My first meal on a school trip to France – a simple plate of salad, grilled steak, haricot verts, French bread and cheese platter – left me wondering how everything could possibly taste so good. I was introduced to these new flavours via lunch at a small bistro, one of those places where they throw Edith Piaf on the stereo, scrawl a menu on a mirror and voila! you have a Parisian bistro.
A bistro is also supposed to be cosy, unpretentious, serving a dependable daily menu with specials offered at painless prices. Then, there is the brasserie style of eating, which comes from the French meaning brewery; these were always establishments owned by a brewery where customers could enjoy the combined delights of a plate of steak and frites washed down with a glass of local beer, but now it’s much more wine bar than beer bar.
A brasserie these days is a place to be seen and to see, it’s also a venue that should make you feel good about going there, it should be welcoming, and the surroundings not be entirely the product of an interior designer’s sense of artifice. The Boulevard Brasserie is just such a place; recently opened in Paphos it is hopefully going to fill the gap in the market between pub, young club style bars and tourist cafés to provide somewhere anyone of any age can go for breakfast, brunch, lunch or supper and relish the very best local and imported wines.
The food here is drawn from the modern bistro hymnal, it’s a blessedly short menu. Starting off with breakfast you have a choice of different omelettes, home-made scones with butter and jam, a full English, also croissant and cakes. Interestingly, you can also come here and dig into a really good Scotch egg as a kick start to the morning.
Lunch offers three soups and a range of good quality sandwiches with fillings ranging from marinated chicken fillet in a ciabbata roll, smoked salmon and cream cheese, beef fillet slices with provolone cheese or an excellent and very filling ciabatta roll oozing with juicy Italian meatballs.
The salads all drip with various dressing from Caesar to citrus, vinaigrette and olive oil and lemon, and all work well if accompanied by a burger or with one of the five pasta dishes.
The night we visited, an English couple was rendered silent for half an hour as each tackled a thick cut pork chop the size of a small woodland creature – it wasn’t just the fact that they were married which made them silent, they were obviously in pork heaven, remarking to the waiter as they leaned back replete and happy, ‘that was the best pork chop we have been served in 15 years of living in Cyprus’.
Praise indeed for Andreas Constantinides, the man charged with getting the place up and running, and he is well qualified to do so as he has long been a feature of the ‘eating’ scene in Paphos as owner and master baker at Constantinides bakeries in Yeriskipou and Peyia. So, the bread, cakes and croissants are guaranteed to always be up to snuff.
Andreas is a wine buff. I dined and drank excellent wine with wine writer and sommelier George Kassianos and he made the best comment of the evening: ‘I don’t really fit into the young trendy places these days, but still want to go out and enjoy a glass of wine and a nibble. Whether it’s the charcuterie or the excellent cheese platter, you can come here on your own, sit, read a paper, work on the laptop, and just enjoy the partnership of good simple food and wine’.
Reassuringly with the menu all recognisable and very democratic, this is an eatery designed to service hunger as well as acting as a perfect meeting place for friends and, importantly, there is no dodgy loud music blasting your reverie as you delve into the delights of the herb crusted cod fillet.
Pricewise it’s very good value as each dish offers top quality ingredients so a starter of Spanish calamari (which can be sufficient as a meal in itself) is €5.25, salads are €6, mains for lunch and supper are around €11 with the elephantine ear pork chop a reasonable €7.25. A full English breakfast is €3 and the marvellous Scotch egg only €2.50. Andreas also promises to create a truly special bacon roll breakfast with a specially created bread roll.
VITAL STATISTICS
SPECIALITY European cuisine
WHERE Boulevard Brasserie, Kennedy Avenue (near the main police station), Paphos
CONTACT 26 910 871
PRICE from €5 up
