While in Strasboug, my group took an afternoon for lunch at the two-star Au Crocodile.  And what a lunch it was!

This being the low-season for fine restaurants, the Etoiles d’Alsace is running their yearly Formules-Jeunes promotion, which means people under 35 can get a delectable two-star meal (and five courses worth of specially paired wines) for a mere 86 Euro.

Highlights of the meal included a velvety mushroom soup, a luscious slab of foie d’oie with mango chutney, a delicate yet firm carp with morels, and……a rich, delectable magret of duck served in blood sauce, for the gourmet vampire in everyone. Oh, and the little pastry nex to it? On the menu it was identified as a “Galette de Béatilles,” but we had no idea what béatilles were. We bravely asked the waiter, who responded by shrugging an pointing to his mid-section. Eventually we were able to determine that the pastry was stuffed with tiny morsels of duck’s heart and liver.

And all that leads us to what was clearly the pièce de résistance: Meringue glacée a l’Extrême. What was so extreme about it? Well for one thing, the meringue was dunked before our eyes into a silver bucket of “hautes liquides,” which I believe translates to liquid nitrogen. Then a warm strawberry soup was ladled onto the flash frozen meringue, which caused the smoke you see in the photo. Better yet, we discovered that if you exhaled with some of the dessert in your mouth, it made smoke come out your nose like a fire-breathing dragon. Talk about a showstopper! I think that poor little ball of litchi sorbet in the background was developing an inferiority complex.