Thank Friday it's Lunchtime - Restaurant Carluc, Ceréste

This week's TFIL is a little different, in that we actually had our meal out on Thursday evening, not Friday lunchtime.  The quality of the food won't change from morning to evening, we reasoned, although there won't be a Menu du Midi (lunchtime special) on offer.

We ate in Carluc a couple of times last year and were never disappointed, so we had high hopes as we arrived at 7.30pm.  The owner greeted us like old friends, and actually, it felt like something of a homecoming - it hadn't changed inside at all, there were some familiar dishes on the menu and best of all, our friends R & G joined us for dinner!

The LSH and I have the same taste in a lot of things (except he likes fish!) and we often opt for the same dish.  This evening was no exception, and we both ordered the same starter, Croustillant de Chévre (goats cheese in filo pastry).  In fact, the croustillant appealed to everyone at the table and we all ordered it!

It was superb - goats cheese and mouth-watering semi-dried tomatoes wrapped in crisp filo pastry, with a crisp green salad on the side - an excellent start to our meal.

G and I opted for the same main course, Cuisse de Pintade, a leg of guinea fowl.  Guinea fowl has been a revelation and I buy it quite a lot in the supermarket here.  To me, it's just like chicken used to be, in the good old days before they started pumping it full of liquid.  The meat is more fibrous and less glaringly white than chicken, and although some people might find the flavour a little gamey, it just tastes extra-chickeny to me.

It came with a little heap of risotto, a really good gravy-like sauce and seasonal vegetables on the side.

The LSH ordered Bouef aux Echalots, or beef with shallots.  This is an old favourite on the Carluc menu, and it's always good.  The beef is cooked to taste (French people are always surprised when we order our beef rare!) and served in a rich sauce.

This was served with mashed potato and the same seasonal veggies.  It was very, very tasty, but the beef was a little tough.

R ordered spaghetti a la carbonara, I'm not sure why, I always thought he was a beef man myself!  He ate it all anyway and said it was good!

We finally moved on to dessert, where we encountered some more old favourites.  Unfortunately, at this stage, the wine was flowing, the company was good and the food was good, so we forgot to take photographs of the food...

The first old favourite was Pain Perdu - literally it means "lost bread" but "pain perdu" is French for stale bread.  In the sense of dessert, it means bread pudding.  It's quite different to English bread pudding, the bread is usually baked in slices and served with a caramel sauce, and, in the Carluc, topped off with cinnamon ice-cream.  If you're ever in Carluc, order it!  I promise you won't be disappointed!  Then there was Tiramisu, tarte tatin (an upside down apple pie) and crème brûlée... all good!

Price wise, dinner is always going to be more expensive than lunch, but even at that, this meal came out at just over €21 per head - not bad at all for good food in a pleasant atmosphere.  It's a very different place to the Saigon Wok which we visited last week, both offer different things, but I think I'd opt for Carluc any day I was given the choice.

Service : ✮✮✮✮✮

Food : ✮✮✮✮✮ 

Value : ✮✮✮✮ 

Ambiance : ✮✮✮✮

Thank Friday it's Lunchtime - Saigon Wok, Cavaillon

Last Saturday, I had to collect the LSH from Marseille Airport.  It had snowed overnight, leaving the road over the Luberon covered with a layer of packed, frozen snow.  By the time I left, the snowplough hadn’t passed yet, and I crawled carefully along.  I was confident that by the time I got to Manosque, it would be slightly warmer, with less snow, as Manosque is usually a few degrees warmer than our side of the Luberon.  I was wrong.  Not only was Manosque covered in snow, but the Autoroute was also snow-covered and treacherous.  At least the snowploughs were in action there, clearing one lane on each carraigeway, so I trundled along in a long line of traffic, presumably with a snowplough at the head of the line.  Traffic in the opposite driection was desperately slow, even at a standstill in some places, so when I finally met up with the LSH in a completely unsnowy Marseille, we decided to go home via the Western end of the Luberon – a long detour, but we decided to have lunch along the way and do our TFIL meal a day late.

Just as we passed through Cavaillon, I spotted this.

All-you-can-eat Chinese, basically.

We can’t lose, we said, and in we went.

