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.
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.