Kiwizine: The Final Reckoning

To celebrate the end of our time here, we'd like to ask a favor of our readers: take a minute to read back through your favorite posts, and send your "top 3" list to panda.a.paris [at] gmail.com. We'll be collecting your submissions throughout the week, and next week (our last in Paris!) we'll post the results. Thanks in advance, and happy browsing!

As many times as we've gushed over Kiwizine, one of our favorite restaurants, we've never actually shown you a characteristic meal. A quick refresher on how it works: they're only open Friday and Saturday nights, serving drinks from 4-8 pm and dinner from 8-12. Each weekend at Kiwizine means a completely new menu, which is the only option both Friday and Saturday nights. The menu is composed of three courses (entrée, plat, dessert) which cost 17.50 euros, total. This makes Kiwizine the best deal in town even before we consider the quality of the food. Here's what we ate two weekends ago, when Becky was in town:

Entrée: Salade d'encornets avec croutons

Squid salad with croutons (which you often don't get on French salads)

A beautiful dish (as you can tell) with various textures for your mouth to enjoy. Even though we knew that these tiny squid were coming, they still surprised us with every bite. We can't remember what the dressing was like, but if we had to guess, we'd say it was a zesty vinaigrette.

Plat: Filet du jour accompagné de tapenade, de poivrons grillés et des pâtes aux épinards

Fish filet of the day topped with tagliatelle, grilled peppers, spinach, and tapenade

It's too bad that the tapenade looks less appetizing in our photograph than it did in real life, because this was an amazing - brilliant, even - combination of tastes. One of the things we love about the French cuisine we've eaten is that everything tastes best when you get a little piece of each element in every bite. Here we had bitter (the tapenade and spinach), sweet (the pepper), and a touch of salty (the fish) on the pasta base. Regarding the presentation of this dish, we recognized the personal plating style of the chef, Jono. He loves stacking layers of different colors and textures and tastes, as we've seen before: a lamb shank on a bed of puréed sweet potatoes, or another fish filet over grilled zucchini, or tomato-and-basil gambas over toast.

Dessert: Carrot cake

We know what you're thinking: carrot cake? So what? Just remember that this basically doesn't exist in France. In fact, for the most part, the only soft cakes to be had are chocolate (which makes banana cake an even bigger hit here than in the States). So a soft - but not melty - sweet cake with even sweeter icing turns out to be kind of a big deal. And as the lemon garnish might suggest, this carrot cake was a refreshing end to one of the lightest three-course dinners we've had in Paris.

Kiwizine (92, rue Rébeval, 75019 Paris, 06 50 41 61 07), you win.