You don’t often see very overweight French people, but there were quite a few in this place – it’s obviously a popular choice for those with – eh – large appetites.

It’s a gigantic hall of a restaurant, with the buffets laid out in the middle.  There was one with bits and pieces you could ask the Wok chef to cook, one with starters, one with mains and one with desserts.  We stuck the the stuff that was already cooked, to keep it simple, and we hit the starter buffet - nems (spring rolls), chicken things, fried vegetable things, prawn things and some other seafood things (that I stayed away from), with an array of salads and sauces to accompany them.

I could have just kept eating the starters until I exploded, but after one revisit, I moved on to the mains, in the interests of research, y’know.  There were Brochets à Poulet (chicken skewers), Thai Beef, Pork Caramel, Moules au sauce Chilli (chilli mussels, a weird combination, neither of us tried that) and Poulet au Gingembre (Ginger Chicken).  These were fine, but less awesome than the starters, with the exception of the Brochets à Poulet which were the best I’d ever had.  It’s possible that they were laced with MSG, but I reckoned that if it triggered a migraine, it would have been worth it.

By the way, if you really love spicy food, you'd be better off getting something cooked by the Wok Chef - the French don't really do "Hot" and we find that Chinese restaurants here cater to the French palate, with Thai and Chilli dishes tasting a bit bland.

Desserts were a bit lacklustre by comparison with the first two courses; there was Dame Blanche, a soft meringue sort of thing, crème caramel and fresh fruit.

Value for money?  At €12.90 per head during the week, it’s brilliant value.  If there’s something you don’t like, you can just go back to the buffet and get something else.  They put the price up at the weekend, so it cost us €14.90 per head, with a pichet of wine bringing the total up to €32.50.  If you’re a big eater and find the portion sizes disappointing during your Provençal visit, it’s definitely worth calling in here.

Comfort wise, yeah, it’s a big barn of a place with no ambiance whatsoever.  We were seated beside the door and were chilled everytime someone came in or out, despite the electric heater placed nearby.  The toilets were surprisingly minimalist for such a large restaurant, too – just one cubicle each for Dames and Hommes.  I bet the queues are not too nice when it's busy in the summer.

I wasn't overly impressed with the service.  I know it was self service, but they brought wine to our table (when asked) and cleared plates.  However, they also left us hovering in the doorway looking bewildered for quite a while when we arrived.  My advice is to march in confidently and just grab a table if that happens.

Here's the ratings.  I know it doesn't look great with the one star for Service and two stars for Ambiance, but that's just the kind of place it is.  I'd happily go back again.

Service : ✮

Food : ✮✮✮ 

Value : ✮✮✮✮✮ 

Ambiance : ✮✮

Thank Friday it's Lunchtime - Café du Cours, Reillanne

I will confess, that the Café du Cours is one of our favourite lunch spots.  I've been reluctant to include it in TFIL on that basis - are we biased?  I suppose we are - biased because the food is great, the staff are friendly, and it's in a lovely spot looking over the square in Reillane? 

Trying to stay objective anyway, here's how our lunch went.

We were meant to go to Forcalquier, but the LSH was busy with work, so we needed to stay local.  Ok, Café du Cours it is, we agreed.

We ambled up and sat down on the terrace in the sun, and quickly took our coats off.  Oh yes.  It was like a summer's day, except for the snow on the roof of the church beside us.

They don't do a menu du jour, as such, but they change their menu regularly.

For starters, I ordered the Foie Gras, and the LSH ordered the Velouté de Topinambour.  Neither of us had a clue what that was, and when it arrived, it looked like a bowl of porridge.

Ever curious, I asked what it was.  The chef told us that it was a vegetable that was used as a substitute for potato in the war, and then brought one out to show it to us - AH! Jerusalem Artichoke!  I've never cooked it, and I don't think we've ever eaten it before, but it was nice, I'd have it again.  Rumour has it that it has some unpleasant effects on the digestive system - I can categorically state that these rumours are not unfounded.

I ordered the Foie Gras Mi-cuit au Calvados... yum.  Sorry animal rights people, I love Foie Gras.  

For our main courses, well there were Moules et Frites on the menu, the LSH's favourite, so that was a no-brainer, while I orders Faux Filet... or Faux Filly, so definitely NOT horse, then.

