Holy crap, what a good meal.

My wife made reservations at Le Gourmand after searching for interesting tasting menus in the Seattle area. Le Gourmand was what she settled on.

We arrived at the tiny little restaurant a little bit late for our 7pm reservation. It’s in a bit of an odd location— certainly not where I’d expect to find a high-end restaurant (kind of at the foot of the hill between Phinney Ridge and Ballard).

Diners can choose between a half a dozen different appetizers and entrees or can elect to go with the 7 course tasting menu. Either way, your last course is a small salad (odd— aren’t salads traditionally an early course?).

I elected to go with the tasting menu and was not disappointed.

I’ll enter in a few of the items for comparative purposes, but Le Gourmand changes it’s menu often, so don’t expect to find them on the menu.

The centerpiece of every dish is some sort of sauce (I’m sure there were other things that I should’ve been paying attention to, but you could dip a piece of cardboard in any of these sauces and be happy). The base of each sauce is a stock of some kind (“The chef works on his stocks all day,” we were told) with liberal amounts of cognac and interesting pureed vegetables. Given the richness of all of the dishes, it’s pretty amazing that there isn’t a drop of heavy cream in most of the recipes.

Oh, I should mention that the desserts were staggeringly good. We shared a Creme Brulee with brandied raspberries which was outstanding.

As we walked out we noticed there was a little bar attached to the restaurant— we’ll likely come back on a Wednesday or Thursday (it was packed on a Saturday).

A final note: this is an experience, not a meal. Don’t go expecting to be out of there in less than 3 hours (especially if you go with the tasting menu). And don’t go Sun-Tues (they aren’t open).