We were looking for a place to have dinner in Angel before Piers went to play basketball. Angel is absolutely packed with restaurants from all over the world but today I felt like a spot of French. I picked Le Sacred Couer which was tucked in a side road a few blocks from the tube station. It has the tiny intimate (I.e. bit on the cramped side) feeling of French cafés with cute checkered table cloths and kitsch wall decorations.
I ordered from the 3 course set menu for £22.95. For my starter, I had the French onion soup. The flavour of the soup was amazing, super rich and with the perfect balance of sweet and savoury. Piers and I agreed that the perfect combination would be the flavour of this soup with the cheese and bread topping on the soup at the brasserie that we went to last time. Dont get me wrong, The cheese coated bread "dumplings" on this soup was gorgeous too but the soup at the brasserie was completely drowned in cheese (or was the cheese drowning in the soup?) So it made for a lot of stringy cheese fun! Piers just ordered a main from the a la carte menu (how curious, that's literally from the menu menu) because he didn't want to be too full for his basketball match.
For my main, I had a boeuf bourguinon because I'd wanted to try this dish since going to the brasserie in Covent garden! Also, I was going to have steak but because of my cough, I thought grilled steak and fries would irritate my throat even more... The bourguinon had such a nice flavour and was also very rich. I loved the carrots in it, it's basically a very tasty stew isn't it? The mash on the side went really well with the bourguinon but on its own it wasn't anything special. The beef was quite tender and in very generous chunks; I was surprised by how big the portions were! The stereotype is that French cuisine is always in tiny portions, right?
Piers ended up having the steak (so I got to have some too Teehee) and again, it was a big portion! The peppercorn sauce was amazing, the flavours were gorgeous, a bit of trend here... The fries were... Comme ci come ca I guess... They weren't super crispy or amazing, just very standard, skinny fries. This restaurant's potato products are definitely not the main focus! Nevertheless, when doused in delicious peppercorn sauce, everything tastes great so the chips were still pretty good. There were so many fries, we couldn't finish them all!
Even though we were stuffed, I still had (just about) enough space for creme brulee! This is my go to dessert, if creme brulee is on the menu, I will almost always pick it because it's just too labour intensive for me to make and you can't really make just one portion at a time, plus I don't have a blowtorch! I'll leave the creme brulee making to the pros, thanks. The custard was delicious, I think it was even better than the brasserie we went to last time, and that one already rocked our world! The crème was just thick enough to hold its shape but it wasn't too solid or hard and was so smooth and creamy. The flavour was just right to complement the caramelised sugar coating. The only thing was that the sugar coating was just a bit too burnt. I loved the crunch and the thickness but it was justttt a tad too much on the toasty side. Delicious carcinogens! We agreed once again that if this creme was mixed with the sugar topping from the other brasserie, it would reach phenomenal flavour levels! This seems to be the trend...