Travel in France: Post-Plague family reunion in Saint-Geniès; dining in the Dordogne; Death Row dinner; tricked into being side-tracked to Montech for lunch, poor Roy!; canal-side in Carcassonne, and why we seldom eat steak in France; Hotel Renaissance at Aix-en-Provence; murals and Ricard at La-Seyne-sur-Mer; cliffs and calanques at Cassis; flagrant disregard of cycle-path etiquette in La Ciotat; homeward bound, with a lot of excess baggage!
Three nights in the Dordogne
As a reminder, this is the first leg of our French triangle: from St Jean-de-Losne in Burgundy to the Dordogne. (NB: There will be a test.)
Lyndsay hadn’t seen Roy since BP (Before the Plague), and so was understandably emotional to hug her bruvver again. I’ve blogged several times before about her and John’s fabulous second home in the impossibly picturesque village of Saint-Geniès, about a 15-minute drive from Sarlat-le-Canéde – see here, here and here.
This time, I had a walk in the lovely countryside around Saint-Geniès, plus a couple of swims in the (thankfully) heated pool – but nowhere near enough to offset the excess of crusty bread, duck-lard and cheese… not to mention wine. Long hours around the table, catching up on family news and debating the state of the world necessarily involved plenty of plonk.
That first night of three, we drove into Sarlat for dinner at one of the little bistrots in the middle of town. For me, a three-course menu with not a scrap of green: paté de foie with toast, duck confit with that sinful pommes de terre Salardaise (potatoes fried with shallots and lashings of duck fat), and crème brûlée.
Restaurant routière
The culinary highlight was a five-course menu du jour at a nearby restaurant routière. Chez Sardan Restaurant Le Bareil serves and sells produce from its own farm, with a shop on the premises where you can buy non-perishables such as tinned duck fat and duck confit, canned beans, paté de foie, jams and other preserves.
For lunch, vegetable soup topped with yesterday’s bread, so it’s nice and soggy (waste not, want not); country salad with eggs and ham; roast rabbit with a tangy lime gravy; a beautiful cheese-board with house-made confitures (jams: melon and apricot) that you help yourself to; and panna cotta for dessert. The price? €19, including all the bread, red wine and coffee you want. That’s incredible value!
Travel in France: to Provence, via Carcassonne
From the Dordogne to Aix-en-Provence was a longer journey than we fancied doing in one day, so we went via Carcassonne, which of course we’d visited before. (Click here for my previous post with lots of boaty photos, plus cassoulet and more in Carcassonne.)
Quite unusually for him, Roy agreed to take a short detour so we could have lunch at Montech rather than at a relatively soulless autoroute café. Less unusually, he was easily peeved by the detour taking longer than my first estimation. (A good ten minutes longer!)
Lunch in Montech
Our favourite Bistrot Constant was closed, unfortunately – whether just for now or forever we couldn’t tell. So we left the car at the canal-side and walked into the town centre for lunch at Le Notre Dame. Mine was a duck breast and gizzard-heavy salad; Roy had the smoked salmon salad.
Travel in France: One night in Carcassonne
Roy had booked a charmingly furnished one-bedroomed apartment at 1 Quai de Riquet with secure parking and a view of the canal. (Note that this is not the famous old walled city of Carcassonne, which I’ve blogged about before.)
On the other side of the bridge was the prime mooring that Digby and Allison had kept for our boat back in the summer of 2017, on a public holiday when the entire town was out and about and Karanja much admired. (See here.)
Though we loved the apartment – despite having to lug luggage up to the first floor – poor Carcassonne has suffered the brunt of COVID lockdowns and was looking a bit rundown. Shopfronts were empty, a couple of hotels had closed, and there were generally more “riff-raff” around, to quote Roy. Nevertheless, we enjoyed a Ricard (he) and a glass of rosé (I) in the square.
Following a recommendation in our apartment’s useful information file, we tried Le Grande Bouffe for dinner. Cross the bridge over the canal, turn left and you’re there. Encouraged by the feu de bois- (wood fire) and carnivore-centric menu, we each ordered 200g of faux-filet (saignant, or medium-rare). It reminded us why we almost never eat steak in France.
It was simply tough. Roy ordered veggies that resembled a ratatouille, while I indulged in a side order of tartiflette – a baked potato, cream and cheese concoction that I have earmarked for my last meal on Death Row. (Along with a slab of Bordier butter from Normandy and une baguette traditionale. I’d better plan ahead to be incarcerated in France, rather than, say, Klerksdorp.)
Travel in France: Aix-en-Provence, 4-6 May
Founded in Roman times, awash with churches and beautified by gracious 17th and 18th century mansion-lined squares, Aix-en-Provence is a lovely city with a rich and diverse history. It just so happens that daughter Wendy lives and works there.
As an early birthday present for Roy, Wendy had booked us into the 5-star Renaissance Hotel in the heart of Aix-en-Provence. That first night, we had dinner at the hotel’s Atmosf’R restaurant. Though highly rated online, it served up so-so food that arrived cold (except for my amazing frites), and the kitchen seemed unable to get it right.
