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Well, who hasn’t heard of Cafe Bizou? #1 on Zagat, top ten on Fodor’s, #3 on AAA Senior Discount Road Trip Bonanza. Cafe Bizou. Same as it always was. Except…

That was the first indication of a change. It is no longer called Cafe Bizou, it’s called Bizou garden bistro. Nothing to be alarmed about, and even the change in decor looked pretty nice. They built a new foyer and upgraded the bar area to have a more regal club style. Fine, fine.

Cafe Bizou is a perennial star among mortal restaraunts in our vulgar city of Los Angeles. It has earned a rabid following and admiration for serving high quality French bistro food at reasonable prices. The service is friendly and attentive. The corkage fee is legendarily cheap.

That is, until our last visit. I’m not going to carpet-bomb Bizou on the basis of one visit out of hundreds, but everything related to the service was just off. This was our first trip back to Cafe Bizou since moving from Santa Monica, which pegs it at roughly a little over two years.

The menu is as solid and nostalgic as I remember. One thing about Cafe Bizou, is the menu changes with the speed of a bureaucracy. While they may move some items around, most featured dishes are only slightly altered, or separated from their side and paired with something else. Reading the menu was like re-reading a favorite book. Except some of the chapters were more expensive.

Being situated in the Water Garden must have its overhead nightmares, so, seeing an increase of a buck or two on some dishes isn’t a great shock. While the old menu topped out at $18.95 for the most expensive non-special dish, now the ceiling has been raised to $21.75. Still a bargain.

My biggest gripe was the service, which was tediously slow. It may have just been an off night. Our reservations were at 9pm, hardly peak dinner rush, but we had to flag down the waiter for damn near everything. Drinks took about 10-15 minutes to arrive. Bread took another 5-10 minutes after that.

We didn’t receive our apps until about 25 minutes into the meal, and the entrees came a full hour after we arrived. Not stellar service. To top that off, we had to request four separate times for more bread. Not four bread orders, for times to get one order of additional bread.

Ok, so enough with the negative, let’s talk about the positive. The food is as good as its always been. I started with the dollar soup, cream of potato-mushroom, Nayan had the stuffed mushrooms, and Mike got the carpaccio.

Food regret. “I shoulda got the…” usually comes from Mike’s mouth, not mine. But in the face of fresh carpaccio, I should have forwent my soup and got that. Bright and fresh, it had a healthy mound of shaved parmesan and greens over what he described as flavorful beef.

Nayan’s mushrooms are perennial favorites. You can barely make out the mushroom, not only because of poor flash quality, but because the mousse mixture overtakes the mushroom itself. They form an herbed chicken paste, ball it over the mushroom, and serve over balsamic reduction with a few arugula shoehorns. The sweetness of the onyx dressing really brings out the hearty chicken and mushroom flavor, complimenting it like a first date.

Our fourth in the group, Rohit, was on a diet or something, because he didn’t get anything…just picked away at the bread.

Here come our entrees! (45 minutes later).

I’m jaded, so if I blow through these you’ll understand why. We used to eat here like some people eat at McDonald’s on the way to the contruction site. If I didn’t mention it before, eating at Cafe Bizou can sometimes feel like an AARP convention or mausoleum. There is more blue dye in the dining room than a jeans factory. The reason is history and consistency. Old people know they will get the same great flavors and textures to gum their way through, at a price that’s attractive to someone on a fixed annuity.

That’s Mike’s rack of lamb. I didn’t eat it, but I’ve had it befo’.

Look at Rohit’s seared ahi. Being a wimp he got it cooked well done. Good going, burn the ahi.

Nayan isn’t too far from getting her AARP card herself, so she got the same thing she got two years ago, and the time before that and the time before that. Steamed vegetable plate. You know, for a cornucopia of vegetables, it isn’t half bad. They give you a nice chopped mushroom ravioli, orange butter and a vegetable strudel with the rest of the greens. That dish can actually fill you up!

Finally, mine. Grilled monkfish on a bed of shrimp risotto, lobster sauce, topped with fried carrots. I must be qualifying for my AARP membership because I recall getting this the last few times, also. The monkfish (”poor man’s lobster”) tastes hearty and the shrimp risotto soaks up the lobster sauce. My theory is the lobster sauce is a reduction of the lobster bisque, but the bisque is so good, hell, why not?

As I said, I’m willing to let go of the trudging service based on Bizou’s long standing ability to please and fulfill. There are three locations: Pasadena (mausoleum), Sherman Oaks (cemetary) and Santa Monica (Sunrise Villa’s Assisted Living). Any of them are well worth your time to check out and enjoy satisfying, reasonably priced French-Cal food.

By Zteve (see more of his posts). You can find more of Zteve's writing at his own website Gastrologica