Dinner at La Broche - bad food, good company

On Tuesday evening we went to La Broche on Rue Stand with a group of my colleagues, 10 of us in all. As the venue was chosen by my Genevoise colleagues I was excited by my expectation of finding a hit. Unfortunately, at the moment Rue Stand is full of road works, so finding it is not strictly easy and when you've done that finding the entrance behind the holes and the fences is tricky too. Nonetheless, when we got to the terrace, we were sat outside a very pretty stone building, called the Arquebuse (though not a gun in sight). The terrace was just the right place to be on a warm July evening.

What's the food like?

I will be generous and say the food was alright, which was something of a major disappointment as I was expecting better. Nothing was particularly bad, with the exception of my desert, but nothing set my pants on fire. The menu is straight forward and offers you a series of choices between the dishes they cook on the broche (spit) unfortunately for all the choices the green salad to start contains Pignon Toastes, so I asked my colleague to explain to them about my allergy, and for the rest of the evening they panicked about giving me any kind of nuts, which did have consequences for my food. To start, whilst everyone else had a green salad with pine nuts, I was served melon, though only after we'd prompted them to come up with an alternative for me. I'd say this was probably my best dish.

How do you say rare steak?

For my main I had steak, saignant and most of it was rare, but I also discovered how unpleasant it is to eat a steak that isn't evenly cooked. The veg and the frites that went with it were pretty good. Unfortunately because of the nut thing  I missed out on a decent sauce, though you'd think they could have whipped up a decent butter sauce. Instead they served me with something a first year university student would try out on his housemates after telling them he can cook and getting over ambitious. It was pretty awful.

The desert menu came, and I figured I could rescue the whole thing with a good desert.  My favourite good desert happens to be Chocolate Fondant, which I spotted on the menu.  We had a babysitter to get home to, so we were conscious of the time, and on the menu it helpfully pointed out that there was a delay of 9 minutes associated with this particular desert. So we looked at our watches and we looked at our watches. Nine minutes came and went and still desert hadn't arrived. So by the time my fondant arrived I was intrigued to discover the cause of the delay. Sadly, as I tucked my fork into the fondant, expecting the gush of warm chocolate, it turned out that the cause in the delay must have been because they decided to turn the fondant into a chocolate cake - a disaster! If it says fondant on the menu, you expect a bit of fondanting, sadly there was none.  

In the end the surrounding and the people were about the best thing going on Tuesday evening, it wasn't the food, and it wasn't the service. In terms of price the dishes come in between CHF30 and CHF40, not the dearest there is in Geneva. But the dishes are definitely over-priced when you consider that elsewhere if you pay a bit more, you get a whole lot more to eat.