Jul 25 2008
Eating Out in France
I’ve been reading Jon Doust’s interesting blog post on the Telegraph website about eating out in France, which has also attracted quite a few comments. I’d like to share a bit about my experiences of eating out in France too, which has been varied but on the whole pretty good.
I guess some of my most memorable eating out experiences are from more recent holidays in France and one place I always look forward to eating out in is Barneville-Carteret, Manche. It’s a small seaside/fishing town on the west side of the Cotentin peninsula and is more or less opposite Jersey. The fishing boats come in opposite the restaurants at Carteret, so the ‘Plateaux de Fruits de Mer’ are extremely good. It’s literally about 100 yards from boat to kitchen! You do get quite a lot of whelks thrown in, but if you like your crab and oyster, you’d love the seafood and it’s at about half what you would pay for an equivalent meal here in the UK - I can never work out why seafood is so expensive here, particularly as we’re an island!
On the downside, we’ve had a particularly awful meal in La Rochelle, mussels which must have been cooked for hours, were tiny and shrivelled and when we complained we got an equally bad replacement. We had to leave the restaurant at that point!
Comparing these two meals, the La Rochelle meal was in a touristy part of the town and I think as soon as you hit places like this, the quality often goes downhill. I’m sure there are some good restaurants in La Rochelle and in many other touristy places, but you have to seek them out. Barneville-Carteret is not as touristy, and many tourists who visit the town are French (many Brits by pass it on their way down south from Cherbourg).
I love the value for money you get in French restaurants, a set menu at a reasonable price (often starter, main course and dessert), more often than not very tasty and ‘home cooked’ (or they’re good at disguising it as home cooked!). Many French restaurants do very well at lunchtimes for hungry office workers and at the prices they offer the food, it’s not surprising that workers still like to have a main meal at lunchtime. This also reminds me of when I worked in France as an ‘assistante’ near Toulouse, one school provided a 4 course meal at lunchtime for staff and students!
You do need to shop around though and not all meals will be good, no doubt corners will be cut with the rising food prices. As with anything you get what you pay for, so don’t expect a gastronomic experience for ‘menu express’ prices!
