This remains my favorite restaurant for fresh oysters and shellfish and seafood of all types. Despite its renown and popularity, Le Dôme still delivers extraordinary quality and freshness. The cancale oysters, which come from the waters surrounding the island/monastery of Mont St.-Michel, taste as if someone had concentrated the seawater in which they live. Their “taste of the sea” freshness is almost like a concentrated jell of oysters. Their intensity and freshness blew me away. My wife ordered a dish that would make a sashimi chef proud, the raw slices of scallops sandwiched with black truffles. She enjoyed it immensely, and I ate as many bites as permitted. As I have written in other Hedonist Gazettes, soupe du poisson is a peasant dish, but it is rarely executed as perfectly as it is at Le Dôme. From the hot mayonnaise (the rouille), to the freshness of the fish stock, this is a labor intensive dish that must be prepared just right, and the Le Dôme kitchen does it exquisitely. It’s a heavenly, garlic, spicy soup. Two other wonderful dishes include the salad of perfectly cooked lobster, and the finest sautéed sole in France. The sole meunière consists of fresh sole that is pan-fried in clarified butter. Simple, but striking in its nuances, freshness, and flavors.

With this meal we drank several bottles of a terrific Loire, the 2005 Sancerre from Nerveu, which was the perfect foil for the cuisine, and the prodigious 2005 Vatan Clos de Noere – a gorgeous, rich, yet textbook Sancerre.