Back to Bordeaux

I was back in Bordeaux early last month, this time with Blai as we were there for his work. There wasn’t much sightseeing as we both saw the city without each other but instead lots of general strolling and, of course, eating. Friends and family came along too and we were often a small group, always a challenge for me as the restaurant responsibility tends to fall on me! Luckily, Bordeaux has numerous fantastic restaurants and we visited quite a few of them. For a group of 4 or more, I would definitely recommend booking, even if it’s an hour ahead; we were turned away from a couple spots when we hadn’t made reservations.

There was an outstanding first meal on our first night at the Corsican Le Petit Mignon with pumpkin soup with a crusted soft boiled egg…

…and my favourite salade de gesiers (confited duck gizzards).

Then a fabulous faux filet with a Corsican wine sauce …

…followed by their chocolate cake (more like a ridiculous rich chocolate torte)…

and a bavarois de poire.

We liked it so much we returned another day for lunch. There’s a good value lunch menu with dishes like this tender grilled cuttlefish with vegetables.

Le Petit Mignon
33 Rue Saint-Rémi
33000 Bordeaux, France

For more classic Bordelais dishes, we went to La Table Bordelais, a very friendly spot with a set lunch that’s available all week. There was another salade de gesiers…

…and another steak, but this time with a sauce bordelaise.

And a confit de canard! Oh yes, and those potatoes – fabulous.

Blai and I shared this simple tarte aux poires but another dessert option was coffee with that classic Bordeaux pastry – the canelé!

La Table Bordelais
10 Rue Piliers de Tutelle
33000 Bordeaux, France

There was one evening where we came out of a concert and it was absolutely pouring down. Hungry and wet, we stepped next door to Le Régent, an old style brasserie on Place Gambetta. Many of us were coming in like drowned rats and somehow there was room for all. Portions were big here!

We shared half a roast chicken…

… and a brandade de cabillaud (made with fresh cod and not dried salted cod). The food was simple but it was all well prepared and hit the spot. They do pizzas too and those appeared to be very popular with locals.

Le Régent
46 Place Gambetta
33000 Bordeaux, France

There was another visit to Le Scopitone where we all opted for the excellent value prix fixe. There was a lamb spring roll to start…

… as well as an excellent cream of turnip soup (I’m growing turnips for the first time this year and I hope to recreate this!).

There was a fish fillet (I can’t remember the type of fish but I recall it’s one not familiar to these shores) cooked very simply but beautifully with tomatoes and capers.

There was an emincé de boeuf as well, with a sauce bordelaise, and it’s where I realised that no, emincé isn’t a mince but thin slices of meat. In this case, these were thin slices of a very rare piece of beef that would be boot leather if cooked any other way!

Desserts were simple but excellent: tarte tatin…

… and an outstanding mango cheesecake.

Le Scopitone
5 Rue de la Vieille Tour
33000 Bordeaux, France

For me, one particular highlight was a lunch at Le Cagette, a beautifully light and airy restaurant. They too had a set lunch with plenty of choices. Watercress soup to start (this was an eye opener for me as I’m only familiar with Chinese pork and watercress soup)…

or a beetroot and orange salad (yeah, this wasn’t mine…I’m still not a fan of beetroot).

For mains, a mushroom risotto…

… or my favourite, an excellent slice of meatloaf with the most impossibly airy mashed potatoes.

Tarte tatin here too! Not sure if you can tell but dessert portions were ridiculously generous.

La Cagette
8 Place du Palais
33000 Bordeaux, France

One more, one more! I became a temporary regular at the Patisserie Artisanale Gaston Bordeaux, which I can highly recommend. Their viennoiserie is outstanding: all the usuals plus combinations like pistachio and raspberry or vanilla and apple. I tried many of them but my favourite is always the croissant. I never got to try their pastries (as they were laid out after breakfast time) but they looked fantastic too.

Patisserie Artisanale Gaston Bordeaux
34 Rue du Dr Charles Nancel Penard
33000 Bordeaux, France

We fell in love with Bordeaux and I sure wouldn’t mind returning again!