Never mind. Our room was lovely, and I had the hotel’s indoor spa pool and hammam to myself. But you can’t help wondering why a 5-star hotel can’t get its culinary act together, while other places we stumbled upon (see below: Le Petit Bistrot and La Petite Ferme, both independent eateries) delivered great service and impeccably fresh, hot food.
Aix cathedral (above left) is built on the site of the original Roman forum. Finding it is a fun way to explore cobbled streets dotted with shops and boutiques ranging from high-end boulangeries to Rolex, Hermés and Longchamp.
Instead of a traditional bus service with regular routes, the local authority provides these small vehicles that can be called when needed. Not by us, presumably; but it sounds like an excellent idea.
Aix offers innumerable lunch options. Le Petit Bistrot (below) turned out to be a good choice, memorable largely for a flamboyant server-sommelier, a yummy chardonnay, a good tartare de bœuf frites and a generous cheese platter.
For dinner, the exterior courtyard at La Petite Ferme (7 Avenue Victor Hugo) was a real gem. Mind you, I now see that it was mentioned in the 2022 Michelin Guide. My souris d’agneau braisée (lamb shank slow-cooked for 12 hours, €30) came with a poem of truffled couscous, caviar d’aubergines à la coriandre, fried chick peas and herby Greek yoghurt. Roy’s cod (€20) was in a yellow curried coconut gravy with shellfish au four Josper. (That is, cooked in a fancy Josper charcoal oven.)
Two nights in La-Seyne-sur-Mer
After two nights in Aix, we left our hire car garaged at Wendy’s place, piled into her roomy VW Tiguan and headed for the nearby coastal resort of Toulon: notable for its naval base and shipyards. Or, more specifically, a picturesque suburb of Toulon called La-Seyne-sur-Mer, where we’d be staying at the conveniently located Mercure.
Like small and medium-sized coastal towns everywhere, La-Seyne-sur-Mer is full of character... not to mention characters. At the bar-tabac below, a friendly diner – evidently well into the pastis – helped out the busy woman server by dragging the chalkboard menu across, and then recounting at length to Roy how he had personally met the inventor of Ricard. (Improbable, though not impossible, since M. Paul Ricard perfected the recipe in 1932 before declaring it le vrai pastis de Marseille; the real pastis of Marseille.)
Roy has long had a soft spot for aniseed-flavoured aperitifs (including ouzo), and I should mention that he’s been dipping quite regularly into the bottle of Ricard purchased from our local Dan Murphy liquor store in nearby Currambine, WA, the very day after we returned from France.
Two dinners in La-Seyne-sur-Mer
Just a five-minute walk from our hotel, La Griotte was another lucky find that served up amazing food, featuring mainly seafood and with an unusual variety of delicious vegetables. It seemed to be run single-handedly by a woman whose dad was in the kitchen, and who made a point of coming out for a chat before each guest left.
Our second night being a Monday and a public holiday, not much was open apart from the casino’s Restaurant Comptoir JOA de La Seyne. To my surprise, we had a great experience: a beautiful location with great waterfront views, and a well-priced menu featuring delicious oysters, slow-cooked succulent veal and more. Again, it was only a few minutes from our hotel.
Day trippers, yeah!
With such spectacular scenery along the rocky coastal drive to the coastal resort of Cassis, it was a treat to have Wendy doing the driving. The area, apparently known to the English as the French Riviera, is famous for its cliffs and sheltered inlets known as calanques. Even better, Wendy will always stop for me to take photos. (This is demonstrably not a heritable trait.)
Unfortunately, with it being not only a Sunday but also a long weekend, Cassis town was jammed and parking was impossible. Never mind; Wendy was able to stop for a couple of photos.
Lunch in La Ciotat
So we gave up the idea of lunching in Cassis and instead took the road to the pretty harbour town of La Ciotat. It too was busy, but had plenty of parking if you were prepared to pay a couple of euros. We were.
Disobedience
Despite once having been spectacularly felled by a young French cyclist barrelling into him from behind on the Quai de la Canal de Bourgogne in St Jean-de-Losne, Roy loves nothing better than to walk on cycle paths. And he will flagrantly – even joyfully – flout any reasonable and well-meant request from his wife that he desist from doing so. Here’s the disgraceful proof:
Homeward Bound
With close on 140kg of luggage between us, the journey home might have been a lot more difficult than it turned out to be. Having left much of what we had taken from our boat, Karanja, at Simon Piper’s house in St Jean-de-Losne (see Part 1), we picked it up again on the way to the airport. (Our gratitude again to the Pipers for their kind hospitality!)
After a night at the convenient Courtyard by Marriot hotel, an easy 6km from Charles de Gaulle airport, it was a doddle to drop off the hire car right inside the airport building and carefully negotiate two heavily laden trolleys to the SIA desk. Thanks for the great service and especially for the upgrade, Singapore Airlines!
Next up… who knows? I wish I did.
Read your blog with interest Verne, especially as we will be in Carcassonne the nights of 17th and 18th June en route to Homps to get our boat for a week. Great tip on the steak – when do you know if its not horse anyway? The town square looks cool – looking forward to it.
Um, I wouldn’t recommend that steakhouse, Clive – or not for the steak, anyway. Have a great trip, and happy cruising! If you haven’t been to the old city of Carcassonne, you need to do that. And order the cassoulet somewhere. You can’t go wrong. xx