The moules were big and juicy, the faux filet (it's sirloin) was very tasty but could have been more tender... yeah, I'm nitpicking, just trying not to be biased, y'know.

For dessert, I'm watching my figure, so I had coffee, while he chomped his way through a Crème Brûlée - flavoured with thyme.  OH BOY, does that work!!! WOW!

So, the ratings.

Service : ✮✮✮✮✮ (with a smile!)

Food : ✮✮✮✮ 

Value : ✮✮✮✮ 

Ambiance : ✮✮✮✮✮

I was mean and I knocked a star off for my tough steak... it would be 4.5 stars if I had a Half Star symbol.  

Café du Cours is a very traditional French Café.  It's been there for years and years - in fact we saw a photo of the exterior which had been taken in the 1920s, and if you changed the faces and the clothes, it could have been taken yesterday.  

What I'm trying to get around to saying is, if you're going to be offended by a toilet like this :

make sure you go to the loo before you visit.  Or else cross your legs.  It's worth the pain.

Thank Friday it's Lunchtime - Auberge le Luberon, Apt

One of my favourite Apt villas

I have a soft spot for Apt.  In the summer, it's buzzing with of tourists, but in the winter, it's a sleepy country town that only comes alive on a Saturday morning, when the market takes over the whole town.  The N100 runs through it, en route from Avignon to Forcalquier, and parallels the river Calavon, which also pass through the town.  On one side of the Calavon, the buildings are practical, commercial, almost industrial.  On the other side, faded old villas snooze in the winter sun, shutters closed against the cold. 

This was where we headed today - the Auberge le Luberon, a traditional hotel and restaurant, which looks across the Calavon to the business district of Apt.

We chose the Auberge le Luberon on a whim - we had parked in the nearby "submersible" car park (it's a car park that's prone to flooding if there's heavy rain, there are warning signs all over the place, apparently it can flood in a mere twenty minutes!).  Not knowing what to expect of the Auberge le Luberon, we were pleasantly surprised to find a welcoming reception area and a small, bright and nicely decorated dining area which opened onto a terrace.  There was a neatly pruned platane (plane tree) at the side of the terrace, which must give very welcome shade in hot weather and we immediately said "This must be lovely in summer, we'll have to come back!"

Our first impression was that it was definitely a bit posh, but actually, the menu wasn't a ridiculously posh price at all!

We both had the same starter, Feuillette de Chèvre and Tapenade - goat's cheese and olive pâté wrapped in filo pastry, with a little salad on the side.

It was nice except it could have done without the tapenade - it was too salty and clashed with the goat's cheese rather than complemented it.

Hmm.  Ok so far, how were the main courses going to be?  

Going with the Menu du Jour, we had a choice of Duck Confit or Salmon.  I went for the Duck and the LSH went for the Salmon.  Both came with a little square of mashed potato, with a bay leaf sticking out of it at a jaunty angle.  The duck had a garnish of choucroute/sauerkraut made with red cabbage, which gave made a nice contrast to the fattiness of the duck.

The salmon was dressed with a slightly mustardy sauce, with the LSH felt was superfluous.  The salmon was cooked to perfection - not an easy thing to do - and he thought it would have been perfectly fine on its own! 

He still had room for dessert - Chocolate Mousse Cake! It looked amazing - the gooey inside oozed out when he broke into it with his fork, I wish I could eat chocolate!

I had to settle for coffee. 

Go on, you feel sorry for me, admit it!

It was a really good meal, very well cooked and presented, but in our humble opinion, the chef could have toned down on the contrasting accompaniments a bit - less would be more!

Value wise, pretty good for town dining in a place with a "posh" ambiance.  We'd be very happy to take visitors there any time we're looking for lunch in Apt.

We'll definitely be back.

Star Rating (out of 5) :

Service : ✮✮✮✮✮ (faultless, despite there being a very large table of diners who came in just before us)

Food : ✮✮✮✮ 

Value : ✮✮✮✮ 

Ambiance : ✮✮✮✮ 

Thank Friday it's Lunchtime - Le Chante de l'Heure, Apt

This week, we went to Apt - dear old slightly shabby Apt, home of one of the best Saturday markets in Provençe.

