Restaurant review: Chez Marie

Str Dionisie Lupu 48, (Icoanei Park)

Well, there really is an owner called Marie. I have known her for the past 15 years when she was the cook at the British Ambassador’s residence, and I ate her food there throughout the tenure of some four successive ambassadors. I always considered this lovely lady to be a competent cook, so I was not surprised when she opened her own restaurant.

Michael Barclay

But being a cook and a restaurateur are two very different things, requiring different and diverse skill sets. So, let us see how she has made out. She chose her location well, just off Magheru. It is a low built villa which formerly housed two failed restaurants. This was not surprising because they were both dumps. But she must have invested some large sums of money in converting the dump into a delightful, newly designed place. It is all dark wood, flanked by some contrasting bright wallpaper. It is cozy, large and comes fully equipped with the proverbial terrace.

The menu arrived, but thereafter the waiter did not! These were the worst waiting staff I have encountered all year. At one point, I literally waved my napkin in the air, and shouted to get attention from a group of three waiters who were huddled in a private conversation, all of whom were ignoring the customers. Okay, back to the menu.

It was pleasant and safe, offering familiar dishes, without falling into the trap of becoming a specifically Romanian restaurant. So from a selection of well thought out starters we ordered a ‘Beef Carpaccio’ at RON 32. This dish is accredited by the modern day marketers of Harry’s Bar in Venice as being their creation of some 50 years ago. The damned liars. They are spreading a myth. These Venetian braggarts also claim that they invented the Bloody Mary. Oh, give me a break! I went there a few years ago to find it packed with gullible Americans who believed this nonsense, and who were all looking for nonexistent mementos of Hemingway, and he hated the place just like I did!

So to make Carpaccio you take a big beef tenderloin and freeze it, so that when you cut it razor thin, you don’t break up the fibers. Good kitchens have a circular saw to do this, otherwise the chef has to beat it to razor thin proportions. Anyway, although it came on a huge bed of ruccola, it failed because it had not thawed out properly and it was soaking wet. Wet, raw, ice cold meat – an unpleasant disaster!

Our second starter of fried beaded sticks of Mozzarella was just fine at a small cost of RON 14. At this point Blondie was moaning and bitching about her bad choice of Carpaccio, and she wanted to save her day with something more adventurous. So she ordered a ‘Beef Chez Marie, Tenderloin, rice, vegetables and a spicy sauce’. Another bad choice and she blew it again, for although all the ingredients were fine, she howled that the ‘spicy sauce’ was nothing of the sort and was just some manufactured junk-in-a-jar off a supermarket shelf. I tasted it and agreed with her.

But I did better with my ‘roast duck leg, plus duck fillet, red cabbage with apple and green beans with garlic’. The vegetables were excellent, the roast duck leg was perfect – but the kitchen screwed up the dish with an additional duck fillet which had been beaten flat into submission and then unnecessarily fried.

We passed on Chinese Chicken Noodles, with ‘Chinese Sauce’ and Chicken Tikka with ‘Tandoori Sauce’ as I suspected that these dishes would also contain supermarket jars of sauce! We also passed on beef with pepper sauce, mushroom sauce and Gorgonzola sauce; which given their simplicity I am sure the House would have prepared correctly.

But to summarize, here you have a delightful, warm place, a great location, excellent prices with four pork grilled dishes priced at RON 20 each, 11 salads priced at an average of RON 9, nine chicken dishes priced around RON 24, 14 vegetable or potato side dishes priced around RON 10. So you can’t complain… unless like me you expect perfection. You will not get it here. But you will get a memorable and low cost meal.

mab.media@dnt.ro

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