Vaillancourt Robert Personal Chef Service

Freshly prepared, wonderful French food at home without cooking because Chef Robert does it for you. He’s a personal chef and cooking instructor. I first met him at a cooking class at the Cook Shop. His cooking is just as good as some of the fine French restaurants in Vancouver. He charges $ 50 per hour for his service plus extra for the cooking ingredients. His service is very useful if someone wants to host a nice dinner party but don’t want to sweat in the kitchen all day.
He would meet you at your home to come up with a menu and find out which serving dishes you have for service on that day. During the meeting, he was friendly and informative. He wasn’t the stereotypical snobby French chef. He listened to my ideas and suggested possible dishes.
On the actual, he would arrive a couple hours early (depending on the complexitity of the menu and how many guests) to prepare dinner. Every dish we had was phonomenal. We had the following:
1) raw oysters on the half shell w/​a refreshing cucumber & cilantro mignonette plus freshly grated horseradish — That mignontte was light and refreshing while the horseradish had a big kick to it.
2) crab cakes w/​cilantro Asian style sauce on a bed of arugula salad — the crabs cakes were so yummy! It wasn’t fussy because it didn’t have a lot of ingredients or cheated by packing with loads of breadcrumbs. The sauce was light and refreshing a nice contrast to the «heavy» panseared cakes.
3) vichyssoise — basically a leek and potato soup but it was light because it was mainly cooked in broth and just finished with little amount of cream. He knew we had a few courses for dinner so he didn’t want to make it too heavy. The tartness of the crème fraîche helped balance the soup. Well done! It was so good I finished my mom’s portion.
4)pan seared pheasant breast w/​cumberland sauce served w/​wilted chard & potato/​sweet potato dauphinoise — the whole dish was properly composed. It had meat, starch & veggies. That cumberland sauce was very good. It was cream with currants and herbs. Since the pheasant breast didn’t have a lot of fat, he placed sliced salted pork to give the pheasant flavour and prevented it from drying out. In the end it was moist and packed with flavour. I could easily have another portion of it. The dauphinoise was tasty too, he prepared it with guyere cheese and cooked it in broth instead of cream because that would be too rich. Yummy! Yummy!1
5)Grand Marnier Soufflé w/​crème anglaise sauce– one of my favourite desserts! Not many restaurants in Vancouver prepare this famous, classic French dessert. It was so good, I could taste the Grand Marnier in the soufflé and in the sauce. The sauce was smoooooth.
He cleaned up before leaving. So the kitchen was back to its normal pristine state.
What a memorable meal! Money well spent.