Chez Fonfon

A deceivingly fancy restaurant in the middle of bustling Five Points, Chez Fonfon is a French restaurant that serves the artesian aesthetic but not the flavor. As long as a couple who goes make no comment on flavor of their food, it is the ideal place for a perfect romantic date night from a movie scene.

Seating:

Nice and simple. Padded wooden chairs and booths, red and brown color scheme. Since the restaurant didn’t open until 4:30 on Saturday, the lighting was dimmed, but sort of excessively. Like it was so dark I could barely make out my friend’s face sitting across from me. We were also placed in a corner booth, where I had to sit in a chair, which left me feeling like an odd thumb sticking out of the table.

Decor:

Dark and French. Bottles of wine line the walls. Freshly-made, never frozen/refrigerated cake in plates lying around. Pots and pans lying around the place and nice maroon lampshades. It gave a similar feel to Vero, but was a lot busier in its decor. The exterior is bland, but does have a nice doorway curtain that gave the interior of the establishment a mysterious feeling. Near the parking lot, a vent from the kitchen shoots out good smells from the back of the house. I guess I simply ordered the wrong things on the menu, which was unreadable to me since it was mostly in French (Ok, I take the blame here. I should really know what a pâté is before I order it). Read on to find out more.

Actual Food:

For starters, why do restaurants think serving sliced flatbread bread is a good idea? It’s always always ALWAYS hard as rock in the crust and spongy and nice in the middle. How am I to enjoy that? It’s like a really stale, really border-centric donut that isn’t sweet. The only spread they give is butter and raw salt flakes. No, I don’t mean salt, I mean larger-than-normal chunks of salt that mean your cold, buttered bread tastes like either bland bad choices or salty bad choices. Okay, moving on from my Bread Rant. The actual food was like a mini-buffet, except it never got refilled and it didn’t taste good. I ordered a pâté, which came with a lot of side dishes like marinated radishes in a teensy bucket, miniature pickles, and literal ground mustard seeds. And no, I don’t mean mustard. Sort of like peanut has chunky and smooth varieties, this was like a chunky version of mustard. Ungodly. And since normal pickles aren’t my thing, I didn’t enjoy the small ones either. The radishes were sweet but a bit strong. Tasted nice with the bread. Moving on. I ordered two main dishes, which, I admit, both of which I did not know how to eat/what they were: a pâté and a order of bone marrow. Turns out, a pâté is “mixture of cooked ground meat and fat minced into a spreadable paste” (Wikipedia), which is shorthand for ground-up meat, recompressed until it’s solid again. Semi-tasty, the texture was weird and Chez Fonfon included pistachios. Not bad. Bone Marrow - Bad. I expected some nice red marrow, maybe in a spread like they enjoy doing (like the stuff inside ribs. Pretty savory). Nah, this was yellow marrow, meaning raw fat. For some "people", this is palatable with a piece of SLICED FLATBREAD and a bucket of RAW SALT FLAKES. Get outta here. My dog really likes the bone though, so I guess I didn’t buy it in vain.

Side Note: Had some arugula salad. Surprisingly the best thing I ate all night. Very weird in taste, but blended SO nicely with the spices they added. Overwhelmingly good. Highly recommended.

Rating:

A French restaurant that matches all the visual requirements for being fancy, but none of the audio (rock and pop music) or taste requirements (The small portions did fit) is disappointing. 3/10 aruguleaves