La P'tite France

La P’tite France
241 St. Mary’s Road
237-5468


February 2009

Smack on the busiest trip of St. Mary’s Road, La’ P’tite France sits unpretentiously, nestled beside the venerable Red Top Drive Inn Restaurant. Without reading their sign, you might easily belief that La France is a doughnut house, rather than a full-serve restaurant. If you paid any attention to this site, you would have noticed that it opened in 2006, closed, re-opened, and re-closed again in the span of a year. Apparently, the Alsatian restaurateurs moved from France and settled in La France. After a few months, the wife left, leaving the restaurant in limbo. The husband decided to forge on but abandoned ship shortly afterwards. Today’s incarnation of La France is captained by Justin Bohemier, reputedly the protégé of one of Winnipeg’s great chefs, Bernard Mirlycourtois (for further information, read the review on Mirlycourtois). Among Winnipeg’s recent proliferation of excellent French restaurants, you need to be spectacular to compete, and La France’s beginnings have so far been shaky.

Although La France doesn’t have the typical French bistro appearance on the outside, the inside does quite a bit to bring you into a proper dining atmosphere. The bright orange walls hits you like a jolt of caffeine but the overall cosiness forces you to relax through their adequate selection of wines.

The limited menu doesn’t offer a big selection but it does cover the French basics, and adds some French-Canadian fare. We choose to have the meatballs in sauce, the boeuf bourguignon and, at the server’s suggestion, the bison ribs. For starters, we share some escargots to go with the standard baguette. The French (in France) don’t consider their baguettes as simply a loaf of bread—the French view the baguette as a necessity of life and you see everyone in the Parisian streets walking with a loaf of bread. Many of Winnipeg’s French restaurants pay proper respects to the baguette and come out with delicious bread. None compare to the wonder of the baguettes that you get in La France; they serve the best French bread in Winnipeg, period. The loaf comes onto the table smoking hot. You don’t mind the searing pain in your palms as you tear through the crispy outsides to get at the fluffy and evenly-celled insides. Absolutely fabulous.

Shortly afterwards, the escargots creep onto our table and they catch us by surprise. To date, I’ve yet to order snails in Winnipeg and find anything but the standard escargot dish that holds six, lonely little snails. Usually, they hide in a huge mushroom cap and they swim in a puddle of butter. I don’t mean that all escargots served in Winnipeg are bad (again, see my review on Mirlycourtois for more info); they’re all just similar. Bohemier breaks out of this shell to serve a plateful of no less than a score of snails, swimming in a delicious butter sauce. Delicious! After the snails all disappear, the remaining sauce works its way towards the bread, making the baguette even more impossibly fabulous. If the food continues like this, I would have to proclaim Bohemier’s food to rival many of the establishments in France’s motherland itself. Alas, it doesn’t.

Between the moment the escargot dish leaves our table and the time our main courses come, the clock ticks almost an hour. The questionable service leaves you relying in a luck-of-the-draw situation to see if you get a very competent server or an inattentive server. Seeing as servers tag-teamed through the middle of our meal, we experience the best (the worst) of both worlds.

When the main course finally arrives, our expectations return for an unparalleled meal. Again, we stare disappointment in the face. The meatballs have nice flavour and the accompanying sauce is rich and interesting, but in the end, there’s something missing—something that would turn them from good meatballs to great meatballs. The barbecue-like sauce that covers the bison ribs has rich and complex flavours. This could have been a great dish except that the ribs came out slightly overdone and became dry. Being a very lean meat, bison foods have a very small window of tolerance for heat, and this serving missed that window. Finally, the generous bourguignon features ample meat that leaves the most voracious carnivore satisfied; however there is too much meat for the amount of sauce. The burgundy sauce tastes delicious and there isn’t nearly enough to smother the meat. Part of the problem comes from the meat itself. The chunks of beef chuck are too large; they should be cut down to smaller pieces before braising. The immensity of the meat prevents the flavours of the sauce from permeating the inner meat fibres. As you cut the pieces of beef open, you find the insides dry and crying for more sauce. Again, this could have been a great dish but it falls just short. An obvious amount of detail and thought went into preparing the beautiful sauce but ultimately, a fundamental mistake in cooking brings this dish down to ordinary.

La P’tite France has some definite assets, capable of elevating it to one of Winnipeg’s elite French restaurants, but it’s failures in the basics is simply unbelievable. The attention to detail is obvious but simple fundamentals (like consistent good service) are essential.

*** /5


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