Cafe Rouge

Café Rouge
51 St Giles St
Oxford
OX1 3LU



With a fantastic 50% off the food bill with the Gourmet Society, we couldn't wait to dine at Café Rouge.



Having had fantastic steak and roast chicken here before, the discount is difficult to ignore.



Café Rouge is a nation-wide chain serving (faux?) French food - mostly steak, chicken, and fish, grilled or roasted. Faily generic, but in Oxford it is done very well. It's about the only place in Oxford one can find a steak cooked to order, rather than uniformly grey.



The highlight is usually the dessert menu.



My duo of seafood (crab mayonnaise, and smoked salmon) was somewhat disappointing. The salmon was marvellous, but the crab was scant and mayonnaise overpowering.



A chose the daily special of escargot served one of three ways (with spinach, or garlic butter, or goat's cheese). The garlic butter was delicious, and snails tender and flavourful but without the earthy stink that they sometimes have.



We asked the waiter the provenance of the snails, and after several iterations he got it out of chef that they were sent alive from France and not frozen as we had assumed.


A's seabass with spinach was served possibly poached. The skin was certainly flaccid, with no sign of crispness. The fish was cooked nicely though, with good flavour. It was just a shame that the crisp skin, usually the highlight of seabass, was left out.

My marinated bavette steak was delicious. Recommended by our flamboyant (Brazillian) waiter, it came with excellent frites, and served rare (or as near as possible) as requested. When ordering, we asked what bavette was, not being familiar with the term. After some confusion, our waitre rubs his tummy and declares 'the belly!' And indeed it was - a trimmed piece of thin skirt steak marinated in oil, garlic, spices and wine, and grilled rare. Slightly chewy but with an intense flavour of beef and the marinade, this is definitely one of the better steaks I've recently had.



A couldn't resist the trio of desserts: lemon tart, rum baba and chocolate truffle torte. The lemon tart was perfectly light with a zesty flavour, and topped with brulée sugar. The rum baba lacked rum - rather it was watered down for the English I expect, and the chocolate truffle torte was decadent and heavenly.



The damage: with 50% off the food bill, and a bottle of wine, dinner for the two of us came to a meagre £41.72 - a ridiculous amount. Even with tipping our fantastic waiter heavily, we walked away from a delicious three course meal barely scathed. Paying full price, the bill would be £70-80 for two. Still excellent for the quality of food here.