Fondue

For a fellow student's birthday, we tried out a recommendation we received from a French student for dinner. It was the first restaurant we have been to that we all ha a pretty difficult time figuring out what was on the menu. Generally speaking with three of us at the minimum at dinner, we can do a substantial job of deciphering everything on the menu. Every once in a while there is a random word that we don't know, but we know all the major ingredients. The problem at this place was that we didn't know the categories of food. Pretty big problem when we can't even figure out what is going on with the way the ingredients are cooked.

The way things work in general at restaurants in France is that they give you the menus when you sit down and then come back 5 minutes later to take your order on food and drink at the same time. Not very often do they stop by to get the drink order and ask if you have any questions before wanting you to order. So, if you have a question (as we did), you ask it and then decide real fast what you want to eat. Thus, our back up plan was fondue. We hadn't had it yet since we have been in France. So, we ask what the random ingredient is in one of the fondues and after getting the answer of mushrooms (it was a specific kind of mushrooms, thus leading to our confusion) we ordered the fondue. Now when I have had fondue in the States, it is all different kinds of vegetables, maybe some different meats, but not usually slices of sausage and ham. Here's what my fondue plate looked like:

Pretty yummy, but a little difficult I thought to dunk the slices in the cheesy goodness. I managed.

The dessert fondue (chocolate obviously) came with bananas, pears or apples (depending on the plate), and oranges or grapefruit (depending on the plate once again). No strawberries or pound cake or marshmallows. Ok, I wasn't really expecting the marshmallows, but no cake? I mean think is the country of "Let them eat cake!" ok ok bad joke, but we decided we didn't get strawberries because they weren't in season. The chocolate sure was good though. As was the entire meal.