Cafe Des Amis

Café des Amis has been going for 25 years. On the Thursday night we visit it’s packed, with a queue of people waiting to either be seated or get into the basement bar. It must be good, right?

Not at all, as we soon find out. The steak tartare is chewy, lacks any kind of flavour, and the addition of half a boiled quail’s egg defeats the point entirely. A gristly rib eye steak in peppercorn sauce has me reaching for the salt despite a liberal sprinkling of pepper. The duck breast looks unattractively limp, but with Armagnac sauce tastes ok, if uninteresting. Only the foie gras is nice and creamy, but as the friend points out this wouldn’t have been made on the premises anyway.

Desserts are a mixed bag; the vanilla cheesecake is adequate, the tarte tatin’s thin pastry has baked for too long and is verging on burnt round the edges, and the most adventurous-sounding dish of the evening, the soup au chocolat, is effectively a melted fondant plonked in a bowl with a dollop of pepper ice cream that may as well be labelled plain vanilla.

The popularity of this generic, cack-handed approach to French food might be less baffling if it was dirt cheap, but it’s not. Upwards of £30 must be spent for a decent bottle of wine (the 2010 Cotes du Rhone we choose is £21 and extremely acidic) and a meal for two is around £85.