Earlier this month, the team that owns and runs the Bistro Georgette French street food counter at LoHi food hall Avanti Food & Beverage announced they were taking over four-year-old Washington Park French restaurant Café Marmotte.
The team’s ultimate plan is to convert Café Marmotte into a new Italian restaurant next year. But first, they planned to debut a new menu of French cuisine that would be served at the restaurant through the end of 2019. The team recently unveiled some highlights from that menu, which was developed by Executive Chef and Partner Ty Leon and contains a mix of French staples and more contemporary dishes.
The new contemporary dishes include a lobster spaghetti appetizer made with black truffle, lemon and marscapone cheese, and a seared foie gras served with a huckleberry waffle, foie gras ice cream and hazelnuts. Then there’s the new dessert menu, which features a chocolate pot de crème made with Chantilly cream and hazelnut granola; a brown butter cake with macerated blackberries, lemon curd and caramel ice cream, and an apple tart Tartin.
Meanwhile, a Lyonnaise salad, French onion soup, steak frites au poivre, escargot, and coq au vin are among the new menu’s more classic offerings.
The restaurant’s new wine and cocktail menus consist of an equal representation of wines from both Italy and France, a conscious choice as the restaurant prepares to transition from a French to Italian focus.
New cocktail offerings include Beverage Director Austin Carson’s take on the French 75, which is made with gin, matcha, green apple and bubbles. There is also a Lemon Drop made with Meyer Limoncello and vanilla sugar and a Vieux Carré, which is made with cognac, chocolate and cinnamon. The new Old Fashioned is made with bourbon, banana rum, and Nutella. Carson will be using exclusively The Family Jones spirits in all Café Marmotte cocktails.