The Tasting Room at Le Quartier Francais

When I first went to Le Quartier Français in Franschhoek around 10 years ago I was blown away. Since then its chef Margot Janse has become one of the world’s most high profile chefs and the food more experimental. Would the experience be as memorable?

I remember sitting outside on a warm evening and eating by far the most delicious meal I’d had on the trip - Janse was way ahead of her competitors then in terms of use of ingredients and technical skill.

There was one dish - one of the ‘boks’ with a sweet, spicy cure - I was so impressed by that I persuaded her to give me the recipe and adapted it to a Chateaubriand in my book ‘Steak’ (now sadly out of print*).

This time the meal took place in a smartly designed room with a neon sign outside from a no-choice 8 course ‘surprise’ tasting menu for which we were advised we should allow 3 1/2 hours - although I think we managed it in 3. Surprise is the right word. It was a roller-coaster of an experience involving a kaleidoscope of different colours, tastes and textures.

You’ll be relieved to know I’m not going to talk you it through course by course, specially as my companion had a slightly different menu which meant I tasted 13 dishes in all - plus amuse-gueules. But the highlights for me were:

• one of the simplest dishes, described as 'a summer walk through Franschhoek' (right) a fresh-tasting salad of young vegetables and salad leaves that went perfectly with the subtle, delicious 2011 Reyneke Chenin Blanc we were drinking.
• a marron (crayfish) with gooseberry water and lemon verbena - a delicate accompaniment pitched just right for the super-fresh shellfish
• quail with amasi (a yoghurt-like fermented milk) savoury granola, shallots, corn puree and sprouts - my favourite of the main course dishes - I liked Janse’s use of grains
• Karoo Wildebeest loin with wild grains, sorghum, rainbow carrots and celeriac purée (right) - the prettiest dish of the meal
• Swartland guineafowl with fennel, porcini and liquorice root - again, a great looking dish. Meat and game are clearly Janse’s forte
• and two really inventive cheese courses - a gooey, fondue-like Dalewood lanquedoc custard with vinegar ‘flings’ and crisp shards of leek and jagged hunks of Klein river gruyere with rusks, mebos (dried plum) custard and raisins (below).

I was less wowed by a slightly tortured starter of a beetroot sponge ball with buttermilk labne and dill and cucumber granita which had lost touch with its beet roots and a rather messy looking dish of oyster with a thick vichyssoise purée and roasted cos lettuce where again the flavour of the oyster had been lost in translation. And the service, while charming, was almost too full-on - a bit like being jumped on by a labrador puppy. It would be hard to go there and have a an intimate meal.

But my main reservation - and this is my beef with most fine dining restaurants - is that there was too much repetition of favoured techniques. Too many crumbs, smears, blobs and pools of puree. Although many were visually arresting it was all rather overwhelming but that may say more about what I’m looking for from a restaurant these days than Janse’s undoubted prowess in the kitchen

We could also have had wine pairings with each course - they looked well chosen but cost another R400 (£29) a head and I’m not sure it wouldn’t have made the meal even more of a sit-up-and-pay-attention performance. After the Chenin we drank a deliciously gamey Eben Sadie 2010 Sequillo - a Rhoneish blend of Syrah, Mourvedre and Grenache which worked particularly well with the game dishes.

Interestingly although Janse continues to pick up awards she no longer appears quite as consistently in the San Pellegrino top 50 as she did in the 'noughties', an indication, perhaps, of how much the restaurant world has moved on since then but also of the fact that staying at the top is tough as chefs seek new ways to grab the critics' attention. I’m not sure I didn’t prefer it the way it was.

If you’re a fan of top-end fine dining experiences you should add it to your bucket list but there are other restaurants in the Winelands where you'll get equally good food and a slightly more relaxed vibe. I'll be writing about some of them shortly.

I ate at Le Quartier Français as a guest of the restaurant. The menu is R770 (£56), R1170 (£85) with wine pairings - expensive for the area but not by comparison with similar restaurants internationally.

Le Quartier Français is at Cnr Berg & Wilhelmina Streets Franschhoek, Western Cape, 7690. Tel: 0027 21876 2151. You'll need to book well ahead.

*actually I was expecting to find, like most of my books, that it was selling for 1p on Amazon but turns out the UK edition is fetching £48.99. Should have kept more copies!

Apologies for appalling pix, due to the low light (though why should chefs light their restaurants for customers who want to snap their food?) Here’s a slightly better set from a similar meal by blogger Jason Bagley

Les 110 de Taillevent, Paris - food and wine matching nirvana

An establishment bearing the name Taillevent sounds scarily expensive - the main restaurant is - but don’t let that it you off eating in its very innovative and well-priced brasserie which opened in Paris just under a year ago.

We actually owed our visit there last week to an accident. We were planning to go back to England two days earlier but a blizzard halted Eurostar services and we reckoned we’d stay another 48 hours until the chaos died down - at least that was our excuse . . .

To be honest I went more out of professional interest than inclination. I’m not mad about that formal Michelin-starred style of dining these days but the fact that it had 110 wines by the glass (hence the name) and - almost unheard of for France - matched them all with individual dishes made it a must.

