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Auberge Flora restaurant in Paris

Non-Frenchies might not know of Flora Mikula, but over here she’s a bit of a celebrity after featuring on the primetime cooking show “Masterchef”. She also helped us out when we were devising the menu at la Belle Juliette.

After closing her restaurant near the Champs Elysées, she’s just opened a new one on the other side of the city, not far from Bastille, offering a vast tapas menu. We went down (after hearing reports that the food was delicious but with slightly flaky service) to test it for ourselves.

photo : JasonW

After opening only a couple of months ago, Auberge Flora has very quickly made a name for itself, mainly because everyone says the food is YUMMY! We were so there…

The restaurant is decorated in a sort of chic meets rustic style, with silver-edged plates attached to the wall, and chicken wire used as décor (!). Together with the metro tiles, and herbs growing in pots on almost every surface, the atmosphere is relaxed, colourful and reasonably noisy… more or less exactly what you’d want from a good Parisian restaurant.Right at the back, you may spy Flora speeding past the serving window, and whenever she slows down enough to see her clearly, she exudes an aura of zen that is inexplicable given the crowd in the restaurant. Impressive.For her new place, Flora has chosen to offer a choice of tapas, and when I say choice… there are nearly 40 different nibbles available from 6-18€, which is also pretty impressive.

However, we opted for the chef’s tapas menu at 45€. The only drawback is that everyone at the table has to opt in too (for the purpose of synchronising service), but that was fine by us.

While we waited for the first dish to arrive, some nibbles were placed before us – olives and crunchy dried bread, both if which were particularly tasty, making us optimistic for what was to come.

45 euros might sound expensive for tapas, but there’s a lot on offer here – an assortiment of hot and cold tapas, then either a fish or meat dish, and finally dessert. We thought that all sounded fine! And then the food started to arrive… and it looked rather great.

The hot selection included mussels, little creamy cheese patties and sardines…

But it was the cold selection that really impressed us. Served on 3-tiered plates, it was a mountain of almost endless food including:

– Guacamole and crunchy vegetables

– Sage paté

– Marbled foie gras and beef paté

– Aubergine caviar

– Potted lapin paté with capers and lemon

– Home-made tarama with coriander and fougasse (particularly good)

– Little glasses of goat’s cheese with basil

– Marinated octopus, fennel and lime

and lots, lots more! Isn’t Flora lovely? 🙂Accompanied by some very delicious bread, we weren’t actually able to finish it all. The great thing about having a multitude of small dishes is being able to try a dozen different things, and in this case they were all delicious, each with a different taste. Your palate is constantly revived, you never get bored. Thoroughly enjoyable.

And full as we were, this was only the beginning: our main course was about to be served.

For one part of the table, bass cooked ‘a la plancha’, with red Camargue rice in a bouillabaisse sauce, clams ‘au gratin’ and special olive oil from Corsica.

For the rest of the table, a rack and roulade of pork, slow-cooked Paimpol beans, chanterelle mushrooms and olive juice.

Beautifully presented, the looks were not deceiving – both dishes tasted amazing, with lots of different tastes and textures to surprise and delight you at each mouthful. Very very impressive!And to finish us off, even the desserts were tapas-style! We had a little crispy ball of what looked liked cornflakes in chocolate, a pot of rosemary-flavoured cream with a miniature madeleine cake, and an amazing rose-flavoured mousse over a stewed fig and biscuit. Super stuff!It’s been a while since a meal out made us marvel at every mouthful, but Auberge Flora definitely impressed us. Plus, there’s sufficient choice to allow you to go back often. Take our word for it, this place is soon going to be very hard to get into, so make sure you book in advance!

The restaurant Auberge Flora (here) is open seven days a week for lunch and dinner.

Tel. +33 (0)1 47 00 52 77

E-mail : restaurant@aubergeflora.fr

Facebook: here (not much going on, but some interesting photos of what the place looked like before they did it up)

Twitter: twitter.com/AubergeFlora (Dead: 4 tweets in 6 months)

To check out all our photos, click the ‘play’ button on the slideshow below, then click the four little arrows to go fullscreen.