Sunday 23 august 2015
Home made foie gras Bourride de poisson
. . . . (not by me!)
Once again apologies for delay since last posting. Drove back from Germany on Tuesday and have been exhausted ever since. Not only the 470 miles on Tuesday but the whole 1500 miles of the week-long trip suddenly caught up with me.
It had been the intention to stop at Waterloo on the way back from Frankfurt to see the battlefield restored for the 200th anniversary to how it would have looked in 1815 (well, the buildings, not the fields) but I decided to save that for another occasion and so we pressed on to Ostend where we had booked a room for the last night of our trip.
Ostend turned out to be quite different to what we were expecting, being more akin to Benidorm than Calais so by the time we found our hotel, between unbelievable one-way systems, trams, parked cars and an infinity of pedestrians paying no heed to vehicles, I was wishing we were not to stay there.
Anyway the hotel obliged telling me that my card payment had been declined and that they had re-let the room. While angry at the nerve of the hotel, I was also relieved at not being obliged to stay.
On the way down to Calais we rang the ferry company and rebooked for later than night – later to give us time to pick up some wine and to have dinner in our favourite restaurant in Calais, Au Côte d’Argent.
There’s just something different about the way they serve fish in France (i.e. different from England) and that doesn’t just mean they don’t fry it and serve it with chips. Even what might be termed ‘classy’ fish restaurants in London don’t demonstrate the subtlety and delicacy achieved in France.
The images at the top show the starter and main course I had, which with a delightful amuse-bouche on arrival and excellent as-much-as-you-want cheese and dessert trolleys, cost €40 or at current exchange rates, about £30. Not bad, eh?
We found the restaurant on a wine-gathering day trip and fell in love with it. Calais is actually a great place to go for lunch if you live in London. It’s about an hour to the coast and another hour sees you in France (bit longer on the ferry) but where else can you get to in 2 hours fro East London? Anywhere west is a non-starter because it takes an hour and a half just to cross London; north there’s Cambridge, very nice but I bet they don’t do fish the same way there so south to France it is, and with the right deals, the savings in wine can pay for the trip. Bargain!
Vive la France!
PS The day after we got back, I received an email from Booking.com saying that the hotel had reported us as a ‘no-show’. Fearing we might be charged for the room we had been denied, I contacted my credit card company who told me the hotel had not even attempted to take a payment (so much for being declined), then rang Booking.com (who incidentally were incredibly and surprisingly supportive) and set them straight about who had done what to whom!