Thursday, July 17, 2008

Restaurant Review: Creperie du Chateau

By The Law Reviewers of The Law Reviewers

Creperie du Chateau, on McKinney Avenue in Dallas' Uptown.

DALLAS — Half the time spent writing this review was devoted to finding the correct accents (and we probably still didn’t get it right), so let’s get down to businēss, as we say in Texas-French. The precious jewel of Dallas dining is gone, stolen, missing: the precious Blue Water, also known as Chez Gerard. Where has all the French food gone? Hunkered down in Fort Zinderneuf, we eat our Bob Armstrong dip and California rolls, oblivious to the sheer gasteronimity of food choices in our own upyard (Note: We made up "gasteronimity" and "upyard," so don’t bother looking them up). Like Beau, Digby, and John, we escaped and traveled all of a quarter mile up McKinney Avenue to check out Crêperie du Château, a real-live French place! In a real-dead office building! Yes, the setting screams Richardson, rather than Paris, but this goes towards one of our theories that many cuisines benefit from being Americanized – we’ll take covered parking with security and an over-air conditioned space that shares a lobby with a red marble office building over cigarette smoke and unfriendly service.

Any place with "creperie" in the name better have a lot of crepes and, fortunately, Creperie du Chateau has plenty, and they are more filling than you would imagine (another fortunate side effect of Americanization; Creperie du Chateau’s crepes are not so measly as to be a suspicious plant by those arguing Euro-thinness over American waistlines). The savory crepes are Sarrasin-style, that is they’re made with wheat flour, which gives them an earthy, more substantial texture and taste than your typical crepe. We tried La Parisienne ($9.99), which may look pricey for a crepe but could easily feed two Americans or five French grad students. The crepe is served partially folded over and filled with chunks of ham, creamy mornay sauce, and not-so-French cheddar cheese, and it made for a hearty, tasty lunch. For dessert, the apple pie crepe ($5.59) is encouragingly advertised as tasting "like the real thing!" and, though the roasted apples were a little greasy, the chewy crepe and plenty of cinnamon and brown sugar made it work. The nutella crepe with bananas ($4.99+$.50) is also a stomach filler, but we would have liked it better served warm. And if you can sing any song from Les Miz by memory, you can order the off-menu, flaming crepes Suzette, which we spied at a nearby table.

Other than crepes and plenty of attentive service from our server (though his sarcasm meter was set to pre-caffeine), the Crepe House (as no one should call it) has a small but inviting array of entrees and salads. We passed on the Croque Monsieur ($8.99, plus $1.00 to have it Madame-style with an egg over easy on top), and had the French Dip ($9.99) (otherwise known at Arby’s as a "French dip"). The "sliced beef," as the menu describes it, was not the rare, shaved fresh roast beef that we were hoping for, but rather a supermarket deli version of the real thing. But, and this is a big American butt, the rest of the sandwich was a winner, and the whole shebang made up for the sorry state of the beef. Plenty of melted Swiss cheese and a toasted, buttered baguette were a welcome sight and overwhelmed the paltry beef. Creperie du Chateau provides a bowl of tame jus, or as we say here in the ‘States, "dippin sauce." The Freedom Fries that accompanied were fantastic – lightly seasoned with the skins still on. If only the recipe could be repeated at some of our esteemed burger joints around town (looking at you, Twisted Root, with the Jack in the Box/Sysco curly fries…).

So, on our French-made cars five gavel scale, where five gavels is [this space intentionally left blank] and one gavel is anything made by Citroen, Renault, or Peugeot, we give Crêperie du Château two and a half gavels, or a taxiing Airbus A320.

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