Our destination was a small restaurant called Le Chante de l'Heure, tucked away off the main pedestrian thoroughfare in Apt, the Rue St Pierre.  The name "Chant de l'Heure" has something to do with pancakes and Candlemas day (Feb 2nd) which is the traditional day for pancake eating in France.  Forget your Mardi Gras moveable feast, the French do it on Feb 2nd every year!



Anyway, the rather unprepossessing entrance does not prepare you for the cosy, homely interior.  Exposed stone walls, decked with an eclectic mix of bits and pieces all add to a very friendly, welcoming atmosphere, and the wood-burning stove glowing brightly in the corner made it nice and cosy on a cold Winter's day.    We liked the fact that the dresser on the left is not just a showpiece - it stores glasses and crockery for the restaurant.  The waiter showed us to our seats and left us alone while we admired the room - I guess they're used to it.  We were a bit surprised that there was only one other diner present - I would have thought that a Friday lunchtime would be busier than that.

Perhaps the prices put the canny local residents off, as it was a bit more expensive than what we've found recently.

There was no "Menu du Midi" and the Plat du Jour on offer was Souris d'Agneau - stewed lamb hocks - at a price of €12.00.  A far cry from the €14 we paid for five courses last week, but it's a very different setting.  There's no way I'd come into this place in muddy boots!

The LSH went for the Souris d'Agneau, but I wasn't feeling very hungry, so I chose "Mont d'Or" described as a baked cheese, baked potato, salad and charcuterie.

I could feel my arteries clogging even as I looked at it - it was enormous!

Not only was it enormous, but it was delicious, and I had lots of fun dipping the different cold meats, potato and pieces of bread into the melted cheese.  Despite that, and despite help from the LSH, I just couldn't finish it - there was enough there for two people with my appetite.

The LSH was meanwhile working his way through the Souris d'Agneau - one of his favourite dishes, since we were first introduced to it in our friend Anne's house many years ago.

This was also served with baked potato and a salad.  Maybe salad was a strange choice to accompany a winter dish, but we both enjoyed it.

I couldn't even contemplate dessert after my Mont d'Or, but there was Café Gourmand on the menu, and the LSH wasn't going to turn that down. 

It wasn't the best Café Gourmand we've seen - clockwise, from the back right corner, there's a slim chocolate mousse with vanilla ice cream, a macaron (which I nabbed - they're light!), a creme brulée slathered with chantilly cream and the coffee itself.  The white square in the middle is a square of chocolate that came with my coffee, which I swapped for the macaron!

So, to the nitty-gritty - was it value for money?

Well, my plate of charcuterie, salad, potato and cheese was a pretty stiff €18.  I think if I went again, I would know that I'd like to share it with someone, which would make it great value.  The total cost of the meal was €40.50 - probably par for the course for lunch in a town restaurant, but there's better value to be had out in the little village cafés if you're prepared to forego some ambiance.

Star Rating (out of 5) :

Service : ✮✮✮✮✮ 

Food : ✮✮✮✮

Value : ✮✮✮

Ambiance : ✮✮✮✮ 

Thank Friday it's Lunchtime - Back at the Buffet de la Gare, Manosque

I didn't think I'd manage to do a TFIL this week at all.  The LSH was flying back from London, arriving in Marseille at 10am on Friday morning (so I thought) and the Maréchal-ferrant (farrier) was due to be at the farm for the morning.  I thought I'd be able to pick up the LSH, whizz home (it's a little over an hour's drive) and be up at the farm by 11.30am.  Then he texted me to say his flight was arriving at 10.50.  Ok, Plan A was clearly not going to work.

Plan B was that he would get the bus to Manosque from the airport and I would collect him there after meeting the maréchal and seeing what he had to say and do about the horses' feet.

Seeing as this is a food post, I won't go into details about the maréchal, save to say he was very nice, very pro-barefoot and very pro-owners picking up the rasp.

I headed off to Manosque with a little time to spare and found myself waiting in front of the station, facing the Buffet de la Gare.  The more I looked at it, the more I thought I'd suggest lunch when the LSH arrived.  Even though I was very scruffy, slightly muddy and smelled strongly of horse, the Buffet de la Gare is not a bit posh, there were loads of equally muddy construction workers going in and out as I waited, and I figured I wouldn't stand out too much in my scruffiness.

