SIMOSE French Restaurant (Shiose French Restaurant) Date
I highly recommend an elegant French date during a trip to Hiroshima.
There’s also an art museum, so after a museum date, you can naturally continue on to lunch~!
After spending nearly 50 minutes touring the Simose Museum, we headed to Simose French Restaurant at Simose Art Garden Villa, where we had a reservation for 11:30. The museum’s back gate leads directly to the restaurant. The French restaurant is located even closer to the Seto Inland Sea.
Inside the restaurant, centered around the pillar near the entrance, there are six spacious round tables for four on the right. On the left, there are three rectangular four-person tables that can accommodate groups and three square four-person tables, making a total of 12 tables.
Later, during the 12:30 seating, I saw a group of about eight people dining with three tables joined together. From the moment we entered at 11:30, there was already a notice saying that all reservations for the day were fully booked and walk-ins were closed.
The kitchen is open, and there seemed to be around 20 staff members working, including even more kitchen staff than guests, plus the dining room servers.
There are five lunch set options in total. Four are seasonal lunch plans, and one is a special lunch plan. The spring season started on 3/11, the day of our visit. The special lunch, created for the restaurant’s third anniversary, is called Émile Gallé’s Garden.
We were handed a pretty pastel-yellow menu. Since they offer champagne by the glass, we chose champagne. They opened a fresh bottle of Pol Roger and poured it for us. It wasn’t exactly cheap, but since it was for a date, we each had a glass to celebrate. Champagne is always delicious.🥂
The meal started with two kinds of pintxos, each presented on a two-tier tray like the one I had seen in photos of their afternoon tea. At a table for two, two portions of each were plated and served. The top tier was a quiche made with sakura shrimp.
The bottom tier was a fried potato chip topped with freshly harvested spring peas. We enjoyed it elegantly with champagne. Feeling a bit like we were having afternoon tea, we also asked for a commemorative photo and got a lovely shot. The next course was an amuse-bouche to delight the palate.
They served a cold soup, a cauliflower potage. It was rich and smooth, and with the added thick cream, it felt like spring was waltzing across my mouth. With the scenery outside being perfect too, it was one of those moments that makes you want to say, “It couldn’t get any better than this.”
Two kinds of bread were served before the meal: baguette and campagne. They looked similar since both were sliced, but I personally preferred the baguette, which was less hard. The unsalted butter was absolutely delicious. They kept refilling the bread, and we asked for more butter and baguette one more time.
For the hors d’oeuvres, they prepared a salad using vegetables and seafood grown in the Seto Inland Sea region during this season. But it wasn’t an ordinary salad. Each ingredient seemed to be brought to life, with decoration that made it look as if spring buds were sprouting.
This is a salad? It was so beautiful from the moment it arrived at the table that it completely captured my eyes. In the center were a sweet sauce and a tangy sauce, and they explained that it would be good to mix them together, so that’s how we ate it. We practically scraped the plate clean and savored every bit of spring.
Next came the main dish. I chose fish over meat. They said that today’s fish was a special offering of mejina. Since it was the first day of the spring season, grilled nibbled seabream was prepared, though they explained that usually grilled madai, red sea bream, is served.
Since the dishes change day by day depending on ingredient availability, it isn’t a fixed menu item but simply categorized as the fish of the day. In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed the tender, plump, perfectly grilled sea bream and finished the rest of the champagne I had been carefully savoring.
The clouds, as if splashed with paint, gradually spread into something artistic. I felt happy. Dessert came in two parts. The small dessert was the same for everyone, while for the main dessert, guests on the higher-tier course could choose, and since I had the basic course, I was supposed to receive the set one.
But as a special gesture, they let me choose the main dessert. I listened to the explanation, though there was a limit to how much I could catch, and I heard the first one was red berry and the second was pistachio, so I chose the berry one because it sounded better to me. The small dessert came out first.
And it was seriously insanely good. It was like soft-serve ice cream with two mixed flavors, strawberry sherbet and milk sherbet, and it was so, so, so delicious. How can ice cream taste this good~! I enjoyed it at least 100 times more than Amorino🌹.
When I mentioned that the main dessert looked like something I had seen in the afternoon tea photos, they complimented me on my sharp eye and said it was Simose’s signature dessert. If the small dessert had more of a sherbet vibe, this one was more gelato-style, so I was very satisfied that the two ice cream desserts had different textures and styles.
Enjoying the main dessert with black tea, we wrapped up the 90-minute Simose French lunch course. They said they hoped we would come back next time for afternoon tea. Even until we finished paying at the table and left, both the kitchen and dining room staff continued to show us warm hospitality. Thank you.