Off the back of a great lunch at Le Pain Grille a couple of months ago, we decided to re-visit the restaurant to celebrate my friend L.'s exciting new job. The experience was a serious disappointment.
On paper, the meal should have been fantastic. The restaurant, designed to look like a sophisticated, classic French bistro with a light, airy feel, was heaving. The menu looked great, covering all the typical French dishes you would expect. The staff were friendly and welcoming, and there seemed to be more than enough of them to go round despite the fact that the place was so busy. The problem was that every aspect fell disappointingly short of the expected standard.
A horribly stereotyped (but probably accurate) view of French waiters is that they are rather sniffy and rude when it comes to customers, but it is also usually true that they are incredibly professional and efficient. The waiters in Le Pain Grille were not at all sniffy or rude but unfortunately they were just not very good - seemingly regardless of whether English or Cantonese was used. For example, an orangina never turned up, an espresso arrived instead of a cappucino, the duck arrived with potato gratin, rather than the requested frites and then re-arrived with neither gratin nor frites and so on....
All would have been forgiven if the food had been up to scratch but, unfortunately, that fell short too. I had the Cassoulet des Landes, 
a traditional dish from the Landes area of France, south of Bordeaux. As expected, it was a tomato-based dish containing duck confit, pork belly, duck sausage and white kidney beans (otherwise known as cannellini beans). It tasted nice, especially the duck sausage, but was over-cooked and the duck was really not as tender as it should have been. This was a bit of a theme because N. wasn't convinced by her duck confit which she felt was a bit dry. As a random tangent, in case you were wondering, confit is a way of preserving meat through the process of curing with salt and then poaching in its own fat - not exactly a healthy experience but one that should make the meat particularly tender.
Unfortunately we made the crucial error of choosing the taster plate for pudding - consisting of creme brulee, profiteroles, chocolate cake, nougat ice-cream and apple tart. 
No chef should have let that creme brulee out of the kitchen. It was seriously over-cooked with an unpleasant rubbery consistency. The profiteroles were little better, the choux pastry feeling and looking stale. All-in-all, a bit of a disaster. The pudding section was only slightly rescued by the arrival of a complimentary chocolate/strawberry mousse cake. It wasn't the best cake in the world but was considerably better than the contents of the taster plate.
The thing that really annoyed me about this meal was that I had had such a good lunch there a couple of months ago. Perhaps the kitchen is better able to cope with lunch or perhaps it was just a bad day for them. Either way, it has put me off going back in a hurry.
Agnes B's Le Pain Grille
111 Leighton Road
Causeway Bay
Tel 2577 2718
Agnes B's Le Pain Grille
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