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Eating in Bordeaux

After a couple days at home after Stockholm, it was back in the air and over to Bordeaux for another work do. I landed in the evening and immediately set out in search of dinner – a friend from Bordeaux recommended Le Scopitone and it was there I headed. I was very taken with the little retro restaurant!

I was brought a little tapenade on toast to nibble on whilst I perused the menu. There’s a fantastic set menu deal that changes daily but I went a la carte to get the fish I desired. Service was lovely – one waitress offered me a local newspaper to read while I waited for my meal (I was by myself) though perhaps the grisly front page news of a found body wasn’t so meal appropriate. Anyway, great service!

I started with a brilliant tarte fine with grilled vegetables…brilliant because it was an unexpected large pile of those grilled vegetables and salad and a soft boiled egg on a little sliver of pastry. Yes, take my word for it – there was a bit of pastry under that salad and I loved it all.

My main course was monkfish with morels, all with a rich cream sauce and an equally rich slice of potato gratin. Oh, and more roast vegetables. The food here was excellent and the portion sizes massive!

Le Scopitone
5 Rue Vieille Tour
Bordeaux

After dinner, I strolled around the city centre and it is exceptionally beautiful down by the water and here at the Bourse and the Miroir d’Eau!

I was wandering around Bordeaux on another day when I came across this adorable Uighur restaurant – Route de la Soie. It was exactly what I felt like that afternoon and settled in for a plateful of polo, here served with the salad of the day and some yogurt. Polo was their pilau rice, very similar to an Uzbek plov, made with lamb and lots of grated carrots. The salad was mainly cold glass noodles with carrots and cucumbers in a moreish garlicky dressing.

This place is brilliant if you’re looking for a little something different!

Route de la Soie
48 Rue des Faures
Bordeaux

I didn’t have much time to see lots of sights but did have time for another bit of a stroll through the city.

I loved the quays area and found myself back there again, this time during the day. This time, I could see that the Miroir didn’t just fill up with water but could also release a spray that made everything look all moody and fantastic.

On my last evening, a group of us headed back to the centre of the city and randomly chose a restaurant with a very Bordelaise menu – this turned out to be Père Chabrot, a relatively new restaurant located in an old wine cellar. My starter of salade de gésiers was delicious – the confit duck gizzards were wonderfully tender and the entire salad was enlivened with a raspberry vinaigrette.

My faux filet avec sauce Bordelaise was cooked perfectly à point. Good stuff – I was a little surprised that despite its proximity to water, the cuisine of Bordeaux is mainly defined by meat. I loved the sauce Bordelaise, made with red wine and marrow.

The accompanying fries were excellent and there were enough for the whole table!

Not bad!

Père Chabrot
30 Rue Saint-Rémi
Bordeaux

And, of course, one couldn’t leave without trying Bordeaux’s most famous pastry: the canelé. The place to get them is Baillardran, and there are quite a few branches scattered around Bordeaux and at the airport too. It was at the airport that I picked up a few to take home.

They’re apparently not everyone’s cup of tea and I originally thought they perhaps weren’t mine. I realised that I liked them when I tried the original size (as pictured above) – these were custardy and vanillaey and with a lovely chewy crust. You don’t get the nice contrasts with the smaller sizes. Go big with canelés!

It’s a great city to visit for a couple of days and there’s certainly some good eating there. If you’re a fan of wine, well, the recently opened Cité du Vin is surely up your street (not so for me as I cannot drink wine – a bit of a shame in Bordeaux!). All my photos from this short trip to Bordeaux can be found in this album.

 

A Much Needed Weekend in Lille

Like the title says, this was a much needed weekend away. It was a girls’ trip and it was going to be all about food and shopping, a proper escape from the working weekends we’d all been having recently. We met at St Pancras after work on the Friday night and caught the last Eurostar train to Lille, arriving a little after 10pm. If you’re familiar with Lille, you’ll know that there’s not much open in the centre past 10 or 11pm but we did just manage to dump our bags at our hotel and then go straight to Flam’s for a flammekueche dinner.

