Cuisine soars to operatic highs - except for the eggplant

My husband's culinary obsessions come and go as quickly as a KFC delivery bike. Thankfully, the fried-chicken phase has long gone, but we still have cans and cans of pâté and foie gras that have been sitting in our cupboard since a trip to Paris two years ago. Canned dolmades have proved a little more successful - there are only a few of them left in the pantry - although pasta hoarding has recently reappeared. We now have enough boxes of variously shaped pasta to get us through World War III or at least open our own Italian restaurant. However, some relationships have proved more enduring. All the paraphernalia surrounding fresh coffee, for example (and Illy coffee is the drug of choice), has been an obsession for years. And olives, Asian food with steamed rice and homemade hamburgers on the grill continue to be firm favorites. And then there is lamb. Pause for a moment and consider how hard it is to write a restaurant review when your dining companion insists on ordering lamb almost every time. It's difficult to wax lyrical with new superlatives and luscious adjectives when I'm describing lamb in all its forms - from grilled kebabs to baked legs, tandoori chops to little loins.

And so, here I go again. At a recent dinner at La Boh¯me, David chose the loin of lamb with sautéed new potatoes and French beans. These delicate lamb chops were cooked to perfection: light pink on the inside with a crispy rosemary-seasoned crumbed crust. The beans had that limp, overcooked look, but the spuds were crisp and hot. The waiter didn't ask me how I wanted my fillet of beef cooked - and I forgot to tell him anyway, which is a shame because it was a little overdone for my taste. But the meat itself was perfect: a small, thick fillet that was tender to the knife and served on a delectable fried potato rosti, and a sweet concoction that the chef deemed to be ratatouille. It was a perfect meal. And, in fact, La Boh¯me has been serving hot dinners in Warsaw since 1996. It has a somewhat posh reputation, perhaps because it's a haunt for patrons of the nearby National Theater, who usually pop in for a pre- or post-show meal. And it also has an even posher sibling inside the Warta tower on Aleje Jerozolimskie. The interior is a kitsch concoction of white and cream with gold trim, but on the night we dined, all guests were requested to sit outside under the restaurant's canvas awning. This is a perfect place to spend a summer's day or evening, but now that the nights are getting cooler, it's a touch frosty. But the autographed crockery and napery, the sparkling wine glasses and cutlery, gave it a rather special feel.

Backtracking to our starters, David's cream of pumpkin soup seasoned with fresh ginger disappeared in minutes. Pumpkin is something of a rarity in Poland, and it's not always the sweetest variety - something that afflicted this soup - and it was hard to detect the ginger. But the soup was warm and rich. My entrée, baked feta cheese with grilled eggplant left me wanting. The feta cheese was creamy and salty (although I could see it had come straight out of one of those little boxes of Polish feta that I never compare favorably to the real McCoy), and the grilled egglant was undercooked. And if there is one thing I don't like, it's semi-raw eggplant. It's a shame because the presentation was great. For dessert, we shared a slice of hot "apfelstrudel." The pastry was light and buttery, wrapped around a hot apple filling that still had a bit of bite to its texture. La Boh¯me has still got what it takes to serve up a good meal that has just the right mix of home cooking and restaurant richness - although, despite the name, I'd be hard-pressed to call this place a French restaurant. The menu doesn't have a lot of choices, but La Boheme is definitely worth another look because they do what they do well. And the wine list has some reasonably priced options, too. Dinner for two, excluding drinks, came to zł. 233 ($56).

From the menu: Black tiger prawn cocktail with papaya and limes served with toast zł. 42 Warm chicken livers on crispy salad leaves zł. 25 Baked feta cheese with grilled eggplant zł.18 Cream of pumpkin soup with ginger zł. 29 Loin of lamb with sautéed new potatoes and French beans zł. 68 Fillet of beef with ratatouille and rosti potato zł. 61 Fried fillet of sea bream served on marinated vegetables zł. 58 Hot "apfelstrudel" with vanilla ice cream zł. 16 Stuffed orange in Grand Marnier zł. 12 Creme brulée zł. 16