Le Cinq *** (8ieme)

In the George V Four Seasons hotel on Georges V

It's hard to imagine a better place for a business lunch in Paris than Le Cinq. The other side of that coin is that it's not necessarily the best place for a holiday lunch - it's hard to get away from it all when suits surround most tables.

Le Cinq is beautiful, though, the perfect combination of the slightly zen Four Seasons aesthetic and the always eloquent over the top French zest for decoration. For example, rather than simple flower arrangements, there are a couple dozen 3-4 foot high vases with various similarly scaled long stemmed flowers at each end of the dining room, and rose petals scattered liberally around the centerpieces of many tables.

The food is as great as you would expect from a restaurant with this pedigree, and happily didn't leave us feeling too weighed down for the rest of the day. I had perfectly done green asparagus with truffles and a parmesan sauce for a starter, followed by a simply grilled red snapper on a bed of fennel, followed by an epic cheese plate (which in turn caused us to skip dessert) - oh and then they brought out the coffee menu, something I can't claim to have seen anywhere before. Anyone for Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee?

I've long since given up choosing wine in fine Parisian restaurants, since every deputy assistant to the deputy sommelier knows more about matching food and wine than I will ever know. And since the sommelier at Le Cinq is Enrico Bernardo, regularly recognized as the world's best sommelier, we left ourselves in the hands of the wine staff. Good call. By the glass, we had a nice white Bordeaux followed by a Meursault. I don't usually put that much stock in matching food and wine, but boy I tell you these combinations were something special, clearly something that the staff had thought about beforehand, and perfect for the lunch. (OK, you have now figured out that my business lunches aren't all that serious these days :-))

It's very expensive, as you would expect. But probably a lot less expensive at lunch than it would be at dinner....