Friday, January 18, 2013

France, Day 8, 8/29/2012

After some Reine Claude plums and coffee at our local bar, which we've become very fond of, we go see the old town of Saint-Malo. We end up for lunch at a fast food crêperie called Breizh Food. I get a galette with egg and country ham, and Lindsay gets one with poitrine (smoked pork belly?) and cheese. Both are good, though the crêpes don't have that fermented tang that we've come to expect.

Old Saint-Malo.

Clouds and rain dash our beach hopes, so we stay in our hotel until we make a late afternoon visit to our cafe to sit and read. We go to dinner at le Bacchus, where we ate lunch the other day. They have a €20 prix-fixe (my guess is that they only have it when there aren't tons of tourists around). There are two choices for each course, so we get to have it all. First is a gratin of chanterelle mushrooms, and two fried eggroll shells stuffed with stewed beef (a way of using up leftovers, I guess). Both dishes come with a slightly overdressed salad of nice mesclun. The mushrooms are delicious: the dish was basically just them, seasoned and cooked in cream.

The two main courses were kidneys in a rich, mushroom sauce, and some kind of white fish à l'ancienne: mashed with potatoes and baked, like we had in Cancale, but this one was much better. Our server spent a long time trying to demonstrate what kidneys were so we knew what we were getting ourselves into.

For dessert we had a chocolate pot de crème and a vacherin with (raspberry?) coulis and crème anglaise. The vacherin was basically a really good ice cream cake, with layers of fluffy frozen icing (I think) and meringue.

After the meal, our waitress (possibly the owner) talks to us and seems very confused as to how we found the restaurant. She points at a Tripadvisor.com sticker and asks if that's why we came. We explain in our best French that our hotel was around the corner, and we just saw it as we walked by.