Le Boeuf is inspired by the 1930 Café de Paris restaurant in Geneva which is a world famous for entrecôte (a rib eye steak) with its butter herb secret sauce, later became known as the “Café de Paris” sauce.  Its formula is as secret as the one of Coca Cola and you can buy the sauce in butter-like bars to take home.  This restaurant later inspired Paris’ most iconic entrecôte restaurant of Paul Gineste de Saurs, Le Relais de Venise in 1959 (my all time favorite restaurant) and its sister restaurants Le Relais de L’Entrecôte.  

The formula is simple – you tell the waitress how you want your steak cooked.  Then you are served a green walnut salad in light vinaigrette dressing, followed by entrecote-cut steak cooked to your liking in its famous sauce with unlimited “pommes allumettes” fries.  Simple but heavenly.

As the No. 1 fan of the Geneva and Paris versions of entrecôte, I was eager to try Le Boeuf and first appreciated that the restaurant told the story and history of the iconic establishments in Geneva and Paris, both in their publicity in the Bangkok Post and on their menu.  It was clear that the goal of Le Beouf was to bring the Café de Paris experience to Bangkok with its own little twist (unlike the scam l’Entrecôte de Paris in Bangkok which copied Le Relais de Venise entirely; presented itself as a branch selling “its secret family recipe sauce” which was utterly disgusting and stole advertisements from the original restaurant to use in their menus, posters, and Wongnai review blogs). 

The restaurant is situated at the Mayfair Marriott in a pavilion like structure.  When entering, you feel like you are in old Paris or Geneva, the only difference being that there is plenty of space.  There are round romantic candlelight tables by the window.  The restaurant manager from Paris was very nice, cordial and well understood the service industry.

The salad in French vinaigrette was good.  I would have preferred butter lettuce over iceberg but I think for the locality and value, iceberg was fine.  We ordered our steak bleu and rare and our meat came to perfection.  The sauce was very tasty, a great combination butter and herbs.  Now, the recipe here is slightly different from Café de Paris in Geneva.  I felt like it was a little heavy on the salty side and parsley.  The volume of sauce served seemed to be less than Café de Paris or Le Relais de Venise, so the meat did not completely absorb the sauce.  We were able to order additional sauce at THB 200 so this was fine.  We take the difference in sauce and serving as the individual interpretation of the sauce of this restaurant and still enjoyed it very much.  The price of THB 680++ is very reasonable for the quality of food, location, and experience.  The wine list is short but we enjoyed what was recommended to us and the profiteroles were decent too.

We will be coming back often and highly recommend anyone to give it a try!  
