Josette's Bistro, a comely little bakery, wine shop and casual French restaurant, is everything you hope for in the genre. So, for that matter, is its owner, an irrepressible woman from Normandy with a name right out of central casting: Josette LeBlond.
I passed by this place dozens of times, before receiving an e-mail from one of Josette's employees imploring me to stop in. What good luck. I had a blast here, and plan to be a regular from now on.
Perhaps some of you are familiar with the Desert Shores bistro and restaurant called Marche Bacchus, which is a favorite among visiting French chefs and wine-lovers. That place started as a wine shop and morphed into a restaurant. This place is doing the opposite. Josette started this place as the Normandie, a French bakery and later added the restaurant. Now she is trying to increase her wine inventory for a retail business.
The atmosphere is charming. That's Josette in the all-pink portrait on one wall, while a large mural of bistro life in La Belle France dominates another. Josette herself is a whirlwind. When she isn't cooking, she flits around her dining room like a dervish, charming guests with a Gallic brogue so thick you could spread it on a baguette.
Tables are draped in white linen and set with fresh flowers and little red hearts. The restaurant is softly lit after the sun goes down, so the ambience is properly lush and romantic. You may want to rethink that Valentine's Day reservation.
Josette began her trade as a charcutiere, a French term for a person who makes patés, sausages, cold cuts and products from the pig. She sells more than one ton a day of her paté in Los Angeles, where she has an authentic French bakery called Normandie, which also doubles, as this place does, as a bakery.
One taste of the duck foie gras, or her grainy paté campagne, eaten with whole-grain mustard, and you may get hooked. All her charcuterie are on display in a pastry case, also stocked with imported cheeses, a line of home-style breads and first-rate pastries, such as chocolate mousse cake, French cheescake and tiramisu. She even does wedding cakes.
My first move here was to browse a number of wine racks and pick out a nice Cahors, a French red wine made from the rare Malbec varietal, which the bistro will let you drink with the dinner for a $10 corkage fee. Add that to a $10.55 price and you have a bargain. Once we were seated, our server brought a basket of sliced baguette and an addictive flatbread, the surface brushed with olive oil, sea salt and flakes of crunchy nori seaweed.
After a slice of the owner's yellow fat-laced duck foie gras, I was ready for a selection of appetizers. One of the sausages Josette does best is merguez, a lusty Moroccan spiced-lamb sausage the French love to eat with couscous, the fluffy semolina wheat pilaf. (Couscous is often served as a daily special.)
Both the black-pepper paté and chicken-liver paté are excellent, and so is the French onion soup, a beefy version with a Gruyere-crusted crouton on top. Shrimp scampi are sautéed a la Provencale, with tomato, olive oil and garlic. If you crave salad, try the mesclun greens crowned with goat cheese toasts, dressed up with a classic vinaigrette dressing.
This is one of the few places in Las Vegas you'll find the bistro dish hachis parmentier, a chopped beef and potato hash that would be just as at home in Muncie as it is in Grenoble or Marseille. My wife loved her sole almondine, a buttery filet swimming in lemon butter and shaved almonds.
I was impressed with my roast rack of lamb, delicious from herbs and bread crumbs brushed over the surface of the meat, then baked to a delicate crust. At $28, it's the most expensive of Josette's entrees. You get what you pay for. She also tweaks the bistro fave steak frites, or steak and fries, by serving the meat raw, in the form of a mustardy tartare.
The bistro is open for lunch, when omelets a choix (your choice) and sandwiches rule. The merguez makes a deliciously exotic sandwich, but the French dip is just right, and so is the freshly made egg salad, and even the Italian sub, if it isn't sacrilege to do it on a French baguette, as it is done here.
And then there are those desserts: a heavenly rich chocolate mousse; a creamy tiramisu dusted with baker's chocolate and powdered sugar; one of the best crème brulees in town; homemade crepes, with fillings like Grand Marnier, butter sugar cinnamon or Nutella, a chocolate hazelnut spread that is to Europeans roughly what Skippy is across the pond.
Sometimes, there is nothing left to say but ooh la la.