We finished off our time in Strasbourg walking around, continuing to enjoy the never ending charm of this surprisingly lovely city. We also enjoyed a yummy local specialty called Tarte Flambée, basically a paper thin crackly pizza crust with a sour-cream like cheese, thinly sliced onions and bacon.
Our train ride to Paris was supposed to be a quick painless 2 hours, but it turned into a 6 hour affair after someone was killed on the tracks (sorry, don't have any details) and had to be cleaned off. With each passing hour I was getting more and more nervous, as we had (what I thought was) a coveted reservation at Pomze restaurant for later that evening. Little did we know we were headed for a (dining) disaster of own.
The first warning sign when we arrived at Pomze was the fact that it was almost completely empty. There were 6 people eating in this quite large restaurant, on a Thursday night at prime time. It was the first restaurant we have been to that has been empty like this. Disregarding our foodie instincts, as I was convinced that this restaurant would be amazing, we were seated upstairs.
The restaurant was kind of pretty, though sterile looking and a bit like a boutique hotel lobby. The hotel lobby vibe continued when a guy started playing jazz standards on a gigantic grand piano in the middle of the room. He was very loud and it was very unpleasant.
Pomze's menu is confused. It is a little French, a little Greek, a lot Japanese (the restaurant is run by two Japanese brothers). But it's not some kind of cool fusion restaurant. It just doesn't make any sense. The one thing that supposedly unites the menu is the gimmicky fact that every dish contains apples (though we didn't perceive any apples in any of the dishes we sampled). But the only thing we found that united the menu was the fact that everything was universally awful. I mean, really awful. The food was cluttered and poorly executed. Matt's lamb was completely raw and inedible. After we attempted to choke down as much as we could, Matt commented that our meal on the plane ride to Europe was substantially better. It was.
After our appetizer was served, Matt noticed that we hadn't been served bread. No bread? That is unheard of here. I turned around and saw stacks of unfilled bread baskets, unsliced baguettes and dishes of butter in the shape of little apples. I guess they had forgotten to give us the bread. And really, if you can't get that right in Paris, you've got no business being here.
View the slideshow below (and don't forget to click show info to see the captions) and you will see our pics from Pomze as well as our final day in Strasbourg.