St.-Cirq-Lapopie, Brive-La-Gaillard

At 4:30 this morning several of other guests at this hotel (apparently German) got up early to leave. This involved a lot of walking around, knocking on doors, and calling out to each other. Out the window I thought I heard the sound of an idling motorcoach. It all woke me up, but I managed to get back to sleep far another 4 hours.

We got up, checked out, and took our stuff to the car. Then we had some coffee and headed to the covered market (many towns have a covered market with vendors in it daily, sort of like the Pike Street Market in Seattle). In addition to the covered market, today was the biweekly market, and the square between the cathedral and the covered market was full of vendors. We bought some cheeses, more canned duck products, some pâté, and some extraordinarily delicious strawberries that were almost blood red. We also bought some bread from a boulangerie and a little tiny folding knife from a knife shop. The knife was only €3.50 and has a built in caribiner-like latch so you can wear it from a belt loop.

After rather a lot of time spent at the market, we headed out of town, taking first a tour around Cahors to see some sights we'd missed (their famous bridge, in particular), and finally heading out along the Lot river to get to St.-Cirq-Lapopie. St.-Cirq-Lapopie is described as one of the most beautiful towns in France; on this trip we've seen a lot of towns like that. Perhaps it was the rain, but it wasn't my favorite. It sits near the top of a rocky promontory and spills partway down. The highest point is where the castle used to be, but now there are just ruins. The church just below it remains, though, and so that's the highest building in town. In town we had a simple lunch at a place with a covered terrace (it was sort of pleasant to sit outside but out of the rain) – I had a salade de la marché, which was salad with something like snowpeas and a scoop of "rillettes de deux saumon", essentially a salmon spread. The salmon was uninspired, but was pretty good with little bits of lemon eaten at the same time (a spoonful of salmon plus a quarter slice of lemon, rind and all, is lovely; it's a trick I learned at IKEA, of all places). Eric had the assiette express, in a section called "assiettes repas", meaning essentially one-plate meals. The plate was rather large and mounded with salad, dried magret de canard, goat cheese (a Cabécou or something similar), and a ton of fries (deep-fried potato slices, actually; the original "chips"). Also there were raisins, which he didn't eat of course. It was OK, but it just didn't come together. The potatoes were tasty, though. Then we had coffee, and went exploring.

After a while poking around St.-Cirq-Lapopie, we headed off to the Peche-Merle caves to see prehistoric cave drawings up close. The caves were amazing. It was a little intimidating at first to be underground like that, but quickly I forgot about it, paying attention instead to the formations and the drawings. The first drawing was, to me, the most amazing, because I was fairly close to it, and thought, thousands of years ago a person drew this thing on a wall and here I am looking right at at, and it looks the same as it ever did. (The cave drawings survive, apparently, better than ancient Greek art, of which we have carvings but nothing pigmented. Supposedly ancient Greek buildings were painted garish colors though we always imagine them as white. But I digress; the point is, these caves and this art looked about the same today as it did when the art was made.

Then we hit the road for Brive-La-Gaillard. Along the route we had rain-clouds-sun-rain and then clouds again, all in only about 60km. Brive is much bigger than Cahors, and more prosperous and sophisticated as well. The medieval center is well preserved and organized, and ringed by boulevards where the city walls used to be. The newer architecture that's been added in meshes well with the older stuff (as it does, usually, in Paris). There's also pretty good shopping, though everything was closed already when we arrived. (Monday, it turns out, is a holiday here: Pentecost. Drat. Oh well.) Ultimately I like Brive better than Cahors; like Cahors it feels like a real town, but it also feels more welcoming, and like a place you might live in happily.

We wandered around town, scoping out restaurants, having left our guidebook at the hotel (Les Collonges, just outside the old town). This was a pretty good way to see the old town. Eventually, though, we did go back to consult the book, and also to change into nicer clothing (wear it if you've got it!). We decided to try one place we'd seen that was in the guidebook, but unfortunately they were all booked. So we headed to another place we'd liked the look of, called La Table d'Olivier, which I think would mean "The Olive-Wood Table".

It was an excellent choice. And, since nicer restaurants are often closed on Sundays and holidays, it may be the last nice meal we have on this trip. We both had the more expensive of the two menus, because it had what we wanted. To begin with they gave us nibbles: something like a cross between eggplant caviar and tapenade; roasted peppers on toast; bacon-wrapped prunes. Mmmmm. As a starter I had the terrine de foie gras, which came with a raisin-pineapple chutney, grains of salt, a little hot pepper, and something like a pink peppercorn. Taken all together on a piece of toast, they all worked together to taste really fabulous. Eric started with a summer-truffle salad with asparagus and hazelnut oil. The summer truffles were a little odd, and lacking the strong flavor we usually associate with truffles – probably why we haven't seen them on menus so far – but the salad was still fantastic. My main dish was filet de morue avec crème de fenouil – I don't know how to translate morue, but it's a nice, firm, strongly-flavoring fish (but not too fishy), and it held its own against the rich and flavorful cream-butter-fennel sauce. It was served on a bed of zucchini, red peppers, and fennel. I have never enjoyed fennel as much as I did tonight (frankly sometimes it's too much for me). Eric had a veal chop encrusted in almonds and parmesan with a fabulous lightly-curry-flavored sauce, which was also fantastic. To drink we had a bottle of white Burgundy: Haute Côtes de Nuit 2002. It was lovely, and married perfectly with the Pont-L'évêque cheese I had with my cheese course. (It did not go well at all with the goat cheese I had with it... not quite as bad as mint and orange juice, but the flavors were pretty much at war. So I didn't drink while I had the goat cheese. Eric had some bleu d'Auvergne and some Camembert (not quite ripe, but good nonetheless). For desert we both had the moelleux au chocolat, which was very runny in the middle, and came with a scoop of intensely-flavored vanilla ice cream. By itself, the ice cream was almost too vanilla-y – it had the perfumy quality of a vanilla extract – but taken in the same bite as a piece of cake, it was just sublime. After all that we had coffee, and they gave us some sweets to go with that (which we really didn't need): some sort of baked-custardy item, a chocolate truffle, and a lace cookie that was probably with almonds, but might have been pignoli.

And there's nothing to follow that up with but bed.

Labels: france, journal

posted by Tony at 11:47 PM