Description: On our trips to and from the Cathedral, we often passed Café Broglie on the corner of Place Broglie, but we stopped here for lunch only on the last day, and that because it was drizzling. We didn’t want to sit inside a stuffy restaurant, and the flimsy beach umbrellas of most cafés looked as if they wouldn’t protect us from a teacupful of water, so Café Broglie’s canopies looked inviting.
The inside of the restaurant is typical: wooden tables, large windows, busy bar counter. Outside stretch the distinctive dark green canopies, with the Café Broglie logo in large white letters along the overhang. We were seated at a wooden table with comfortable cane chairs, and menus handed over by a waiter who spoke passable English. The food on the Café Broglie menu is a mix of French, Italian and some (restrained) fusion. After much thought, Tarun and I both chose the same dish: faux filet with a sauce of green peppercorns. We both decided we wanted our steak medium rare, and accompanied by a glass each of Reisling. I usually prefer juice or an aerated drink, but the drizzle had put me in the mood for wine, and since this was our last meal in Alsace (and Reisling is an Alsatian wine), a glass seemed in order. Café Broglie delivered—the wine was lovely, dry but not mouth-puckeringly so.
The food too was excellent. The steak was beautifully seared on the outside and moist on the inside, with the jus just so: meaty and rich, perfectly seasoned. On the side was a helping of steamed cauliflower, carrots, peas and beans, and a little sauceboat each of a tart, creamy sauce studded with green peppercorns. And, just in case that wasn’t enough for two hungry souls, there was a dish of diced sautéed potatoes, crisp and brown, that we heaped lavishly onto our plates. And there were thickly sliced hard rolls to mop up the sauce and the jus.
Both Tarun and I agreed that the food was very good, and the portion sizes correct: not too much, not too little. We might have ordered dessert if it hadn’t been for the fact that we had a train to catch and were in a hurry. As it was, we paid €45 for our meal (which included a tip—the service had been swift and courteous, and we genuinely wanted to leave a gratuity). Highly recommended.
One word of caution, though: if it’s raining and you’re sitting outside, make sure you sit at a table that’s in the centre of a canopy. Tables at the edges tend to get stray splashes of rain, as we discovered to our discomfort (we’d finished eating and were waiting for our bill, so it wasn’t an issue, but anyway).
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