Le Gourmand
425 N.W. Market St.
784-3463
Wednesday - Saturday, 5:30 - 10 p.m.

As Ballard's long-loved classic French restaurant, Le Gourmand was one of the first to tout the importance of locally available, fresh and seasonal ingredients.

Chef owner Bruce Naftaly is credited with inventing a whole new cuisine based on Northwest ingredients. Expensive and elegant, the restaurant has always been a haven for those who appreciate perfection and don't mind dawdling over dinner, sometimes for hours.

Le Gourmand likes to do things the old way.

Even Le Gourmand has been affected by the current recession, and to stir up some business they've begun offering a less pricey version of their prix-fixe menu, $45 for three courses.

The ingredients are still fresh and local, and the purveyors are listed on the menu, a practice started at Le Gourmand well before other restaurants caught on to the trend. Sadly, this menu does not live up to expectations.

The new version of the menu includes three choices for the appetizer and entree, and two desserts. Blintzes filled with sheep's milk cheese may have been fine on their own, but the chive butter sauce they swam in covered the entire plate. In contrast, the gorgeous deep-green spinach and watercress soup was thick and intensely fragrant, delivering in its simplicity the promise of Le Gourmand.

Long known as the Ballard King of Sauces, Naftaly may need to do a bit of sauce updating. Too plentiful and too sweet, the copper fennel sauce vin blanc with the poached filet of rockfish smothered an otherwise nice piece of poisson. Put simply, the fish drowned.

Roast free range chicken stuffed with mushroom paste had Jerusalem artichoke sauce for its accompaniment. The pairing was rich and hearty, perhaps a bit much for a summer evening.

Sauces may be what people expect when they eat French food, but can indeed be a double edged epee. When served with a heavy hand, they can even insult what lies below.

The prix-fixe menu was without salad, leading us to order the magnificent Salade Composée. Loaded with quintessential ingredients from organic farmers and foragers, this was the star of the evening. The shining reputation of Le Gourmand sparked in this large, colorful platter. Small and powerful, the Morel mushrooms beefy and robust flavor caused a feverish to-do at our table.

Hopes faded as our dessert failed to rescue the meal. While "Rhubarb & Strawberry Crisp with Vanilla Crème Fraîche Ice Cream" sounds like a can't miss winner, our strange experience with the crisp missed indeed.

While one of the servings was solid and enjoyable, the other tasted as though someone had spilled a sugar bowl into the ramekin, leaving it so sweet as to be inedible. What could have led to this?

The waits between courses were l-o-n-g, even to get a menu. Service appeared somewhat disengaged, although friendly. Our visits to a variety of France eating establishments almost universally feature solid pacing and progression.

Certainly there is a French tradition of allowing diners to linger over dinner for extended periods, but this is usually driven by diner preference, not wait-staff scarcity.

There were, to be fair, many special touches at Le Gourmand. For example, we were offered a bottle of wine which wasn't on the list. We were also lucky to have our server share stories of mushroom foragers coming around to the Le Gourmand with their precious cargo. And these are the details upon which Le Gourmand was built.

Other things we like about Le Gourmand are the eclectic decorating style, the arty and comfortable decor, the unusual location in an old house, the wonderful tiny connected bar (Sambar, with its own menu) with the leafy magical garden seating area.

But even the bar has warts too big too ignore. Wait times in the bar can be atrocious as well. Handcrafted drinks take time to build, but we once went with a party of four and the last person at the table got their drink an hour after we sat down.

We were exhausted by our evening at Le Gourmand, tired from the intensity, the waiting, and the sauce. This felt fitting, as Le Gourmand seemed a little tired as well.

The Ballard Food Police visit all establishments anonymously and pay for all food and drink in full. Know anything we should know? Tell the Ballard Food Police at ballardfoodpolice@gmail.com.