I ate there a couple of weeks ago for the first time with a good friend.
Food and service were quite good, and the wine unfortunately was very poor. Now when I say that, let me give you some background.
I’m not a sommelier, I don’t even play one on TV. However, I have frequented a lot of bistros, having lived in France, and I invariably order one of two dishes when I visit a bistro for the first time. Steak tartare or steak frites. I like to compare apples to apples - if I want to know if bistro A is better than bistro B I try out one of their staple dishes (every bistro in France does a steak frites). By the way, steak frites is just a fancy way of saying steak and french fries. Of course, the results can range from ghastly to sublime, but that’s why you read restaurant reviews, right?
Now, the fellow who chooses the wines at Petit Louis (located in one of Baltimore’s ritzier suburbs) is the husband of the owner, chef Cindy Wolf and a self-proclaimed wine connoisseur. So one would think that the house wines would be decent. It’s like a law of bistro cookery - you have to offer a competent red and white house wine at a reasonable price. You can have all the fancy wines you want, but when you buy a dinner it had better come with a decent house wine.
I ended up trying four of their wines by the glass before I found one marginally acceptable (at $13/glass!). Now, while I don’t know French wines anywhere as near as well as I know California reds, this is pretty horrible.
After all, these were the house recommendations.
Notwithstanding the awful wine choices, the salad romaine was truly mediocre (chopped bits of romaine with an admittedly flavorful goat cheese added).
On the plus side, my steak frites was exemplary as was my flan dessert.
But I find myself quite reluctant to recommend the place. While the food was quite acceptable (overall), the house wines weren’t and when you throw in their extraordinarily snobby attitude toward bringing one’s own wine (bad attitude is never acceptable but I suppose the reluctance to allow outside wines in is if you have good offerings yourself) it just moves the restaurant into the category of one this reviewer is unlikely to visit again.
Petit Louis Bistro
4800 Roland Ave
Baltimore, MD 21210
(410) 366-9393