The bus eventually arrived, and the LSH thought lunch was a good idea too, so we headed in and ordered the Menu du Midi - starter, main course, cheese course, dessert, coffee AND a bottle of Rose for €14 each.

Our starters were a plate of charcuterie (him) and a (tinned) tuna salad (me).  They arrived with the 75cl bottle of Rosé.  I had to behave myself seeing as I was driving, so I only had one glass, and we ended up drinking less than half of the bottle.  This must happen a lot.  I guess they end up serving the left over Lunch Wine in the bar later on.

The starters were both good, you can't go wrong with charcuterie - unless you're a vegetarian, of course - and the salad had a lovely mustardy dressing on it, but there's no photos of them - sorry!  I wasn't thinking in terms of doing TFIL until the main course arrived and WOWed us!

The main was described as Cassoulet Terrine.  Cassoulet is duck, sausage and beans, all cooked slowly as a casserole, but we had no idea where "Terrine" would come into it - a Terrine is a cold, pressed meatloaf sort of thing (although it doesn't have to be meat).  Were we going to be faced with a cold, pressed cassoulet?  Was it going to be a normal cassoulet with bits of terrine in it instead of the duck or the sausage?

It turned out that the word "Terrine" was referring to what it was cooked in - an earthenware dish, full of delicious cassoulet - a duck leg, toulouse sausage and a big wodge of haricot beans in each, sprinkled with bread crumbs and crisped under the grill.  It was really hearty winter food, absolutely delicious, and very, very filling.  The LSH ate most of his, apart from some of the beans, but I'm ashamed to say I could only manage to eat half of mine.  I honestly felt guilty about this - what if they thought I didn't like it?  The waitress was very understanding though, and didn't send the chef out to see the woman who hadn't cleaned her plate.

She was all set to bring out the cheese course, but we hastily said no!  Shocked, she made sure we understood that it was included in the price, but we insisted that we couldn't face it.  But what was for dessert? we enquired. (There's always room for dessert!)

Tarte au Poire was all gone - poor LSH was distraught - and we both opted for Café Crème, which apparently is something of a French classic, but we'd never had it before.

It was like blancmange with a hint of coffee flavouring.  In its favour, it was very light and easy to eat after that big, filling bowl of cassoulet, but it was also very bland and quite probably came from the chiller section of the local supermarket.

A coffee each rounded off the meal and we paid our €28 and left.

The overall verdict was that it was better than the previous visit - that cassoulet was really special! - so we awarded an extra star in "Food"

Star Rating (out of 5) :

Service : ✮✮✮✮✮ 

Food : ✮✮✮✮

Value : ✮✮✮✮✮ 

Ambiance : ✮✮ 

Thank Friday it's Lunchtime, Cafe du Commerce, Forcalquier

A lot of our local restaurants have taken holidays in the post-Christmas lull, including our first choice for today's post.  Undaunted, we drove the 16km to Forcalquier in the never-ending search for lunch and settled ourselves in the sun in front of the Café du Commerce in the town's main square.

The menu du jour, for a starter, main course and dessert, was a trim €14.00 and gave us two options for our main - it's always good to have choices!  We both decided to go with the set menu and placed our orders with the waiter.  The starter was velouté du potiron (pumpkin soup), the LSH opted for the salmon for his main course and I went for the faux-filet de bouef - (faux-filet is the same cut as sirloin).

I have to confess here that I forgot to take a photo of the soup, but it looked pretty much like the soup we had at Nice Airport the day we left for our Christmas holidays - even the bowls were the same!

It tasted good, a little bit sweet, but that's pumpkin for you.

The salmon came with pasta and vegetables.  I liked the way this was presented, the veggies were thinly sliced and lightly cooked and then tossed up with the pasta, with no heavy sauce or anything.  All very light and healthy and it definitely didn't overpower the salmon.

The faux-filet was presented with chips and some salad.  Very plain, but very tasty.  I wasn't asked how I wanted my steak cooked - fortunately "rare" is what I would have said, but I know that wouldn't be to everyone's taste.

There was a good range of desserts on offer.  The LSH ordered Isles Flottant - light, fluffy meringue sitting in a pool of custard with a caramel sauce poured over it.  The waiter apologised when he served it - it was in the wrong sort of bowl!  Quelle dommage!

