AUX BONS CRUS — Restaurant in Paris

Avoid this place if you're gluten intolerant. My wife is celiac, so I called ahead to ask if they had anything gluten free and they said it wouldn't be a problem. Not everything was gluten free, but she could have things like steak and fries with things like the pepper sauce. When we got there she proceeded to order that. First she was told that the pepper sauce had gluten and so did the fries, we asked if there was another sauce she could have and if the fries really had gluten since nothing else on the menu was obviously fried. The waitress came back and said the parsley butter was gluten free and indeed the fries were actually gluten free. When we got the food the steak came without sauce and we were told that all sauces in fact had gluten and she'd have to eat the steak without sauce. At this point we got upset and asked if there was something else that my wife could have instead of just a steak with no sauce. I also said that I had called ahead to ask, to which the waitress responded that "she wasn't the one that I had spoken to" The waitress then rushed off and came back with the parsely butter and said that it was gluten free after all and "the kitchen has no idea". We were pretty frustrated at this point, but the parsely butter looked "safe" so she ate it. Then half way through the meal my wife found a macaroni (?!) in the butter. We immediately flagged it to the waitress who was very apologetic about it and comped my wife's steak. The experience completely ruined the evening so we left.

I'm aware that not every restaurant can cater to gluten free diets / celiac disease, which is why I had called ahead. Given that I was then assured over the phone that gluten free dishes wasn't a problem I really would have...

I am unsure what went wrong here seeing as this spot is rated so highly. I will let everyone know their menu CHANGES. I would suggest booking a reservation and weeks before arriving check out the menu items. We originally looked at a menu from another season and year and when we arrived the food is not what we thought it would be.

We ordered the steak au poivre, the cabbage roll and the artichoke. We split the artichoke as an appetizer. We saw pictures online of a fully stuffed artichoke and were presented with a stem, egg yolk sauce and hardened egg yolk. The dish has absolutely NO flavour and the texture was mush. I need some sort of crunch in my meals but the "crunch" was hardened egg yolk. It was a really odd dish.

The steak au poivre was red as could be and honestly, inedible. My husband was chewing like a cow from side to side - his teeth could not cut through the meat. The pepper sauce was also drowning the meat and was spicy as it had whole peppercorns in it.

The cabbage roll was actually quite good. I was told this place was all home cooked, hearty meals and the evening will take a few hours. The cabbage sauce was creamy and the flavouring inside with the meats was tasty. The cabbage soaked all of the juices up. So this was our leading lady of the night!

Overall, maybe we ordered wrong or maybe the menu for the season wasn't the best but we did not enjoy our meal here. I am sure it could be a great restaurant but after eating here I think we started to realize we are not into French cuisine. If the menu items excite you then give it a go but just not a place we'd ever...

For the French, Les Routiers, an association of mostly roadside restaurants represented by a graphic sign of the same two words in white sans serif letters on a circular, blue-and-red background, strums chords of happy 1950s and 60s nostalgia — similar to those once evoked by the orange roofs of the Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain in the United States. The difference is that the French label — which was founded in 1937 when two journalists published “La Route Facile,” a guide for truckers that highlighted restaurants with good cheap eats and useful facilities — had a blue-collar, rather than middle-class family, allure. Now Margot and Félix Dumant, twins from a restaurant-owning family, have mined the chain’s retro appeal with several studiously decorated bistros that serve up a menu so profoundly Gaullish that Charles de Gaulle himself would probably have crowed with pleasure.

Aux Bons Crus, which is part of Les Routiers and one of four within Paris, has been a hit ever since it opened last fall in the 11th Arrondissement.

A friend and I recently had an excellent meal that included beet salad with a mimosa garnish (sieved hard-cooked egg); curly endive salad with a poached egg and lardons (chunks of bacon); stuffed cabbage and quenelles de brochet (pike perch dumplings in a pale pink crayfish sauce) from Bobosse, a celebrated charcutier in Lyon; and a shared order of Crêpes Suzette flambéed in Grand Marnier. The menu...