I live for the lunches that are satisfying and elegant but no-frills. They’re accompanied by no fanfare or grandiosity but just the right amount of attention and care. Simple and clean, they’re precursors to what may be a fantastic dinner later on. But this is nothing more than a quick midday respite, some tasty things arranged artfully on a dish to tide you over and make you smile a little brighter.
This salad from Café Degas was, in short, exactly that. Romaine is tossed with succulent, chewy sundried tomatoes, creamy feta, and briny hearts of palm. About a half-dozen flash-fried Louisiana oysters, fat enough that you get one crispy morsel per bite, are scattered happily atop the mix. All this is dressed in a creamy vinaigrette that tasted, strangely, vaguely redolent of the broth they serve with their mussels. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it may have been white wine and even a hint of fennel — if any of you happen to know, please feel free to step in and put my puzzled mind at ease.
The best part about eating at Café Degas, though, is the atmosphere. The restaurant itself is burrowed behind lush greenery in a tiny house whose kitchen churns out traditional French fare that occasionally slips and lets out a southern twang. The dining room is covered but open-air, and its perch right on Esplanade will unleash your inner voyeur. It’s charming and the definition of quaint. When the service is slow, you feel all the more that you’ve been elaborately tricked and have in truth ended up on a sidewalk bistro in Paris; for this lunch, though, the service was so quick as to border on “hello, we’ve read your mind and put your order in the kitchen before you were even seated.” Followed by a shared slice of lemon icebox pie, whose thick crust and potent strawberry coulis were as tasty as the canned whipped cream was mediocre, it was a perfect midday pick-me-up.
