Haute Comme 3 Pommes

Remember my post about living life like a parisienne, simply spending time at cafés and enjoying time with your companions? What a beautiful - and expensive- past-time. Well, here's the visual accompaniment to that, with my lovely senior classmate, H!

For dinner, we had ramen at this small restaurant on Robson and Denman. We were lucky enough to avoid a big line-up - H claims that that particular restaurant has high quality ramen. While we waited, we ordered our ramen. You can pick the richness of the broth(this is based on how much fat they put in) , the cut (fat or lean) of the meat, and extra toppings. As we made our way into the shop, I was mystified. It had the exact layout of what I would imagine a traditional ramen shop would be like (I blame two RPGs for this haha). As mentioned before, dinner was good for the price we paid (well, I paid).

Afterwards, we left the restaurant with warm bellies... which were ready for dessert. The plan was to have cheesecake, but we ended up at this upscale patisserie (H's friends changed their minds) which I've longed to visit for a while now.When I heard the news, I might have started talking in an octave higher than I normally do . And started doing funny hand gestures. Classy. H paid for dessert, and I got 7 fabulous macarons while they got a spiked tea. Then we sat with their friends and had a lovely conversation while enjoying the sunset.

Eye Eat 17: - Spicy Garlic Ramen with medium broth and lean pork (H's)
                   - Miso Ramen with light broth and lean pork (mine)

[mine]

The verdict: I thought my miso ramen was good, but there were some things I was iffy on. First, the broth. Maybe it's just me being a pansy about spicy things, but there was a spicy note to the broth. The last time I checked, miso was not spicy. In spite of this, the broth was flavourful and I enjoyed it.Another thing which I wasn't fond of was the cut of pork. Lean meat doesn't mean dry meat. Enough said.

Eye Eat 18: Macarons - lemon, raspberry, mint, passion fruit, salted caramel, gianduja (fancy word for chocolate hazelnut), and earl grey.

[beautiful presentation, I felt bad opening the box haha]

[passion fruit, salted caramel, and mint macarons]

*the sudden improvement in image quality is accredited to a different camera with manual focus

The verdict: Between this patisserie (that H and I visited) and the one where I got the caramel macaron, I personally favour this one. These macarons were more dense and cake-like, and generally more rich in filling. Take for instance, the lemon macaron (not pictured since my camera died and I ate it). The lemon ganache/ filling was thick and bursting with lemon flavour. The mint one turned out to be a pleasant surprise! I expected the ganache to be too minty for my taste (something similar to the paste in After Eight chocolates), but it was very light. However, the earl grey one was a miss. I've actually never had earl grey tea (I haven't developed a taste for citrus teas), but I felt this one wasn't up to par with the others. There was something off with the flavour - I can't describe it in words. If there's one that I'd recommend to my friends/classmates to buy, it'd be the raspberry one. There were raspberries in the shell, and this provided a nice, fruity note to the almond taste.