Another Food Blog

A friend brought me some top quality chocolate from New York.  The brand was MarieBelle and, knowing my taste, included only dark chocolate.  There was a square of Coeur de Guanaja 80% cocoa butter which was fabulous, and which lingered in the mouth long afterwards.  There were four flavoured chocolates: saffron, fennel, cinnamon, and Earl Grey tea.  The flavouring was subtle, just enough to give wisps of flavour along with the intense chocolate hit.  Wow! This was pure luxury, not to be taken every day…

Most streets in Nice seem to feature a few bistros, “a small restaurant serving moderately priced simple meals in a modest setting.”  They are usually family owned and offer very good value, especially in their fixed price menu.  My local one on the corner of Boulevard Gambetta and Rue Verdi is Chez Michel, which has street tables, as do most.

I often eat lunch there.  This time my companion ordered their house salad, featuring ham, cheese, tomato and onion.  It looked very good,  I ordered their escalope de volaille, which translates as poultry reared for meat or eggs and is often chicken.  It came in a dark cream sauce with green beans and fries.  One of us drank beer, one the house rosé wine.  It made for a pleasant lunch in great outdoors weather.

Chez Freddy probably sounds a lot cooler in French than it does in English.  It’s a really good seafood restaurant in Nice’s market square, and you dine out of doors, of course.  I began with the foie gras de canard, which was delicious, with an excellent sweet chutney to offset it.  There wasn’t enough toast, but the baguette basket made up for that.

My dining companion went for the prawns, five giant ones, followed by a main course of whole seabass.  This was pronounced good, but there was a bone problem, as always, which is one reason I am always reluctant to order a whole fish of anything except trout.

I had boulliabaisse, Marseilles style.  It’s a kind of fish stew with big lumps of seafood in it and is completely delicious.  Chez Freddy did it proud.

With the food I drank a Provence rosé, as everyone does.  This time it was a Domaine St Beatrice., and was very good.  Our set menu included dessert, which we ordered, but which never came.  Eventually we grew bored with waiting, so settled up and left without it. I doubt they even noticed.

The word gnocchi means “lumps”, and may derive from nocchio, a knot in the wood, or from nocca (knuckle).  They are Italian dumplings which can be based on wheat flour, but are often made from potatoes, and I am told to pronounce then “nee-yock-ee.”  People intolerant of wheat gluten can find in potato dumplings an acceptable pasta-type dish.  I was out for a half-day visit to Villefranche, and after a stroll through its Old Town, its harbour, I took a quick look at the Eglise de St Pierre, a 14th century church decorated with huge murals painted by Jean Cocteau in the late 1950s.

Just across from it, a few yards down opposite the harbour, is Les Corsaires, a sea-front restaurant I often visit.  This time my fellow luncher ordered the fritto mixture, giving quite an assortment of deep-fried seafood.  I ordered the gnocchi with magret de canard, and was pleasantly surprised by how much duck there was.  It was very good, too.  We drank beer and Provence rosé.

L’Abbaye is an Italian restaurant in the cathedral square of Nice’s Old Town.  It is a few yards away from the Cathedral of St Reparata, and specializes in pasta, pizzas, and traditional Italian dishes.  I looked long and hard at the different ways they offer of serving mussels, and was tempted (as so often) by moules mariniere.

I decided instead to start with the onion and cheese tart, which was nicely done and very appetizing.

For the main course I had sea bream with wild rice and chopped peppers and onions and other unidentifiable vegetables.  It was perfectly adequate, if somewhat uninspiring.  The house rosé wine was, as expected, very good.

I sat outside at La Liber’Tea near Place Massena at lunchtime to recover from an exhausting session with French bureaucracy as I (successfully) ordered a phone line, broadband internet, plus 100 TV channels.  I was so hungry I could have eaten a horse.  In fact I did eat a small part of a horse by ordering a cheval burger, made from horsemeat.  To my delight the waiter queried ” à point?” (roughly medium rare), and that’s how I wanted it and how it came.  It was on half a bun, with an egg on the other half, soft fried.  There were fries, tomato, and a mixed beansprout and raw carrot salad.  It was quite delicious, and I drank beer with it.

Revisiting Nice, it was pleasant to see how a month has changed things.  It is still very warm, but not oppressively so, and with no stickiness.  Most of the restaurants in the evening are busy outside, but with empty tables inside. My first night back I dined with a friend at l’Ousteau on Boulevard Gambetta, opposite the park.

I chose veal à la crème for my main course, using the basket of bread with oil and vinegar as a starter.  The veal was very good, nicely done, but with way too much cream sauce.  This often seems to happen in France – maybe we’re supposed to mop it up with bread?  I guess our tastes differ.  My companion ordered the fillet of salmon, which appeared with an array of chopped vegetables on top, looking rather like a bruschetta, but with a salmon base instead of bread.  There were some nice fries for both of us to pick at, and a pitcher of the house rosé wine to help the food go down. It was quite a good welcome back.

Just as Xander did, I began my meal at About Thyme with the scallops and black pudding.  Whenever I see that combination I almost always order it (they do it sometimes at the Chop Houses).  My main course, however, was the day’s special rack of lamb.  It was stunning, done just right, soft, pink and juicy.  It came with asparagus and new potatoes and a nice jus.

But for artistic flair, the stuffed peppers that one of us ordered won the prize.  The comment that “it looks like art deco” was soon followed by the observation that tasted as good as it looked.

This worked surprisingly well.  I bought some skinless breast of duck fillets and rubbed them with sea salt before putting them on a baking tray in the oven for about 40 minutes at 170, turning once.  I pricked the baking potato all over with a fork, then rubbed first olive oil, then sea salt before giving it an hour on a rack in the oven.  For vegetables I chopped red peppers, purple onion, mangetout and courgette, and sautéed them in a little oil and butter before adding mushrooms after 4 minutes.

The sauce was a quick-make version I thought up. It basically consisted of orange juice, caramel and dry white wine, stirred together with some crème fraiche and heated.  I added a few twirls of pepper after tasting it.  It went very well with the duck.

Some of us tried this out at the Cork & Bottle, Leicester Square. Antica Terra is a small 40-acre parcel “sitting on a sloping hillside of shallow, well-drained soil, underlain by sandstone and siltstone and formed from old alluvium – la antica terra.”  Apparently they keep the yields low to develop concentrated flavours.  The pinot noir is full of cherry and blueberry tones, with plums in the body of it.  It bursts with fruit that lingers, with an almost flowery aroma. We loved it, and thought it went particularly well with sitting outside over cigars…