Frenchie, Paris

Whilst most of our Paris eating was fly-by-the-seat-of-our pants I did book ONE meal. I'd received a few recommendations on great Parisian restaurants but most of them didn't take bookings, or were already booked out.

By some stroke of luck I nabbed a booking a Frenchie, one of the new, hip bistro type eateries popping up in Paris.  This place is notoriously hard to get a reservation for, but I managed to score a table at 9.30pm on our second last night in town. When the day arrived I knew I was mad making a dinner booking for a time that I'm normally getting ready for bed - I want to be in bed at that time of night, not eating! Lady Luck was smiling on me that day however I was able to move our booking to 7.00pm as they'd had a last minute cancellation. Woot!

The style of food at Frenchie is less traditional French - no confit duck, french onion soup or steak tartare was on the menu for us.  The style of food is quite modern, pretty much like the mod Oz food we get at our fancy  restaurants at home. They have a strong focus on seasonal cooking and as such the menu changes almost on a weekly basis.

The menu is three courses with a choice of two dishes for each course.  There's an option to add Foie Gras as a pre-starter which we decided to do for "research purposes" seeing as our first try of Foie Gras on our food tour was...underwhelming. We thought maybe our minds would be blown if we had it prepared in a top notch restaurant.  It was still underwhelming and even though people around us were ooh'ing and ahh'ing I just don't "get" Foie Gras and I don't think it's worth what the animals are put through in order to produce it.

Entrees were lovely - mackerel for me and quail for The Boy. I liked my entree but I had food envy when I tried The Boy's quail...it was GREAT with wonderful smokey, savoury flavours.

We both went with the Pork Belly for mains...because it's pork and noone wants to share pork we decided we needed one of these to ourselves.

And dessert! I can't actually remember what we had now (it's been a few weeks since this dinner) but as to be expected they were lovely, a great way to end a special night out in Paris. It was berry season when we were in Paris so the desserts features loads of sweet fresh berries, berry sorbets and berry jus. It was berry berry good!

Frenchie is at 5-6 Rue du Nil, 75002 Paris, France.  The restaurant is VERY small (only 25 tables) and reservations are a MUST. We watched so many people try to get a table just by walking in...and we couldn't believe it when a group of 8 turned up trying for a table. Crazy!