Sunday 7 September 2014

Long Sunday Lunch at Bitton

One of my favourite things to do is to explore new areas and try out new cafe's and restaurants. Sometimes it works out and we find a new gem, and sometimes it is a bit of a disappointment. In any event, it's always new and exciting.

When Sydney Trains is having trackwork on and we take the railbus we always drive past Bitton. I discovered this bistro because my inlaws gave me a Bitton cookbook. Full with French style recipes and cooking tips, this book is written by the owner of the cafe, David Bitton.

I have been to France a few times and the way the French eat is quite interesting. For brekkie, they often have a pastry or some baguette with butter and a coffee. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day, with multiple courses (including dessert), some cheese and baguette. Dinner is often super simple. A soup with some bread or a very light salad with some bread. Although I really enjoy my fitbit and exercising more I have also downloaded 'French Women Don't get Fat' because I want to be able to eat like the French and enjoy my food.

Bitton was really busy. It was father's day today so extra busy, but I have the feeling that this place is usually quite crowded. We were seated fairly quickly and handed over the menu. One quick look and I knew what I wanted. The brie salad! I was after a light French style lunch with some bread so I could still have some dessert. MrBehomeforT ordered the beef pie with spicy relish. We both had a nice wine - a NZ Sav Blanc for me and an Ozzie Shiraz for MrBehomeforT.

The service was OK. It was super busy but the staff was really friendly. A lovely French accent is always charming! Our food arrived after a while and I can image many people would be quite underwhelmed by the brie salad. It consisted of some lettuce, slow roasted cherry tomatoes and some grilled brie. That's it. I thought it would be a light lunch if I would order some bread with it, so I did. But the bread did not arrive with the salad and I had to ask for it. 

The bread was not very French. I was expecting to see a piece of torn baguette but I received (for $7!!) four tiny slices of bread with some butter (which looked like it had already been opened by someone else!) and balsamic vinegar/olive oil (which I did not order). Bit of a disappointment. The salad itself was very simple but the brie was good quality brie and the dressing was nice and fresh.



MrBehomeforT's beef pie was nice (he said) but not spectacular. We decided to order dessert and I ordered a muscat to go with it. The dessert was a chocolate fondant with salted caramel ice cream. Oh wow! It was so good! The cake was gooey on the inside and the salted caramel ice cream was the bomb. There were also some berries to go with it. I thought that we were given a botrytis semillon instead of the muscat, but it was a white muscat. Our neighbours thought the same and asked whether they were given the proper drink. A waiter came out and brought both the botrytis and the muscat for them to taste. It was indeed a muscat and it was nice. 







When I went to pay the bill I was a bit shocked - $120 is quite pricy. I was given a coriander pesto because I paid with a MasterCard which was a nice touch. All in all, Bitton was nice and we did enjoy our food there, however, we will save this one for special occasions due to the price point. 


Bitton Gourmet Cafe on Urbanspoon

Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Instagram/Bloglovin'

Creative Commons License
The content of this post by BehomeforT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Ellen,

    I have some good news. I've added a new feature so you can publish your blog posts on Urbanspoon yourself without having to wait for us to do it! Here's how it works:

    - Make sure you're signed into Urbanspoon.
    - Go to your Urbanspoon blog page (not your user profile): https://www.urbanspoon.com/br/70/12905/Sydney/behomeforT.html
    - Click "Edit blog settings".
    - In the Pending Posts section, click "Edit and publish my pending posts".
    - Then, enter the "snippet" text, verify the date and URL, and press Publish.

    Please make sure that:
    - The URL should be the permalink to the blog post (not the blog home page, a category page, a post preview, or a service like feedproxy).
    - The snippet should be 3-4 sentences (quoted from your blog post) that gives an idea of what's in the post.
    - The snippet should NOT include bylines, dates, address info, captions, tags, HTML code, etc.

    If reviewing a restaurant that is part of a chain, only add a spoonback for one of the locations. The only exception to this is if you are specifically and in detail reviewing more than one of the locations.

    Note: there may be a delay of 1-2 hours after you post on your blog until our system detects the post.

    We'll give you one week to do it yourself, then it'll go into our queue to publish.

    Thank you for all of your contributions, and let me know if you have any questions.

    Best regards,
    Greg

    www.urbanspoon.com

    --
    greg(at)urbanspoon(dot)com

    ReplyDelete