Lavinia, La Defense, Paris, France

After spending the morning at The Eiffel Tower I’d headed back to my hotel, The Hilton Paris at La Defence, for a little bit of a siesta to get over the jet lag.

Hunger got the better of me so I searched TripAdvisor to see what decent restaurants were close to the hotel and I found one called Lavinia in the CNIT complex that the hotel is also part of.

Lavinia is a restaurant with a wine shop attached (or a wine shop with a restaurant depending on your point of view). There’s no printed menu but the menu of the day is written on the huge blackboard on the wall.

Lavinia, La Defense, Paris, France

I’d turned up around 1:30pm so the service was in full flight and some of the menu items were no longer available.

For starters there was a very nice Ham and Melon plate that was just the right size. For the main I chose Tuna Steak, now I’m not normally a tuna fan but I thought I’d take the plunge and I was not disappointed.

The beauty of eating in a restaurant with a wine shop attached is that you can be pretty sure that the wine selection is good and there was a splendid selection of all varieties. You could do some damage to your liver in this place!

The food was great for my first “real” french meal.

HOWEVER, one thing I noted as I was going back through my receipts a couple of days later was that they’d charged me twice for the entree. A €10 error… I was pissed but couldn’t really do anything at that stage.

My note to you – check your bill before you swipe your credit card.