A year or so ago I had an entertaining argument with a friend of mine about how much better the food culture is in France than it is in the UK. I can't remember the details (I think we were in the middle of a Notting Hill pub crawl at the time) but I suspect I was banging on about France's ability to sustain both local butchers, bakers and probably candlestick-makers AND huge supermarkets in and around small towns, and the fact that even Monsieur LeClerq et al offer high quality, local ingredients rather than ready meals for the brain dead. Something like that anyway.
I probably blew it by saying it was almost enough to want make me want to live there: cue lots of predictable cheese-eating-surrender-monkey gibes and other good(ish) natured prejudice. I think we'd just lost at rugby again.
Anyway, the point is, for all Jamie Oliver's proselytising in schools and Hugh F-W's heroic efforts with microwave junkies, the depressing fact is that the French take the availability of decent food for granted, and for the most part the British are satisfied with - even enthusiastic for - fodder that is mediocre, bland or downright awful.
What would be your expectation, for instance, were you to pull off a motorway in the UK in need of shelter for the night and a bite to eat? If you were lucky, you'd find a B&B or a country pub offering "home cooked" food of the chips-with-everything variety. If you were very lucky, you might find something genuinely home cooked. More likely, though, you'd have to go to a Travelodge. I don't know what you'd eat there and I'm not keen to find out either.
Contrast this with my trip back from Switzerland this week with my good friends John and Lindi. We ended up with a bit of time in hand so we decided to drive back in two stages, stopping off at a motel just off the autoroute not far from Dijon, where they'd been once or twice before. Pretty ordinary accommodation, to be sure, but (for a Brit, at least) extraordinary food.
From the outside, Val Moret is not much to look at. A low-slung modern roadside building with a number of smaller outbuildings that make up the cheap and cheerful motel accommodation. Neon signs and fairy lights abound, not all of them hangovers from Christmas. Inside, things aren't much better, to be honest. Nothing shabby, as such, but there's a feeling of conference centre seconds about the furniture. Certainly very little to hint at the quality of the food you're going to get.
The first clue comes when an amuse buche arrives. In a motel restaurant. Something delicate involving prawns presented on a chicory leaf as I recall. The details are less important than its mere existence.
To start, I went for the feuilleté andouillette. The waiter was good enough to check I understood what I was ordering (bless him). Just as well I did know, as the English translation on the menu offered little help: it said something like "pastry filled with Ahn Douy". This was very generous and rich, the tangy offaliness of the chitterlings nicely offset by the lightness of the pastry. John had an astonishing salade Perigourdine, which proved to be foie gras toasts, a generous helping of smoked duck and a confit of what looked like half an adolescent duckling (I think it was actually quail). My kind of salad: not much room for the green bits. Lindi knew what she was going to order before she left Switzerland and was not disappointed by her escargots, which came in some sort of pastry shell (this doesn't do it justice) and were indeed delicious.
There was more offal to follow as Lindi and I opted for the ris de veau. A big old sweetbread each came delicately sautéed and accompanied by a little forest of watercress and a shot glass of more watercress in a hot creamy sauce. Magnificent. John went for one of the house specials, an intensely flavoured boeuf bourguignon, which was indeed special. The other semi-permanent special is the pot au feu, almost certainly worth trying next time as it's also made with high quality beef from the family farm. A bottle of Gevrey Chambertin helped everything along nicely. An side of unctuous dauphinoise was largely surplus to requirements, and with no room for pudding, or a bash at the impressive looking cheese trolley, we settled for a Marc and a coffee to finish off.
Now this was categorically not haute cuisine. Just a local restaurant with a few loyal followers and a flourishing passing trade from those people (quite a few Brits) who know it's there. No culinary flourishes, little in the way of fancy presentation, just great quality gutsy grub at sensible prices. By no means a destination restaurant, but if you're ever (controversially) passing through Champagne or Burgundy, you could do a lot worse. And if the equivalent does exist half way up the M1, I'd be delighted to know where.
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