Fancy French dinner

The last day, when the conference was finally over, I had dinner with my Canadian professor friend, and my boss.

We decided to meet at the restaurant, but since I did not really know where the restaurant was located I decided to go there well in advance. It was in an area of the city I had not visited, so I figured I could spend some time looking at the sights there after finding the restaurant.

When I got off the subway I picked a random exit and went out. After climbing some stairs to get to the street level I was looking around trying to get a bearing on which direction was north (the way I wanted to go), and heard someone say: "Ah, Jonas"...

It turned out that my boss was also there well in advance to try to find the restaurant so as not to be late. I found the restaurant quickly, so we had a lot of time to kill. My boss was too hot and tired so he said we should just go sit in some cafe and have a drink instead of keep walking around.

I asked for "freshly pressed lemon juice", which looked interesting on the menu. My boss said that it sounded good but that he thought it would be too sweet. He "cannot drink sweet stuff, like juice". I said that since I thought it would just be made by squeezing a lemon and catching whatever came out, it would most likely not be sweet, but actually very sour. He was still not convinced, since it was listed under juices, so he ordered beer.

I got a glass of what was exactly what I had expected, which was of course very sour. It was pretty much 0% sweet... They also gave me a big packet of sugar so I could add as much sugar as I wanted, but I drank it without sugar. Definitely not sweet, despite being called juice.

Once it was time for dinner, dinner turned out to be excellent. The professors had foie gras as a starter, and gave me some to try too. I do not particularly like foie gras, but this was one was great. I had an egg with chanterelle sauce. This is common in Sweden too, but I have not seen anyone pick this type of mushroom in Japan. Very good.

The food in general was very good. Even the butter for the bread was great, haha. I had baked fish with mushrooms and asparagus, which was excellent, of course. My boss had scallops and the Canadian professor had meat.

The meat came with Béarnaise sauce, which is also quite popular in Sweden. My Japanese friends that have tried it all hate it, though. They think it tastes like food gone bad.

For desserts I figured I should try Crème brûlée in a fancy French restaurant at least once, so I know if the stuff I have made myself is reasonably close to the real thing or not. I was very good, of course. The Canadian professor had something that the restaurant was famous for (profiterole), which was ice cream filled petit choux with extreme amounts of expensive melted chocolate poured on them. I tried one of those too, which was also good.