Joe Ray

Thursday, February 17, 2011

THE CREPE KING OF OYSTER CITY

CANCALE, France - Dad, Jim and I leave the ladies to roam on their own for a bit and we head to the oyster stands to split a few plates, sitting on the sea wall and flipping the shells into the sea.

Later, we double back for lunch at the Breizh Café. With the mother ship here, and branches in Paris and Tokyo, this place is multiplying like, um, hotcakes and that’s not such a bad thing.

Bertrand Larcher serves classics with high-quality fillings or more creative combinations like my smoked herring, lumpfish roe and cream - smoky, salty and just a little sweet. Whatever you get, the buckwheat crepes are crispy on the outside, downy within.

Nobody at the table offers to share - a good sign - and we wash it down with a Fouesnant cider that has a wonderful, farmy funk.

I run out to feed the meter before the dessert crepes - chocolate and butter and apple compote, cider syrup and whipped cream - are ordered and return to two rather tiny wedges the gang has ‘saved’ for me. Not bad considering I had to push the idea of dessert on them.

After that, we go back out and have more oysters on the sea wall.

Not really. But we thought about it.

Count on 15-20€ with cider.

Breizh Café - MAP
7 quai Thomas
Cancale
+33 (0)2 99 89 61 76
www.breizhcafe.com

Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

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Tuesday, February 01, 2011

DAD, TINTIN AND THE RESTAURANT ON THE BEACH

I’ve just made a mad dash inside the walls of Saint-Malo, trying to find a restaurant for my party five and left glassy-eyed. I’m sure some are fine, but most look like they’re made to accomodate the hordes that descend on the city in the warmer months.

“Bof!” the nonplussed French would say.

Crestfallen, I meet the gang.

“There was a good-looking place back by the hotel,” suggests Dad.

The place near the hotel, are you kidding!?!? I think. I’m the food guy - I should be able to find something better…Except I had noticed that place and it’s getting late…

“Perfect! Let’s go!”

La Brasserie du Sillon, a 10-minute walk down the beach from the center of Saint-Malo is bustling when just about everything else out this way is quiet. The food will be good and after a week of translating menus for my folks and their friends, the service is blessedly, impressively bilingual. While there are several à la carte options and shellfish platters a gogo, there are good values in the 25 to 40 euro prix fixe menus. My favorite is the whopping raie à la Grenobloise, skate served in brown butter, capers, lemon and walnuts. Roasted, it makes the tip of the skate wing flip up like Tintin’s hair. Mom gets an Italian-themed salad with a great slab of cured ham and the best mozzarella I’ve had in France.

Good call, Dad.

La Brasserie du Sillon - MAP
3 Chaussée du Sillon
Saint-Malo
+33 (0)2 99 56 10 74
www.brasseriedusillon.com
Reservations recommended

Follow me on Twitter: @joe_diner and on Facebook.

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Sunday, October 05, 2008

Doing it for the right reasons

I recently interviewed American food icon Alice Waters for a story I’m working on – Alice is down on France – particularly on the way the farming industry is run – now preferring to go to Italy where they still “get it.”

She should meet Baptiste Vasseur, an organic farmer in Belle Ile’s tiny town of Kerzo.

I met Vasseur, 26, while wandering the cliffs of Belle-Ile. He was out there with his friends, 100 feet above the ocean, fishing for the sea bass known as bar and “whatever else will bite” using shore casting rods to cast their bait a country mile out into the water. How they got the fish up to the top of the cliff remained a mystery.

Vasseur is in his second year of production on his farm with no name, now harvesting late-season tomatoes along with eggplant, cabbage, leeks, turnips, pumpkins and spuds.

It seems a lonely existence for a young guy (Kerzo is a tiny town on an island with a total population of only about 5,000 and mainland France is alternately known as “The Continent” or just “The Other Side”), so why here?

“I’ve got some family here, but mostly I just like it,” he explained. “I found a farm, I studied to make sure it was going to work and got a farmer’s loan. We’ve got a lot of debt, but the loan helped us get going.”

I ask the same question everyone eventually asks me as a freelance journalist: “You can make a living doing this?”

“I sell in the market in Le Palais, to restaurants, at the farm itself, and once a week a group of island farmers sells at the aerodrome. That’s it – that’s all I can grow.

What he doesn’t say (I’ll later learn this from chef Epron, who buys Vasseur’s tomatoes for his restaurant, La Table de la Desirade) is that some jerk once came by and poured pesticide in the cistern Vasseur uses to water his plants. This could strip a farmer of his organic certification in a heartbeat, but Vasseur rapidly realized the problem with a minimum of damage.

“It can get political,” he adds, “but in the end, it’s working. We work hard and believe in what we do.”

