Advice: La Fourchette

This weekend was the best weekend of 2012- starting with a crêpe dinner and ending with a crispy chicken in a park next door.

However, I realized, talking to several close friends, many people don't even know what "La Fourchette" is, especially not tourists or newcomers to Paris.

La Fourchette (http://www.lafourchette.com) is a website that basically offers the function to reserve a table online, look at their menu/pricing and the best part- get a huge discount on a normally overpriced meal.  From either the website or the iPhone application, reserving a table is super simple and the service is really quite unique.  I've used the service about 5 times now in Paris.. and they were pretty fantastic restaurants.

This weekend I used it twice, once on Friday evening at a crêperie, basically a 15€ menu with aperitif, salty crêpe, sweet crêpe and the typically French 'cidre'.

Afterwards, Saturday night was the best deal- we decided to eat at a much fancier restaurant, just to have a little break from the cheap stuff, and so I was in charge of hunting around la Fourchette.

What I stumbled across was "La Millésimes" near the Montparnasse tower, an amazingly chic restaurant bustling with foreign and local individuals.

Normal menu averaged about 30€, we got the full entrée-plat-dessert deal for only 24€ and was the meal amazing.  Starting with a delicately wrapped goat cheese with garden salad,

My polenta and fish..

a polenta base with sautéed rougets filets,

and ending with the best lava cake I've ever eaten in my life... topped with a pistachio ice cream fait maison.


La Fourchette not only facilitates booking restaurants, it allows you to cancel, review the restaurant, search by type of food, read previous reviews, look at photos- an amazing service that didn't, unfortunately, exist in Lyon.  Paris has hundreds if not thousands of restaurants that are signed up for La Fourchette, and unlike Groupon, the patrons and servers respect the clients from La Fourchette.  I've never had a side look or a hesitation when I've booked through them, always treated with patience and care.

If you plan to move to Paris, already live in Paris, want to visit Paris- try La Fourchette to book your dinners and I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

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