Simple everyday French cuisine with superlative execution…read more Superlative execution is a good thing. I had two dishes that you have eaten a million times. 1) Veal Parmigiana (French people eat this too. It is not purely an Italian dish). 2) Creme Brulee. Both of them were the finest versions I have ever had of either dish. * * * The Veal Parmigiana was a pure quality of raw ingredients play. The French have magnificent veal. The United States has mediocre veal. This dish shows what a huge difference veal quality means. One bite of the naked veal with no sauce and no cheese on it - And I could see I had entered a whole new realm of veal eating. There is more to La Belle Colombe's execution than just good veal. La Belle Colombe puts a thick slice of eggplant on top of the veal. The eggplant was the eggplantiest eggplant I have ever had in my life. ("Eggplantiest" is a real word. As of now. Sez me.) Their eggplant makes the eggplants I get in my supermarket at home seem like cardboard. Which did I like better, the veal, the eggplant or the tomato sauce with cheese? Oh my god, can I have ten weeks to decide With me eating their veal parmigiana every day just to be sure? * * * But then there was dessert. You think you know what creme brulee is all about? La Belle Colombe will change your entire thinking about the dish. Americans make a sweet creamy pudding on the bottom which gets covered with crispy caramelization on top. But the crisp caramel glaze is just a lid for what is in essence a very creamy custard. The sugar in the custard makes the dish dessert. La Belle Colombe reverses the roles. Very very little sugar is put in the custard. A spice is added - not to make things interest - but to make things dull. The cook is trying deliberately to make the custard as flat as uninteresting as possible. The spice cancels out whatever sugar or dairy taste is there - giving you a base of creamy nothing. Why would any cook deliberately do that? So You Taste The Crispy Brulee On The Top. The cook is saying, why should I bother grilling the custard if nobody is going to taste all the work I put into this? The creme brulee crust is not just a wrapper that you take off and throw away. The cook at La Belle Colombe puts much more of a char on the brulee crust than you are used to seeing. This brulee is really really really brulee. It is charred and broiled like a steak. And THIS crust really tastes like something. * * * Pretend that the custard in a creme brulee is the saxophone and the crust is the bass. The cook is saying - Bass Solo! The saxophone player gets away from the front of the stage and has a beer. It is time for the bass player to show what he can do. THIS brulee crust is Charles Mingus all the way! An interesting dessert I would be happy to have over and over and over again. * * * There are no novelties on the menu of La Belle Colombe. These are all standard French favorites. But they are so so good ... and in some cases ... they are original takes. A fine fine fine establishment.