Vive la Tripaille! - Emile's Restaurant

Before I begin, sorry for the belated publishing of this post. It's a little outdated...

Valentines Day is often an occasion celebrated by loved up couples by eating food, whether it be heart shaped chocolates, edible body paint or a 3 course dinner. My boyfriend and I opted for the latter and decided to try the highly rated (on TripAdvisor) restaurant Emile's in Putney which specialises in an 'eclectic mix of modern British and classic French'. On its slightly demode website, it boasts of being 'part of Putney's restaurant scene for over 22 years' and the outdated decor certainly backs up this statement, making you feel as if you've been welcomed into someone's dining room. It also states that 'customers soon become friends' which was evidently their intention as we were greeted by numerous members of staff on our arrival and were soon addressed on first name terms.

The menu was surprisingly varied considering it was a special menu for the occasion and for what seems like a small restaurant. There were several types of meat available on the menu including lamb sweetbreads which I very naïvely assumed would be pieces of tender lamb served upon some type of bread. I was wrong. I was informed by my Mother that a sweetbread is in fact a gland, usually from the throat, gullet, neck or pancreas of the animal.

After doing a little research I discovered that these types of meat were considered a sort of delicacy in French cooking and one that is in danger of becoming extinct. Stéphane Reynaud is a famous owner of of restaurant Villa 9 Trois in Paris and comes from a family of butchers and pig farmers in the Ardeche region of France. His cook book 'Ripailles: Traditional French Cuisine' exclaims "Vive la tripaille!" (p46) which translates as "Long live innards!" demonstrating his passion for the parts of an animal often rejected by the English tongue. He tells us of his love for a woman named Colette who is the 'living memory of all that Lyon can offer our fickle palates' (p11) and she certainly has no qualms about dicing the insides of an animal as she, 'chops up and packages innards and chitterlings and tends to sausage meat like others tend their roses' (p11). This traditionally French attitude to the innards of an animal made me feel a little better about the lamb sweetbreads I unknowingly tucked into as eating as depicted as a gracious gesture; "There was something noble about eating, a true privelege of the strong body" (p7).

The menu offers a romantic tipple at the very top of the page before any suggestion of food to get their customers in the celebratory mood. There are various options in each category offered of starter, main and dessert, allowing the customer a dish to suit every tastebud. Traditional French techniques of cooking are dotted all over the page such as 'Soufflé', 'Rillette', and 'Sauté', treating the  English customer to approaches to cooking not usually offered whilst typically French ingredients truffle-scented gravy and Béarnaise are also stashed into dishes. There is a lot of attention to detail throughout the menu, with every ingredient having its flavour considered and attempting to add something to it that will compliment it, such as the escalope of veal being stuffed with goat's cheese and the squid being coated in sichuan pepper. Every meal included small gestures of detail such as the game chips that accompanied the roast breast of goose that both myself and my boyfriend treated ourselves to.

Not only do Emile's provide an outstanding selection of French food with a British twist in the restaurant, they also offer a home delivery service for 'home cooking alternatives' especially designed for the middle-class residents that surround the restaurant, situated in a very nice part of South-West London. This service allows restaurant standard food to be delivered to your door so that you can either fob the food off as your own creation to impress guests, or you can make having a takeaway unnecessarily more difficult by having to heat it up yourself. This service would certainly have been welcomed in the era of Mrs Beeton whose whole reputation would depend on the service provided to her dinner guests when throwing a multiple course party for her acquaintances. Not only would the food be superb, but she could also pass it off as the handiwork of one of her many (imaginary) maids.