Nice central location, on a busy square, with a large outdoor seating area and a sleek modern decor inside.
Very reasonable prices for the quality. The food is good, diverse (ranging from French dishes to great risottos, to a burger & fries, to a killer Scandinavian marinated salmon with warm boiled potatoes) and (sometimes) inventive. The technical mastery of the chef comes through in his savoury dishes. We've tried many of them and they were all spot on.
Unfortunately I can't say the same for the desserts, which turned out to be complete disasters twice, so I gave up on desserts after that. I had a chocolate "parfait", which was not a parfait at all. It was a weird flourless chocolate cake but so dense that it felt like eating spoonfuls of solid butter cream. Just pure chocolaty cold fat. Pretty disgusting, if you ask me; but I guess some people may like it. And another time I had the "cheesecake", which was nothing like a cheesecake. It was a speculoos tart, with very little speculoos flavor and a spongy texture like a cake, not creamy at all. Weird.
Service can be a little unprofessional at times. Sometimes (not always) the waiting time is excessive (once it took us 2 hours to complete lunch) and there seems to be a foul atmosphere among staff, with a waiter prone to loud tantrums, even with guests nearby. But these incidents were the exception, not the rule.
Overall, still better than most places I've tried in Rouen (and will remain nameless because I don't want to post too many one- and two-star reviews and look like a grinch). Too bad their desserts suck, but there are many tearooms or pastry stores for a dessert nearby.
Last warning: between May and August, the restaurant lives off groups of 20-30 foreign tourists (Japanese, Chinese, German, US, you name it), both for lunch and dinner. Good for them, bad for you, the couple who wanted to have a quiet relaxing meal or a quick bite... read more