It also turned out to be a real bargain. All the wines are available in 7cl as well as 14cl glasses which means you can play around with different pairings without breaking the bank. The wines are divided into 4 price bands - under 10€, under 16€, under 26€ and over €26 and each dish has a pairing in each price bracket ranging from an incredibly reasonable 3€ to 98€ for a full glass of Chateau d’Yquem. And the wines come from all over the world - again far from common practice in France.

We decided that one of us would go for the three course set price menu and the other eat à la carte. I got the better part of the bargain. There was a choice of starter and main course and one of two desserts or a cheese course - a steal for 39€ (£33/$55) especially as it’s available at dinner as well as lunch.

My first course was a stunning pot au feu terrine with seasonal vegetables which was offered with a 2009 Anjou villages from Domaine Rousset Rouillier (3.50€ a 7cl glass) and a Domaine Tempier Bandol rosé (6€) - the better wine but surprisingly also the better match (due to its structure and acidity, I think).

Then an haute cuisine classic - quenelles de brochet (pike) with sauce Nantua and spinach (a bit like moulded souffles with a creamy shellfish sauce) - exactly the kind of dish you expect to come out of a 3 star kitchen. Again there was a surprise - the incredibly inexpensive Côtes de Bergerac "Cuvée des Conti" 2011 Château Tour des Gendres (€3) a crisp zippy white, proving a better, more refreshing contrast than a more classic white burgundy, Mâcon-Uchizy, Les Maranches 2010 from Domaine des Héritiers du Comte Lafon (€6)

Meanwhile my husband had a generous plateful of squid with chorizo and piment d’espelette as his starter with a classy 2009 Reuilly - a crisp Loire Sauvignon from Domaine C. Lafond (3.50€) and - the only dish that didn’t work - a mushroom risotto so salty he had to send it back. A new plateful came out but slightly underdone. Note to self - do not order risotto in French restaurants, a mistake I also made at Balthazar. Oh, and the pairing, a Bellet from Clos St Vincent, wasn’t quite as assured either.

By now we were on a roll so we ordered an extra course of cheese - a 26 month old Comté just to see how it would pair with a Lustau manzanilla Papirussa (€4.50) and a similarly oxidised Côte du Jura 2008 from Domaine J. Macle from the same region as the cheese. Honours to the Cote du Jura.

And finally a light, icy dessert of cheesecake with raspberry sauce and a fromage blanc sorbet with which we had a glass of sweet, frothy La Spinetta Moscato d'Asti "Biancospino" 2012 (5€) - again spot on.

So, classy food, imaginative and bold wine matching, more than fair prices. Any downside - apart from the misfiring risotto? My only criticism is that the concept could have been explained better and with slightly more enthusiasm by the otherwise efficient staff. Few of our fellow diners were ordering the smaller glasses though perhaps that happens more in the evening. But otherwise a lot of fun and you’ll get to eat dishes you would pay a fortune for in the parent restaurant. Go!

Les 110 de Taillevent is open 7 days a week at 195 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré

Tél : +33(0)1.40.74.20.20. Email: les110@taillevent.com

Where else to match food and wine in Paris

Paris has always taken food and wine pairing a good deal more seriously than London. Here are a couple of other good places:

Senderens - the original master of food and wine pairing - nobody I’ve come across takes such pains. The food is matched to the wines rather than the other way round. Here's my report of a meal back in 2006.

Goust - Fomer best sommelier in the world, Enrico Bernardo, now has a number of restaurants of which Goust is the newest. Check out this recent review by the FT’s restaurant critic Nicholas Lander and my own experience at Il Vino d’Enrico Bernardo a few years ago. Again wine rather than food is the starting point.

River Cottage Canteen, Bristol: a good place for families

I've never managed to get to one of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's River Cottage Canteens so was intrigued to find one was opening on our doorstep on Bristol's Whiteladies Road

There's always a slight suspicion that celebrity chefs are cashing in with these enterprises and although Hugh is a colleague at the Guardian I wasn’t expecting a great deal, to be honest. But it’s a lovely open rustic space with a very relaxed atmosphere and exactly the kind of wholesome food you'd imagine from his recipes.

As you’d expect from a champion of sustainable fishing and healthy eating the ingredients are scrupulously sourced, mainly from the west country. There’s a board on the side which trumpets the suppliers. Most vegetables are grown within 50 miles of Bristol. The menu is strong on veggies though Fearnley-Whittingstall is not too puritanical to offer chips - albeit with Maldon sea salt.

The highlights of our meal were a colourful board of beetroot hummus, carrot puree, a perfectly spiced pork terrine (rare to get that accuracy of seasoning) and a warm salad of roasted parsnip, lentil and superbly light moussey goats’ curd that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the River Café*.

Mains, being sent out in the middle of a very busy Saturday lunchtime, were slightly less sure-footed, a spicy bacon and cannellini bean stew failing to disguise the basic dullness of a generous hunk of pollock (sorry Hugh, it IS a boring fish) and the rather leaden wood-fired pizza crust needing a bit more fine-tuning, as our waitress acknowledged. But a simple dessert of poached pear with ice cream and chocolate sauce - despite its teetering pear - was lovely: a natural, not over-sweet way of ending a meal. The sort of thing you’d run up for friends - or at least I would.

