Enjoying a French Lunch Dinner: Our Dinner Menu

As you probably know, the traditional European (particularly, French) meal has three or more courses with an appetizer, or hors d’oeuvres, before a major meal with a side dish, followed by a dessert.

For this article, we’ll concentrate on appetizers, main courses and side dishes, and leave desserts for another post — we have a wide variety of desserts; too many to cover in this article alone!

Although traditional thinking involves the strict separation of hors d’oeuvres from main courses, we’ve added some appetizers to our chief dinner menu here at French Lunch. Nowadays, a single hors d’oeuvres dish is more than enough for one meal.

One such example is our mini blini with red caviar and sour cream, a product of both France and Canada. It’s a microwaveable meal of French pancakes blanketed in chum salmon roe caviar and sour cream. This is an efficient way for you to enjoy caviar almost instantly.

Appetizers

Our full hors d’oeuvres menu has more examples. You can grab plain potatoes au gratin or potatoes au gratin with porcini mushrooms baked in — both dishes use four potatoes. Au gratin refers to a dish topped with toasted breadcrumbs that's browned in the oven.

Potato au gratin is a cheesy baked potato pie with egg yolk, cream, herbs, and spices. Ours are from France, and you don’t want to miss the opportunity to try them!

 A French meal shop isn’t complete without escargot. We have Helix lucorum escargot in butter and cooked herbs, straight from France.

All four of those appetizers also work as full meals. That’s why we mentioned them in our dinner menu. But if you want your dinners to be a bit more extravagant, don’t worry, we have many other complete dinner menu selections for you to choose.

Other appetizers include tiny Mediterranean fillo quiches in a set of four, smoked salmon and dill fillo quiches, and brie and pear fillo rolls. You’ll notice that all three include “fillo”. Fillo is an unleavened and layered Greek pastry dough that gives a light, wafer-like texture to dishes. It’s a great choice for hors d’oeuvres items.

Our last two appetizers are a lobster- and shrimp-stuffed shell and a pacific salmon-stuffed shell. Both are from Quebec, and are relatively simple dishes that combine seafood with mozzarella, Swiss cheese, wheat, mushrooms, onions, and spices into a baked meal not unlike a small pie.

Dinner

Perhaps the only course that matters to you, this is our dinner menu. You can substitute our dinner choices for lunch items, soups, seafood items, or even starters, as we discussed in the Appetizers section — you have the freedom to mix and match as you’d like, and that’s the beauty of a meal shop.

Our food is cooked or bought with convenience, storage, and portion size in mind. A single appetizer might be enough for one, while an appetizer and dinner dish combo is enough for two or three. Our meals are flexible enough to accommodate everyone.

Enjoy coq au vin, a popular French stew that we cook ourselves using chicken, bacon, and button mushrooms with pearl onions, red wine, herbs, and spices. We also do French casseroles, or cassoulets with lean Toulouse sausages from Italy in red wine, tomatoes, grilled eggplants, red bell peppers, onion, garlic, olive oil, and herbs and spices.

Then there’s our very own tartiflette, a somewhat uncommon dish in North America. A baked pie of potatoes, onions, white wine, double-créme brie cheese and mushrooms instead of bacon, our tartiflette recaptures the original recette in a healthier way. Bacon tastes great, but it doesn’t have to be in everything.

If you’re looking for more meals, we have other categories that specific dishes are grouped under on our website.

Our Meat & Poultry section has rôti de porc, or pork slices covered in garlic and herbs, paella with shrimp and chicken, and beef provençal, a beloved French stew of beef, red wine, carrots, celery, onions, herbs and spices. Also try the French Shepherd’s pie, or hachis Parmentier with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, cinnamon, potatoes, and cheddar cheese.

Sides

A good side complements a good dish. But consider our sides for one other reason — health. Some French Lunch dinners are quite meat- and cheese-heavy.

You can get some extra nutrition by pairing your dinner with grilled zucchini slices, mixed grilled vegetables, a mushroom mix, or beans and carrots. We also keep nut potatoes from Belgium and Parisian potatoes if you feel your meal is too light.

Did you spot a dish that interests you? Don’t hesitate to drop by, check it out and learn more about it from French Lunch’s employees in store.

We’ve done a lot of research on the healthiest, most affordable, and most convenient approach to gourmet foods, and all of this research culminated in our current menu. We encourage you to try a dish you’ve never heard of before, be it tartiflette, coq au vin, beef provençal, or something else. We guarantee you’ll love it!

As always, we look forward to feeding you,

French Lunch