Sunday 6^th August 2023

The door looked completely unprepossessing.  Dark blue paint on vertical boards, no window, no signage on the door, a dark forbidding-looking handle.  You could have missed it completely if you didn’t see the sign outside above and to one side on the wall. And what a curious name for the restaurant – I’m still not sure how to pronounce it. The door did, however, have a notice hanging from a nail saying in white painted handwriting “Complet”.  Fingers crossed that didn’t include our 1pm reservation.

The door opened with more a push than the turn of the handle into a room full of people sitting a tables.  It felt a bit like one of those western movie when the gunslinger enters the saloon, the music stops and everyone turns and stares.  A short man came up to us, smiling and said something I didn’t catch.  I guessed he wanted to know if we had a reservation, and given how full the place was, he may have been a little sceptical about how much longer he’d be enjoying our company. I could see a shake of the head coming and “Je suis desolé” forming on his lips.

Taking back the initiative, however, I said my name and the time of the reservation. He checked a list, smiled again (phew) and showed us to a table by the door that was already occupied at one end by four older people (husbands and wives by the look of them) but which had two places set at the door end. We all said “Bonjour”.

Sabine generously let me sit facing inwards with a view of the restaurant and the other patrons, which she knows I prefer, but which required me to sit on the bench seat against the wall that was about eight inches wide.  The two ladies at the other end were sat on it too.  Sabine had a chair.  We were given cushions to sit on that made it much more comfortable.

The Sunday menu was put in front of us as well as a laminated menu with some explanation of the menu food combinations and prices, and the wine which pleasantly had half bottles of Menetou-Salon white, red and rose.

An older women (60?), the owner as we learnt later, asked if we wanted an aperitif and we chose a half bottle of the white.  She explained a few things about the menu, including the word Brochet (pike) served in a cream sauce, a house speciality.  She did this gracefully in a mixture of English and French with no sign that speaking English was objectionable or difficult.  Neither of us fancied the pike which from my limited experience and Sabine’s memory of having it in Germany was quite a strong flavour and very bony (but not here, as it turned out).

The first food to arrive was a tray of bread and a jar of gherkins, home-pickled, with a pair of wooden tongs to serve them up. Then came the wine – the man delivered it with a little flourish, saying it was go gay or something like that.  I got him to repeat it again, said it back to him to his satisfaction (Oui), after which he left without pouring it.  I then noticed the wine bottle had no label.  But before we went to the restaurant, we did a little walkabout in the town (didn’t take long as surprisingly given it was the centre of the Appelation, but typically in only a French way, there was nothing there) and Sabine had suggested I take a photo of the list of vignerons at the bottom of the area map we saw down the street from the restaurant.  I had a sudden brainwave, not a frequent occurrence these days, and checked the list.  Lo and behold, Gogué was on the list.  That answered that question.  The wine was perfectly quaffable.

Our entrées (starters if you’re American) came fairly quickly after the wine, but not in a way that seemed hurried.  It was the same with all the service from the four people doing the serving.  There was the older woman, the man, a younger woman who looked like the older woman’s daughter and a teenage girl.  

Sabine had duck terrine with bread and I had herrings in oil, onions and carrots with sliced potatoes in balsamic vinegar and oil – the herrings were delicious, far too much food but mercifully I wasn’t mad about the potatoes and only ate about half the dish.  Sabine loved her duck terrine.

At the end of the first course, I ordered a half-bottle of red.  It arrived as the white had, in a bottle with no label.  This time, though, it was brought by the teenage waitress; she didn’t tell me the vigneron and had gone off before I could ask.  Again, wine pouring was not part of the service proposition.  It was passable and went well with the lamb and cheese, but was nothing like as good as the red wine we’d enjoyed the night before at Restaurant La Tour (and nothing like the price either).  Sabine only had a little as she had offered to drive back, bless her.

The plats (main courses) were delicious.  My lamb was pink, soft and succulent.  Sabine’s rabbit effortlessly fell off the bone.  We both had green beans and roasted carrots, plus a large spoonful of dauphinoise potatoes.  I’d noticed the man going round serving this to other people as they were given their main courses. For example, the four next to us had the pike and before they served themselves the fish and cream sauce they had on the table, he scooped large portions out for each of them from a Pyrex dish that he carried to their end of the table but then took away it with him.  We got the same treatment.

When we had finished, the lady next to me asked (in French of course) if we wanted to try their pike.  I said No (I might even have been so confused that I said Nein), but Sabine felt obliged to give it a go, saying in French that she used to eat this as a child in Germany. We were given a very generous portion of their leftovers.  It was reasonably tasteless but had a nice constituency and the cream sauce made it really quite pleasant, not at all fishy and we were spared any bones.  I still think we made the right call in not ordering it, though.

While we were in that holding position of having had more than enough to eat but knowing that we would need to confront the cheese and dessert courses, the woman serving us who we had correctly designated the daughter of the older woman, early 30s and very slim, came and talked to us in English, starting by asking us where we were from.  I was a bit nervous that others diners might hear when Sabine said Scotland, given the rugby result of the day before, the hitherto unheard-of victory of Scotland over France at Murrayfield 25-21, but fortunately there were no embittered rugby fans within earshot

She was lovely, elegant and at ease in that very French way. She’d spent time in Dublin but had come home to help with the restaurant, a fourth-generation family business.  She amazed us by saying she had 3 children.  It was so nice that she came up and talked to us.

While we were chatting to her, the cheese trays had arrived at the other end of the table. When I say trays, that hardly does justice to the size of the two round trays, easily 50 cms across. One was laden with mainly goats cheese, the other with only two cow cheese, a huge brie and one with orange rind like Port Salut. They were carried, one in each hand, but I don’t mean carried, I mean balanced rather than held, with the fingers of each hand supporting a tray.  The fingers belonged to the young waitress who looked about 16, who had been carrying these trays in this way around the restaurant from table to table, apparently effortlessly, as the patrons reached that course.

The daughter of the owner left us and the lady next to me started chatting to me in French again (I think she fancied me).  She seemed to have no idea that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but I did catch “quatre-vingt something” so I rightly guessed she was saying her age and commented appropriately.  She was very petite, but dressed and turned out beautifully and had a lovely twinkle in her eye.  Sabine asked what her secret was and she said living every day as happily as you can.  She’d had hardship as a child (WW2 presumably) but now things were better.  Her husband, sitting diagonally opposite and also very well turned out, was eighty-five.

Then it was our turn for the cheese.  In fact, we were asked if we wanted cheese and dessert.  Sabine made a face where you blow out your cheeks to indicate how stuffed you are and declined both courses.  I said Oui to both.  I didn’t want any goat’s cheese as it looked mainly from Chavignol – I’d had some the previous evening at La Tour and had preferred the flavour of all the other five cheeses we’d had between us that evening.  I had some fromage frais that had no taste, but the brie and the one that looked like Port Salut were great, consumed of course with some bread and what was left of the red wine.

Then came dessert – Charlotte chocolate gateau with a choice of accessories – crème anglaise, peche, banana, prunes in red wine, apricot and others.  I chose crème anglaise and peche, forcing it down as Sabine looked on – she was so full, but she had a taste and in an instant realised her mistake in not ordering it, but still went without. We had coffee (black) to finish.

When we came to pay, it was an unbelievable €110, €120 with tip.