France: Les Cesars Nancy

I went to Les Cesars with an attitude. I wanted to eat at our hotel and was voted down. We came here on a recommendation from Xavier. The menu was posted outside the door and was in both French and English. That sold us.

 

We entered and after a brief wait, we were seated right in front of the door. Since it was January and quite cold we were not too happy but the restaurant appeared quite full. The hostess/waitress noticed we weren't too happy and offered us a table near the window out of the draft. Happily, we moved until we got there. The people at the next table were all smoking, it was terrible. Reluctantly we headed back to our old table. Marion took one look at our faces and said follow me, in French. She took us upstairs where there was only one couple and we had a wonderful view down into the restaurant. Thus began our wonderful experience.

#lescesarsnancy

Marion our waitress was amazing. She was dressed in a business suit with high heels and shortly after we had ordered our meal a party of 16 was brought upstairs and she ran up and down the stairs in those heels with everyone’s drinks, appetizers, meals, and desserts. We were in total awe of her. We shared many laughs with her and she invited us to eat at her house the next time we are in Nancy. And we managed all this on limited French on my side and very limited English on her side.

 

The decor is what you would expect on the Place Stanislaus, very luxurious. Lots of gold and lots of red. But it was not at all a stuffy place, it was very noisy and everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time.  The food did not disappoint. We began with an appetizer of roasted vegetables. It contained aubergine, peppers, and mushrooms with fresh mint. It was delicious. Joe and Bob had vegetable soup which was thick and had good flavor. We got a nice basket of crisp bread but alas no butter.

 

This is sort of an Italian restaurant. All the main courses were served with pasta on the side. We tried the duck, filet of beef, lamb and I had a pasta dish with four kinds of cheese. The duck and lamb were first class, the beef was tough. My pasta was excellent but so rich and the portion was huge.

We all had different flavors of glace (ice cream) for dessert. Lemon, apricot, mandarin orange, apple, Malaga, coffee, vanilla, and chocolate. I had coffee with ice cream in it. Very unusual but tasty. Actually, I wanted coffee ice cream but I had a little language snafu.

 This wasn't the best food we had on our trip but it was certainly one of the best experiences.