We sat outside and dined on two of the flams and a warm salad. I loved the thinness of the tartes and how light it all felt (yeah, sure, there was cheese on top and plenty of lardons on everything but, look, salad!).

And we couldn’t help it and shared a chocolate banana flam for dessert as well. With drinks, it came to only €30 total for all three of us. An excellent late night eat.

Flam’s
8 Rue Pas

On Saturday mornings, Lille has a small local food market around the Theatre Sébastopol and the stalls all looked excellent. We only bought some cherries and they were very good indeed. We didn’t find the breakfast we were looking for though, finding patisserie and not viennoiserie.

Marché Sébastopol
Place Sébastopol

And so we stopped at a random cafe close to the market and fed ourselves with cafe cremes, croissants, …

… and giggled at the cappuccino that came with whipped cream! Definitely more luxurious than your bog-standard one!

Then the shopping began in earnest… and I’ll spare you the details. Well, other than to say that the sales at this time of the year were fantastic and prices were already at their third markdown.

Lunch! I couldn’t get a dinner booking at Bloempot, run by Florent Ladeyn of French Top Chef fame, for any time in July and instead we tried to get a walk in table for the midday meal… and we succeeded! By going a little early (12:30) we had our pick of tables in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it restaurant down the end if a narrow alley; by 14:00 the whole restaurant was packed.

On weekends, they serve the same menus as weekday evenings. There’s a choice of three menus which differ on the number of courses you get and we went with the cheapest at €34, getting us a starter, main, cheese and dessert. Drink pairings are also available. It’s a surprise menu based on what’s good at the market at that time of the year, though they do take allergies and dietary restrictions into consideration.

The little extras were more generous than I was expecting. Prior to our starter, we received a mound of fresh radishes with plenty of salt, butter and a soft fresh cheese. Very good bread too, in a paper bag.

Our starter was a beautiful roulade of thinly sliced kohlrabi with a quenelle of a fresh drained cheese topped with tarragon.

Our main course was fish. A perfect piece of skate was served with sliced razor clams, mangetout and the loveliest little potatoes.

Then came what we originally thought was our cheese course. This was a massive bowl of maroilles foam topped with lardons and parsley crumbs, served with a big hunk of toasted bread crust for dipping. (Maroilles is the famous odoriferous cheese of the region) It was insanely good and we requested spoons to hasten its transfer into our mouths.

Our waiter then came around with three small glasses half filled with a yellow-green liquid. He explained that we were being served a limonade made using their homemade sorrel syrup and topped up the glass with fizzy water. It was a lovely and necessary touch to clear our palates after that cheese onslaught.

Our actual cheese course then arrived – yes, the Maroilles foam was an extra. This was thin slices of tomme de sec bois topped with fresh raspberries, rose petals and a drizzle of syrup.

Dessert was a dream. Fresh perfect berries, sorrel sorbet, langues de chat and a milk custard ladled on the side – I could have had another few bowls!

Bloempot is highly recommended!

Bloempot
22 Rue des Bouchers

Then it was back to shopping. When the shops finally did us in, we headed straight to Meert for refreshments.

The cakes were all excellent as usual (and that waffle!) and the iced tea was exactly what I needed.

Meert
27 Rue Esquermoise

We swung by the hypermarket next to the train station and picked up goodies for home before finally taking a break at the hotel before dinner. Can you tell that we were trying to cram all the shopping in on Saturday? Like most other places in France, 99% of Lille shuts down on Sundays.

Our night was going to be spent on Rue de Gand, a street lined with restaurants and wine bars. I had made a booking at Chez la Vieille, a highly regarded Lillois estaminet (and one in which we couldn’t get a table the last time I was in Lille). They served large portions of hearty northern French food and we struggled to finish it all.

Croquettes aux crevettes were excellent and full of little brown shrimps.

My friend’s Coeur des Flandres was a fantastic homemade tart filled with minced pork, onion and apple.

My Gratin de la Vieille was insane. An entire cooked endive (and a fat one at that) had been wrapped in ham and then drowned in plenty of bechamel and topped with maroilles cheese before being grilled on top. With frites!