The well-priced short wine list has a number of organic options though it would have been good to see a few more English wines on it. Cider comes from Orchard Pig and beer from the local Bristol Beer Factory. I had a cider called Charmer that sailed serenely through the meal.

Brownie points too for the childrens’ menu which had five main choices the day we were there including grilled whiting and salad, felafel with flatbread and hummus and a leek onion and cheddar pizza parcel (a pasty?) as well as the inevitable pasta and bangers and chips.

Given that the aim is to change the menu every day there were the inevitable glitches - a couple of missing elements like the chutney from my husband’s terrine and a side of kale that had been sent out without the advertised lemon and rapeseed oil (both swiftly rectified) but these are early days. The restaurant doesn’t officially open until tomorrow (March 4th). Service is sweet and the pricing more than fair for the quality of the ingredients.

Bristol does casual eating well so there’s plenty of competition for the RCC but few that offer quite such imaginative food for kids. Once the glitches are ironed out it will be interesting to see if it can manage to keep up the standard at these prices. All credit to it if it can.

PS One other point when you’re booking. There’s more room between the tables - and fewer buggies - on the ground floor than upstairs. Ask for a table in the window if you can get one.

*Where Hugh started his career

The River Cottage Canteen is at St John's Court, Whiteladies Road, Bristol BS8 2QY. I ate there as a guest of the restaurant.

Balthazar, London: beautiful but curiously dated

There’s no doubt about it Balthazar is drop-dead gorgeous. You only have to see the golden lights winking through the windows to be drawn through the door like a moth to a candle. But how does the food stack up?

I managed (with considerable difficulty) to get a table for dinner this week and found it already heaving with almost as many waiters as punters. Oddly that didn’t make the service especially responsive. They had a knack - as waiters do - of looking round the room to see if anything needed doing but managing to avoid your eye in case you actually wanted anything. It took a while - and a reminder - to get our order taken and a further prompt - after we spotted a basket on our neighbours' table - to be given some of the very good bread.

The menu is French in the way the Americans do French - i.e. with supersize portions, lashings of frites and a wildly indulgent dessert menu.

There was plenty to tempt so I suppose I shouldn’t have ordered a very un-French lobster and truffle risotto. It sounded too good to be true at £10.50, and indeed was with a strong taste of truffle oil and a mound of pallid rice that managed to be both sticky and underdone. My daughter’s frisée aux lardons was a better bet though the bacon shallot vinaigrette was bigger on vinegar than on bacon.

Her cheeseburger though was strangely gamey (the burger, not the cheese) suggesting very well hung beef - an odd way of handling a menu option that would be chosen by conservative eaters. And my steak au poivre, which I am embarrassed to admit I remember fondly from its '70s heyday, was disappointingly unpeppery with a rather dull gravy-like sauce. Top marks for the frites and the perfectly cooked spinach that came with it though.

Desserts were much better - a really gorgeous moussey, New York style cheesecake with a slick of apple purée and a light-as-air cinnamon apple doughnut and some pretty good profiteroles though with a not-quite-chocolatey-enough chocolate sauce.

Wines by the glass - a slightly tired aligoté and a very good 2009 Rasteau that was perfect with my steak - were on the pricey side at £9 a glass.

I’ve never been to the original so can’t comment on how it measures up but the obvious comparison here is with the equally glam but rather more authentically French Brasserie Zédel which is ironically run by Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, former owners of the Caprice group which has now taken McNally’s Balthazar under its umbrella. I prefer Zédel (not least for the pricing) though others in search of more of a scene might well not.

What struck me forcibly though is how curiously old-fashioned the food seems by London 2013 standards. That might seem an odd thing to say of a restaurant that pays tribute to a classic French food tradition but it harks more back to 1997 New York (the date Balthazar was founded) than the 1970s Paris that Zédel apes. There are better casual French restaurants in London - Racine and and McNally's adopted compatriot Daniel Boulud's Bar Boulud among them - and better burger joints (Honest Burger comes to mind). And the portions seem ridiculously large by today’s standards.

What was McNally’s aim in coming to London? A faithful reproduction of his New York restaurant for ex-pats? I’m sure he’ll have achieved that. A new beacon restaurant for London? I’m not so sure.

That said it already feels as if it's been there for months, never mind days. If you want a bit of New York glitz without jumping on a plane, Balthazar is for you. And knowing McNally’s reputation as a restaurateur I’m sure he’ll get the food and the service right. In the meantime stick to a couple of starters or a main course and a pud and you’ll be able to walk out feeling a little lighter than we did and with a slightly lesser hit on your wallet.

My bill at Balthazar was £115.31 for 2 for 3 courses, 2 glasses of wine, 2 lemonades and a mint tea.

Balthazar is at 4-6 Russell Street, London WC2B 5HZ (just off the Covent Garden piazza) and is currently only open for dinner. Lunches start on March 4th and brunch and breakfast in due course. There is a rather gorgeous-looking bakery next door.