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Review: French restaurant earns `E' for effort

By Tamara N. Shope
Friday, April 20, 2007

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You know how first dates can be. Awkward, exciting, full of expectations. Sometimes, disappointment creeps in. If you're lucky, the best you can hope for is a second date.

This is precisely how my friend and I felt about our first experience at Brasserie La Provence, the Nob Hill French eatery that took over Stella Blue's space last fall.

La Provence, for its part, was quite charming. It tried to be laid back and attentive at the same time. It tried to woo without coming on too strong.

A glass of wine, the promise of mussels, dim lighting and soft music. It seemed the perfect suitor.

But.

A peculiar seating arrangement, awkwardly loud din, unimpressive entrees, inconsistent desserts.

Would happiness elude us?

We adored so much about this suitor, this brasserie. We swooned over how much effort went in to making things perfect. (Men, if there is any lesson in romance comedies, it is that most women can be won over by effort alone. The act is almost always secondary. This is why second dates should be easier to achieve than they often are.)

"Give him another chance," they always say in those movies. "You never know," they say. In our minds, we remember John Cusack hoisting a stereo over his head, Peter Gabriel convincing us of the payoff of hope.

And so it was that we agreed to a second date.

My friend and I, cautiously optimistic, this time flirted with different entrees. On our last visit, we ordered mussels frites and a chicken crepe. This time, we chose steak frites and the special, lamb chops with a red wine-mushroom sauce. House salads and wine (on a suggestion from our waiter) began our evening.

Our disappointment, we found, was a thread common to every entree we tried. It's the sauce. Always delicious but always overwhelming. The salad, the steak frites and the lamb chops were nearly stifled by the volume of sauce that accompanied the dishes.

With the steak frites, wonderfully prepared and cooked to perfect tenderness, diners choose from three sauces. We chose the creamy roquefort, though our waitress told us later it was "too much" for her taste. (She suggests the bernaise sauce.)

The lamb chops, meanwhile, were tender (if a bit too fatty) and tasty. Despite its being drenched in a pool of red wine sauce, the lamb maintained its own signature flavor, and the celeriac potatoes that anchored the bowl benefited from the mixture of the lamb's own juices and the red sauce below it.

"This," my friend gushed, "is much better."

I, too, was relishing every savory and sweet morsel. The wine pairings were better, the fries were better, and dessert (creme brulée for my friend and a pear-and-dried-cherry crepe for me) was nearly heavenly.

A waiter, the same tall young man we had the first night, had acted as our suitor's spokesman. He directed our attention to the brasserie's every wonderful detail. The long and lovely wine list (laid out by French region), for instance.

He saw to it that we were never short on La Provence's deliriously wonderful french bread. He made certain that our meats were cooked to our liking.

Oh, how La Provence courted us.

Sure, it was still too loud and the table arrangements too awkward. There was still an unnecessary amount of sauce.

"No relationship," my friend and I told ourselves, "is perfect."

But we know what makes them work: It's the effort. It's that they are always trying to do better, to do right.

And somewhere in that effort, goodness comes. Hope is rewarded.