Estaminet Chez la Vieille
60 Rue de Gand

And then we crashed back at the hotel…and I think all the day’s cheese affected the others as they awoke around me recounting strange dreams the next morning. Haha!

We checked out, dumped our now overflowing bags, and headed straight to the Marché de Wazemmes. The walk along the way was through a deserted city but as we got nearer to the market, it became exceedingly clear that the entire city was there. The first thing I did was find the lady who was selling Tunisian bricks – this was the brick that got away the last time I was in Lille!

It hit the spot. This one was filled with minced lamb and onions and the essential egg.

After walking once around the market (and perhaps I’ll mention here that not everything was peachy – we had coffee at a specialist place where they treated us badly), we noticed there was a bar (L’Oxford) at one corner with plenty of outdoor seating and everyone sitting there had ordered drinks at the bar and were tucking into food purchased at the market. Yeah, we wanted in on that! We surveyed all the rotisserie chicken vans (there were a few) before choosing our favourite and for the grand sum of €9, we received one roast chicken, plenty of potatoes that had been cooked in the drippings, and a giant spiced potato and lamb patty.

That poor chicken never stood a chance.

Marché de Wazemmes
Place Nouvelle Aventure

The afternoon was spent in the Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille and when we emerged, it was raining (not in the original weather forecast!). We had a couple hours to kill before our train back and headed out to the Quai du Wault in search of a hotel that used to be a convent, hoping to wait out the weather. That was the Alliance Couvent des Minimes and we sat in their bar eating pastries…

… and ice cream.

Alliance Couvent des Minimes
Quai du Wault

And then it was time to catch the Eurostar back to London. Back to reality. I highly recommend Lille for a short break. It’s easy to get there and prices at restaurants are lower than similar restaurants in Paris. And if you’re there during the sales… well, I take no responsibility for that.

All my photos from Lille can be found in this Flickr album.

 

Chez Etienne, Marseille

It had been a lazy day in Marseille. We had missed the bus to Cassis and instead took another couple of buses to Marseille’s beaches south of the main city. A very lazy day by the beach. And what was for dinner that night? Pizza. Pizza in Marseille? Yes, and I was really looking forward to it, especially after my great pizza experiences in Nice a couple years ago and also another cheap pizza we scoffed earlier on this trip. My French colleague had sent me off with only one recommendation for Marseille – Chez Etienne – which specialises in, you guessed it, pizza.

The restaurant is easy enough to find in Le Panier, Marseille’s oldest neighbourhood just north of the port. We got there quite early (19:30) and got a table, no problem. However, it started filling up swiftly and when we left, it was completely packed. Get there early.

Service was generally grumpy here. There was one or two friendlier waiters but in general, don’t expect anything too pleasant. It’s a good thing the food was good!

There are only two pizzas available at Etienne: anchovy or cheese. We followed the suggestion of my colleague and ordered a pizza moitié-moitié, half and half (€14). The pizza arrived on a tray and the surly waitress dumped half of it on each of our plates and whisked the tray away. The anchovy pizza was just anchovy and black olives and tomato sauce and was very good but what was even better was that ooey gooey cheese pizza (also with olives). The crust was thin and almost cracker-like; it felt like a particular unique sort of Marseillaise pizza. If I get the opportunity to return, I shall be only ordering that amazing cheese pizza.

We followed our pizza starter with an order of their famous supions (€16), the little squids popular in the Marseille area. Here they had been sliced up and fried with a healthy amount of garlic and parsley and a little something to give them a bit of a coating – flour? Anyway, they were delicious, all garlicky and tender and made just perfect with a squeeze of lemon. The man next to us was also a visitor to Marseille and when he asked a (friendlier) waitress for a suggestion, she suggested the supions; I’ve also since heard that they’re considered some of the best in the city.

Bread (perfect for mopping up the garlicky juices) and a dressed salad were served alongside. However, we found the salad dressing to be just a bit too spicy, having been made with an uncomfortable amount of hot mustard.

