you, Dear Unilocaler, would never do such a thing. But perhaps you could remind your friends and relations that the discussion of weighty topics — health, politics, taxes, global warming, etc. — is best done quietly, in a far corner of the restaurant, on a park bench or in a private home so that others are not forced to listen to conversations that they would prefer not to hear.
Fortunately, this was the only such situation we had in Europe. There are challenges of traveling in a country where you don’t speak the language — or speak it only passably — but it did make me consider that one of the virtues of traveling in a non-​English-​speaking country is the ability to tune out other people’s conversation — particularly in enclosed spaces such as restaurants — so that it just becomes background noise.

Excellent sur tous les plans
Ouvert très récemment, l’hédoniste propose en même temps une carte fine et originale, des produits choisis avec soin, une cuisine de gourmet et des prix raisonnables. Le service est impeccable et le cadre beau et feutré fonctionne pour tous types de contexte (affaires, repas d’amis, entre amoureux…)