Name: Café Caillou
Address: 210 Rue de Grenelle, Paris, 75007, FR
Telephone: 09 78 81 21 12
Rating: 4.1

France

Paris

Café Caillou

Duck Breast

Onions cooked down for the best part of an hour until they are brown and sweet, simmered in beef stock, ladled into a bowl over stale bread, covered with grated Gruyère and put under the grill until the cheese blisters: soupe à l'oignon gratinée is the dish Paris eats at the end of the night. The onion soup itself is old, a peasant and market-worker food found across France since at least the eighteenth century, and the gratinéed version with its cheese crust is associated with the all-night restaurants around Les Halles, the central market, where porters and revellers ate it at dawn until the market moved out in 1969. Several bistros there still serve it, and it remains on the menu of practically every brasserie in the country. Abroad it is usually called French onion soup, which no French menu writes.

Everything depends on the onions. Yellow onions, two or three large ones per person, are sliced thin and cooked in butter over moderate heat for forty-five minutes to an hour, stirred often, until they have collapsed to a fraction of their volume and turned a deep mahogany without burning; a pinch of salt early draws out their water, and a splash of dry white wine or a little flour at the end thickens what follows. Stock is the second pillar: a real brown beef or veal stock, or a mix with chicken, simmered with the onions for twenty minutes or more, seasoned with thyme, bay and pepper. For the gratin, thick slices of day-old baguette are dried in the oven and laid on the soup in ovenproof bowls, Gruyère or Comté is heaped on top, and the bowls go under a fierce grill or into a very hot oven until the cheese is bubbling and browned at the edges.

Judge it by digging through. The crust should be thick enough to resist the spoon and stretch into strings, browned and not just melted; underneath, the bread should have soaked up broth without dissolving. The soup should be dark brown, clear rather than cloudy, and taste first of sweet cooked onion and then of meat stock, with real depth and only moderate salt. Mark down pale, watery soup with onions still crunchy or merely softened, a stock-cube flavour, a thin layer of cheese that has not browned, a mozzarella-like cheese that tastes of nothing, and a bowl so full of bread that it eats like a pudding. It should arrive too hot to eat for a minute or two. A version with a cream base or a sherry sweetness is a different soup, and a cold crust means it was gratinéed in advance.

Soupe à l’oignon

When i see duck in the menu i usually give it a try to experience the taste. I told waiter i wanted the duck cooked as medium which was served in that way.

At beginning it felt like a bit dry but eventually the center parts were juicy. Classic sauce was there and i liked it. 

It was served with mashed potatoes they were top quality. It is good to try the taste but it is not something I would order regularly.

It is my first time trying this soup. I always thought it is going to be a raw taste but it wasn’t the case.

So it is not just onion inside also there are breads with young cheese in it which melted. Pretty fine taste to be honest. I couldn’t finish all but it was a nice try. Would I order it again? We will see let’s not make any promises 😂

Also bread was burnt i don’t know if that is how they cook it.

Café Caillou

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