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Friday, October 03, 2008

‘Eating out’

Le Palais – Belle Ile, FRANCE - Maybe it’s all the clean air, but I’m getting into this ‘lunch on the seawall’ idea. Perhaps it’s because everyone in Le Palais, Belle-Ile’s biggest town, shrugs when I ask for a good place to eat (there are a few), but I’m learning that while the towns are picturesque, people don’t leave “Le Continent” for the island’s social scene or a destination restaurant. It’s more about taking a long walk or watching the waves crash.

I realize this while leaning against one of the two mini-lighthouses (the red one) that mark the entrance to Le Palais’ tiny port. I’ve brought a baguette, a half-dozen plates (flat oysters) from Quiberon, a tomato from a little farm one side of the island and a pepper-coated dome of fresh goat cheese from a cheese maker the other.

Here, this may be the version of ‘eating out’ I like the most.

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Friday, October 03, 2008

I Lied. Again.

I spoke too soon. Belle-Ile chef Pacôme Epron has brought me back in from the seawall with one dish.

Though the man has mastered roasting turbot at La Desirade, it was his dish based around cockles (cockles!) that brought me in. His recent millefeuille de coques, rosace de pomme de terre et courgettes au thym, jus viande au foie gras might be a little long in name, but what’s most important is the mix of cockles and meat jus. Some here will cry heresy at the idea of mixing of meat and fish, but theirs is a waste of hot air.

Pouring what tastes like the delicious fond from the bottom of a roast beef pan over the dish turns it from a dainty seafood course to something almost carnal – I wish I was eating this on a date.

Francois Mitterand might have preferred the frou-frou of the nearby Castel Clara (think: thalassotherapy, buffet tables and crisp white jackets), but I like Epron’s and La Table’s simplicity.

La Table de La Desirade - www.hotel-la-desirade.com – “Le Petit Cosquet” – 56360 Belle-Ile-En-Mer - +33 (0)2 97 31 70 70

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Monday, September 29, 2008

The Buttered One

QUIBERON - A Provencal friend of mine who claims to be ‘allergic to butter’ would perish in this town. Good thing she’s not here – more for me! Last night I had wonderful crèpes at La Duchesse Anne where melted butter is brushed on the hot galette (a crèpe made with buckwheat flour) before the ingredients are added and often brushed again before the finished dish goes out to the floor.

This morning, I stopped at the Boulangerie Bihan “Trois Marches” and picked up a pair of kouign amann – Breton for “cake” and “butter,” though they should have also added Breton for “lots of extra sugar,” which caramelizes around the whole thing and makes life good. Though they’re not particularly large, I learned that eating two is a bit like trying to get through an entrecôte pour deux personnes alone.

Luckily, my arteries and I were up for it. There’s a moment of crunchy, sugary goodness where your teeth stick together, then all at once, the butter gives up the ghost and becomes a liquid, full of so much flavor, I giggle.

Later, on the train back to Paris, I tasted another kouign amann that I brought from Quiberon’s famous Maison Riguidel - touted to be the city’s best. These were excellent – flatter and more cake-like in form, but Boulangerie Bihan’s got them beat, hands down.

SPECIAL NOTE: People of Quiberon, unite! Go to the Boulangerie Bihan (where I found my favorite kouign amann) and encourage the good woman running it not to close the bakery doors for good following the death of her brother the baker – she’s kept on running the bakery, but is talking of shutting it down within a month, taking one of the city’s tiny treasures with her.

Boulangerie Bihan “Trois Marches” 34, rue de Verdun QUIBERON – 02.97.50.14.96 - MAP

Creperie Duchesse Anne - 10, Place Duchesse Anne QUIBERON - 02 97 30 49 33 - MAP

Maison Riguidel – 38, Rue de Port Maria, QUIBERION - 02.97.50.07.41 - MAP

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Sunday, September 28, 2008

Sardine is not a four-letter word

QUIBERON – After three and a half hours on an early train from Paris and another hour on the bus, the idea of sitting around tourists and retirees in a restaurant didn’t really float my boat. Returning from a meeting to set up an outing with a gooseneck barnacle fisherman, I walked right in front of the solution: La Belle-Iloise cannery.

Five minutes and a six-can variety pack of sardines later – everything from the little silver fish marinated in muscadet to two peppers, olive oil and lemon – I was in business. Sitting on the seawall, I ate a tin of sardine à la tomate served on pain Poilâne that I smuggled from Paris. Though there’s a fierce debate as to whether La Belle-Iloise or La Quiberonnaise makes the better sardine it didn’t seem to matter; in the space of five minutes, three people walked by jealously eyeing my picnic and smiling. One guy even offered up a “Bon Appetit!”

On the bus, I had listened to an interview with Alice Waters who extolled the virtues of both cooking and eating with friends, yet here I was, straddling the seawall by myself, getting a sense of place from a can.

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