The rest of their menu looked good, especially their pastas and meats we spied on neighbouring tables. The pizza is a must, though, and is what they’re famous for. Apparently in earlier days, everyone eating at the restaurant was forced to eat pizza as a starter!

Chez Etienne
43, Rue de Lorette
13002 Marseille
France

 

Bouillabaisse at Chez Fonfon, Marseille

We started our holiday with a bang. We were going to be spending two weeks by the Mediterranean, the first in Marseille and the second in Barcelona. The timing also coincided with our wedding anniversary and we were going to celebrate it by eating Marseille’s most famous dish – bouillabaisse. After scouring the internet and getting a few recommendations from friends, we settled for Chez Fonfon for lunch on our first full day in the city.

The walk to the Vallon des Auffes, where the restaurant is located, was longer than we expected from the port but we got there in the end (uh…give yourself time!). But when we did, we couldn’t see the restaurant anywhere (we were up at the top on le Corniche du Président-John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy). We should have paid more attention to the location – a vallon is a small valley – and sure enough, there were some stairs that took us down to this beautiful tiny harbour and there was the restaurant!

We got settled inside the very modern-looking restaurant quickly (that third photo above, that was my view!) and were brought delicious homemade taramasalata with croutons while we perused the all-fish, all-seafood menu. There are no other meats nor are there any vegetarians options from what I could tell. If you’re not a fan of anything that swims, stay away.

We would share one order of bouillabaisse (there’s no need to order this in advance at Chez Fonfon – it’s so popular and they always have it everyday) and one of their fishes of the day, grilled with a side of our choice. The waitress ran to the kitchen to bring over a basket of the fishes they had available – there were red mullets, and a couple of fishes I didn’t recognise. After we asked for a recommendation, she suggested that the sea bream would be best grilled and we went with that, with panisses on the side. While we waited, we were again shown another basket of fish; this time, this was the selection of four fishes that would play a part in the bouillabaise.

After we had made our selections, we were brought an amuse – melon gazpacho, a lovely way to chill out that hot day. We appreciated having the windows open in the dining room as well; it was a hot day.

The grilled sea bream came first – it was presented to us tableside where a waiter filleted it. On the side were lemon, olive oil and a lovely generous bowlful of homemade tartar sauce (I hate it when you have to make do with a tiny ramekin’s worth). The fish was gorgeously fresh and so delicious just with a squeeze of lemon. The panisses on the side (made of chickpea flour) were lightly crisp on the outside, soft and moist on the inside, and surprisingly filling.

The sauces for the bouillabaise were already at our table; there was an aioli and the classic rust-coloured rouille. They did forget the croutons though and we had to ask for them – these are essential! A soup bowl was set down before me and a waiter came by with a large tureen and ladled a very dark fish broth into the bowl. By itself, it’s a great, flavorful fish broth, very dark and rich and comforting. But it really comes alive when you smear some of spicy and garlicky rouille on a crouton and float that baby in that bowl. Ah… I drank a lot of that soup. And we could have as much of the broth as we wished – that tureen kept making the rounds of the tables.

The fish from the bouillabaisse was presented alongside not long after, on a bed of potatoes that had also been boiled in the broth. You could tell there were four different types though I can’t remember them all for the life of me. It was fun trying the different textures from the different species. Anyway, you eat the fish and you eat the potatoes and then if you’re like me, you try to fit in as much soup, croutons and rouille as you can.

After all that fish and soup, I could barely even think about dessert. What a shame, as their dessert menu was full of delicious sounding things! Chocolate fondant with a chestnut heart? Dammit – no space!  Blai found space for a selection of their delicious sorbets though. Their fruit flavours were just about perfect – I suspect they’re all homemade.

I just got a coffee which came presented with these excellent little sweets – delicious fruit jellies, orangettes and two types of calisson – regular (white) and rose-scented (pink). A sweet yet light (and caffeinated) end to the meal.

Of course, this could hardly be called a budget lunch. The total was about €120, including mineral water and service. But then, this was an occasion that required something rather grand and I think we got it. Happy anniversary, my love!

Chez Fonfon
140 Rue du Vallon des Auffes
13007 Marseille
France

Bookings are essential.