Quarante Quatre

You might remember my post about a wonderful French restaurant in the "My Town" section I put up a while ago. Well, let me recommend you yet another French restaurant in Osaka.

I’m not sure what’s going on here – before last year I’ve never really been into French food, mostly because it made comments pop up in my mind like

“too fancy”,

“you pay a tiny fortune and then you have to check your plate with a magnifying glass to locate your food”,

“the waiter looks down on you for not knowing what wine to order”,

and

“what exactly IS French food anyways?”.

In other words, I was fairly prejudiced, uneducated and ignorant about the French cuisine.

(Then again, there is justice in the world because I pay my fair share when people ask me on a regular basis whether in Germany we eat white sausage every day.)

A friend introduced me to “Quarante Quatre” and we went there with two of her friends for lunch. Although at first paying Yen 2,800 (about EUR 23,00 or US$ 25,00) for lunch felt like a tiny kick in the stomach, I joined the group in taking course B, and couldn’t have been more amazed and satisfied with what was offered.

We were served a salad with a light herbal dressing, warm baguette, an innocent looking tiny starter that took me to heaven with its creamy texture and put me softly back on my chair, a great burdock soup, another breathtaking appetizer, heavenly soft lamb in sauce with seasonal vegetables as the main dish, and an unforgettable apple dessert topped with cream that reminded us of a light version of Nutella.

Overall, it was a delight.

“Quarante Quatre” is located in Kitahama, which due to its business offices is mostly busy during the day. From the outside the place itself is fairly unrecognizable – it’s small and with it’s brown wooden design outside it slightly reminded me of a typical old-style Japanese café.

I loved their yellow napkins and pink/purple small flower arrangements on each table. They felt like spots of spring.

The staff was amazing. They know my friend well and so we might have received special attention but everyone was very kind, welcoming and always had a smile on their face.

Sometimes they have “Petit Concert” there, it seems. I’m assuming it’s French music.

And voilà, here is the link to Quarante Quatre and a few pictures.

German bread

Most Japanese prefer soft white bread. Therefore it's not easy to find dark, hearty, rich, densely textured bread in Japan. By the number of adjectives I used it’s not hard to guess how much I miss REAL bread!!!!

My mother and a friend were so sweet to send me a few bread mix packages from Germany the other day and all of them were quite healthy dark bread types. One was even gluten-, lactose-, and wheat-free.  Mind blowing! 

I always find a way to mess up even easy instructions and I didn't want to take any chances here. That’s why I was happy to meet up with one of my friends, who is enrolled in a one-year bread-baking course. She really knows how to make crusty, beautiful baguette and other kinds of bread. She is also very interested in organic food in general.

We were both looking forward to baking all bread mix packages on one single day.

We had one oven, three bread mixes, and 6 hours in total to get everything done.

“Why sweat?” (as one of my friends likes to say), you’ll think – “That sounds like a lot of time!”,  but different bread have different rest times, which made the whole process a little challenging.

Luckily, my friend had learned at her bread baking course how to plan out a time table and so we managed to not only finish baking all three bread mixes but we also had time to a “Brotzeit”, a light meal at the end.