Geneva - Cafe Paris

Cafe de Paris
rue du Mont-Blanc 26
1201 Genève, Switzerland



Cafe de Paris is famous for one thing. Steak. Like a few of their counterparts in Paris itself, the cafe serves one thing: salad followed by steak frites.



Wine and desserts are advertised, but otherwise there is no menu.



We are promptly served a green salad with light mustard-vinegrette dressing. The acid excites the palate, but the dressing also has a rich umami flavour that I associate with Swiss dressings. I'm not sure what it is, but there is an associate with meat that I cannot fathom. After all, this is a green salad: the antithesis to all that I believe to be good in the world.



Fresh fluffy rolls with crusty exteriors are served, and a mark on the paper table cloth shows where we are in our meal.



The sirloin is served. The steak is referred to as an entrecôte, but that usually connotes a ribeye, and this should rightly be a contr-filet. Lets just call it a sirloin.



Served atop a spirit burner, the butter sauce bubbled merrily but was thankfully not hot enough to ruin the deliciously rare steak atop. A word about the sauce: made famous since the 1930s, this is one of those 'closely guarded secrets' that turn into great marketing. The ingredients are apparently both unknown and a jealously guarded secret. What we can say is that it's incredibly rich with an unmistakable creamy/buttery flavour. The herbs come through strikingly, but not in our ken to guess; and the sauce adds a richness beyond simple fat in the butter or cream: it adds an unctuously heavy meatiness to an otherwise lean piece of steak. Would this sauce work as well with a proper entrecôte?, perhaps it would be too rich.



A more than generous serving of frites arrived, but they unfortunately lacked the crisp exterior one would expect from an establishment that serves only one dish.



The steak was glorious in its rawness: having ordered it rare, it came closer to blue, with a branded exterior that wasn't quite as crisp and caramalised as I would prefer, but made up by the texture of the silken beef. Why can restaurants in the UK not sear a piece of beef like so?

The damage: immaculate service, salad and steak frites for two, and a glass of wine each came to a tad over CHF120 (approximately £80). Extravagent for steak frites (it was just seared beef, after all), but certainly worth experiencing.