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Brasserie “L’Ecole”
This was also part of my weekend of Trying to Impress Big Calgary Firms. I was invited out to dinner by a different Firm B- than the previous night, but I was still kind of getting over the food poisoning and I had had interviews all day and I had a horrible, horrible headache. Somehow I had already established with these people on the taxi ride from the wine & cheese to the restaurant that I didn’t like mushrooms or seafood, but that was all forgotten when we got to the restaurant and received our menus, which proclaimed that if we wanted to order cheese we should order it at the same time as our entrees in order to allow it to come to the proper temperature.
This distracted the firm reps and the other two students for a while, but I was desperately searching the menu for something that didn’t contain at least one of seafood, mushrooms, lamb, or blue cheese. I had finally settled on a salad that had tomatos in it, because despite my gag reflex to tomatos it was actually the least gag-worthy of things that were on the printed menu, when the waiter came by and to my immense relief started reciting the specials, which were on a chalkboard behind where I was seated, which was why I hadn’t seen them before, and one of them was Steak Frites.
I got the impression that this restaurant actually wouldn’t have had Steak Frites on the menu, except that the firm rep had called to let them know that a bunch of people from Alberta were coming. The steak was pretty okay. The fries were kind of crispy and salty and came with garlic butter, which is exactly not what I like to eat on my fries, but I wasn’t about to ask for ketchup in a fancy French bistro in front of someone who might want to give me a job, so I just kind of left the fries alone and saved room for dessert, which wasn’t a big sacrifice because the starchy things I was trying to eat that day were not making me feel any better.
For dessert I ordered “Chocolate Mousse with A Little French Cookie”. This was definitely the best part of the meal. I was able to eat the whole thing, except the little French cookie, and it was very tasty and chocolatey. I thought the evening was pretty much a success, I got along well with the firm reps and the other students, I don’t think I made too big a spectacle of myself, and I didn’t get food poisoning again.
The bistro itself was of the funky variety - it’s sandwiched in between a Korean grocery and a Vietnamese grocery. It was a little pricey for me to want to go there on my own, and I would be pretty doubtful of finding something I wanted to order on the menu, but the waiters were all friendly and witty, and there were all these individual fabric washcloths in the washroom to use as towels and then toss in a bin when you were done.
3 pints of a beer I don’t actually like to drink.
Score: 
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