St Germain

Sometimes, you just want to relax. No shock of the new, no strange fusion bedfellows, no odd foams. You want a meal as familiar as a favourite overcoat. Cue the traditional French restaurant.

Christchurch is blessed with several and St Germain flew the inner-city French flag until the February quake wrecked its building. Thankfully, no one was injured, but the restaurant was forced to up breadsticks and find
a new home. Intelligently, it headed to lower Papanui Rd in Merivale, where much of its local support lives. As one of a number of authentically accented and highly professional waiters who served us remarked, the restaurant is busy and probably selling even more wine than before because the regulars now have a much closer dash to home.

However, St Germain’s new home is a little, well, Anglo. Nestled in the ground floor of a ye olde Tudor-styled hotel with white walls and dinky wooden windows, all that’s missing are a thatched roof and Shakespeare. Also on site are the Tudors Restaurant and the Earl of Essex bar; take a wrong turn and you could end up with rosbif and porter.

St Germain plays it straight. The menu is a concise greatest hits of French classics, and from a list of entrees that included snails, panfried quail and a goat’s cheese souffle, we picked the foie gras and onion tart, and the French onion soup.

The tart’s rustic pastry, sweet onion jam and the buttery hit of flavour from a sliver of the liver, accompanied by greens and a duck liver vinaigrette, made an excellent start. The soup came with a huge melted-cheese-covered-crouton – so big it filled the bowl. But the soup’s flavour was a little bland, suggesting that more onion caramelisation was needed.

From the 10 mains, the winners were a lamb rack and a cassoulet – and they certainly were winners. The lamb was cooked beautifully and well complemented by a glossy rich morel sauce and sweet pumpkin mash. A side dish of green beans was suitably buttery and garlicky. Yes, this was no calorie-counting outing.

The cassoulet also hit all the right notes. A rich, complex broth was filled with a falling-apart duck leg, more garlic in the Toulouse sausage and slices of tender pork belly. Another right note came when I asked a waiter for a red wine to replace the excellent-value French chardonnay (Domaine William Fèvre) I’d finished. To match the cassoulet, he suggested a glass of malbec from the region of cassoulet’s home – a Le Cèdre – and its brambly, blackberry flavours did, as the waiter so eloquently put it, cut through the fat. The wine list is dominated by French wines, many by the glass.

Dessert was a familiar list of French sweets. Crepes Suzette featured fantastic hot, buttery crepes, though the zest-flecked intense orange sauce was a little skimpy in quantity. But this is being picky; the creme brulee was perfect. Creamy and unctuous, its texture was spot-on, and the rush of pleasure at the spoon’s first tap-tap on the golden brown sugar crust perfectly symbolised the joy of comfort food.

We’ll be tapping on St Germain’s Tudor door again.

88-96 Papanui Rd (Heartland Hotel Cotswold), ph: 03-355 3096, saint-germain.co.nz
Tues-Sun 6pm to late
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