Thankfully the bowl did not affect the taste!

I went for the old reliable Creme caramel...

...which was yum but not all of the sugar on top was caramelised

This was our first Thank Friday It's Lunchtime lunch of 2013.  The sun shone, the food was simple, French and good, the town square was delightful - where else but France will you find a gorgeous old building like this housing the local Cinéma?

I finished lunch sipping coffee and getting arty with my photographs.

Yes, it's good to be back.

Ratings :

Food – ✮✮✮

Service – ✮✮✮✮

Ambiance – ✮✮✮✮

Value – ✮✮✮✮

Thank Friday it's Lunchtime - Restaurant Riviera at Nice Airport

It’s Friday and we’re travelling, so no chance of Thank Friday it’s Lunchtime, I thought.  Until we arrived at Nice airport with time to spare and decided to have lunch at the airport.

The first thing to watch out for at Nice Airport is that there is no restaurant once you’ve gone through the security checks for departures.  If you’re hungry, you have to balance your need for food with the number of people queueing at the security gate.  There is a sandwich bar on the other side, but no place where you can sit down for a hot meal.

We had plenty of time – more than two hours – our bags were dropped off and our boarding cards were in our back pockets, so we had no problem taking time out for lunch.

To be fair, an airport restaurant is a completely different experience to any of the little restaurants and brasseries we have visited to date.  We didn’t expect it to do very well, and unfortunately we were right.

The waitress was very pleasant and showed us to a nice table at the edge of the mezzanine, overlooking the busy hall down below.  She took our orders pretty quickly and it probably wasn’t her fault that the food was a little slow to appear.  We sat and sipped a glass of Rosé each while we waited, and eventually the starters arrived.

For starters, the LSH had Velouté de Potiron (Pumpkin soup) and I had a plate of charcuterie (cold meats).  The soup was a dainty, lady-like portion, and the charcuterie and accompanying salad and bread would easily have fed both of us.  Both were absolutely fine, no complaints there.

Charcuterie - sorry I forgot to take photos until half-way through the starters

Pumpkin soup.  It started life with some croutons floating in it

Lesson learned – next time, just order a plate of charcuterie between us.

For our mains, we both order Brochette de Poulet (Chicken skewers).  The LSH was craving carbohydrates, or SPUDS to be precise, so he asked for gratin potatoes as well as chips, whereas I restrained myself and asked for chips and haricot beans. 

The brochette with chips, gratin potatoes and the bowl of weird stuff

The brochette mostly hidden by chips and soggy haricots

The brochette, when it came, was served with a small salad and a bowl of something weird on the side – maybe it was meant to be a beurre blanc sauce, but it tasted like melted butter mixed with lemon juice, with a few drops of vinegar for that certain “Je ne sais quois!”  Indeed, I don’t know what it was, it was very, very strange.  The chicken was delicious and the salad was fine, but that was where the good stuff ended!  The gratin potatoes were cold, the haricot beans were so overcooked that they were just mush and the chips were nothing special, shaken out of a bag into the deep fat fryer, and a little on the cold side when served.

We skipped dessert and went straight to tea (LSH) and coffee (me).  I don’t like ordering tea when I’m abroad, it’s never as good as we’d make at home, but that’s just me.  The coffee was good – I think the French are genetically incapable of making bad coffee!

The total cost? A wallet-bruising €30 per head.  That’s the same as our very posh and very tasty meal at Chez Eric two months ago, and it was nowhere near the same category in quality.  My recommendation is to bring sandwiches.

Food – ✮✮

Service – ✮✮✮

Ambiance – ✮✮

Value – ✮

Finally, a word about the weather.  We have a lot of travelling ahead of us in the next few days.  I am a worrier.  I was worried that the roads over the Luberon would be icy.  I was worried that Dublin airport might be closed with snow/ice/gale force winds.  I was worried (and still am) that Chicago airport might be snowbound on Sunday and we might miss our connection to San Francisco.  The last thing I expected was this - torrential rain at Nice! I have never seen Nice looking so cold and so wet!

Rain at Nice, with a fire engine on standby while our plane was refuelling

Brrr!