Eating out in rural France

Quelle horreur

We live in one of the many rural areas in France that has seen enormous population shrinkage over the past decades. It’s why housing is relatively cheap here and how we ended up here, though it’s still a fairly popular tourist area with the Perigord to one side and Bordeaux and Cognac to the other. I hadn’t visited rural France myself since the mid-90’s so when I first came back around 5 years ago I was pretty shocked at how abysmal eating out in rural France had become.

When I was little France was where I learned to eat like an adult. Eskewing anything but the kid’s menu for the longest time, it was in an Ardeche mountaintown at 11 or 12 that I saw a lady neatly dissect a whole trout and decided I wanted to try the same, resulting in years of ordering whatever fish was on the menu. Later came whole prawns and langoustines in Normandy and Bretagne. And of course I’d always engorged myself on whole meringues from the local boulangerie. But now? Certainly when eating out rural France can feel like a bit of a food dessert.

Limousin her? I never even heard of her
While we live right next to (or smack dab in the middle of) what is considered one of the breadbaskets of France, and I can count about five different breeds of cow on my drive to the supermarche, these days most restaurants here do burgers and pizzas, if you’re lucky a steak frites (mayo or ketchup optional, from a little packet) and a storebought crème brulée. The burgers, pizzas and dessert invariably come from the freezer. A local restaurant nearby got in a tif with a customer, because they use Black Angus freezer burgers, which they defended as ‘one of the best quality burgers in the world’. Though certainly not from the freezer? And certainly not when the legendary Limousin cow lives in the field opposite (not pictured, these pretty white ladies are our neighbors).

Presentation at least offers something in the way of nostalgia, with most salads served with stripey drizzles of Balsamic glaze and most entrecotes (no sauce in sight) placed on a nice bit of slate roof tile.

Of course, the pandemic hasn’t helped. The other main source of income besides farming here is tourism so most restaurant income can only be made in about a 2 month timewindow (and often not at all, during both the local lockdowns as well as a full lockdown from foreign visitors for almost 2 years).

The fall of French cuisine
People ask me how come things are so bad here and I can’t say I’ve entirely figured it out.

I’d imagine a huge part of it is poverty, most of the people that live here year round are farmers, builders and (English, Dutch and Belgian) retirees.

I’d imagine there is also the issue of being bogged down by nostalgic expectations. If a restaurant doesn’t serve pizza and burgers, they tend to serve ‘the classics’, all those classics that France’s culinary dominance was based on and that this area in particular is known for (a block of foie and some toast, and confit duck).

But a lot of that stuff feels old and stale now, and since income is so low only the least adventurous chefs end up out here, while cooks looking to level up will probably look towards one of France’s cities to try their luck (though I’ve found even in a lot of cities it’s a needle in a haystack situation). Things become even more dire when restaurants are run by half-retired Brits* looking for some additional income figuring they running a restaurant is something they could ‘probably do’ even though they have zero restaurant experience never mind a real interest in or love for food.

As a final note on the bad, I think this Guardian article from 2019 offers a good understanding of what’s happened to French cuisine in terms of running cost and other issues involved (imagine how much worse the pandemic has made this).

The good: local, local, local
Among the bad there’s also some good. A key indicator for anything good is that those who do it well are all working with local farmers, brewers and vineyards to get the most out of this corner of France. I’ve been compiling a list of places to try and am slowly beginning to work my way through them so at least I can point visitors to our future writer’s retreat in the right direction. I’ve already found a good basic brasserie for Sunday lunches and two pretty stellar pick-up joints with people cooking really good Vietnamese and Indian food from home in villages nearby.

So in all fairness maybe it’s not even that bad at all. I rarely ate out in the Netherlands as well because *shrug* and with London as a notable exception I’d say virtually everywhere (to me) probably 75% of restaurants are yikes, 20% are okay (which is to say: good) and maybe 5% are mindblowing. It could be that it’s just harder to find that 25% here when everything is at least 30 minutes away. Thoughts?

Ideal French menu
While I’m whining, for the “But what should they do?” people, my ideal rural French menu would have at least some oeuf’s mayonaise from local eggs, a goat’s cheese salad with a local goat cheese and a Pineau des Charentes-vinegar and walnut oil based vinaigrette. Probably a steak tartare from local beef and some kind of steak-situ with some kind of Cognac-based sauce, of course we can keep the confit de canard but please lighten the sides, especially in summer. Of course in winter we can go ham with truffles. I’d also just like a good roast chicken, just… a simple basic bitch of a well roast chicken. What would you like?

First up: Michelin star gourmet eating
Last week I had to drop off my significant other at the train station in Angouleme so I decided to visit Sources de Fontbelle, which consists of Sources, a one Michelin star gourmet restaurant, on one side, and La Forêt des Sources, a bistro on the other. I opted for Sources, who offer a 3 course lunch, one glass of wine and coffee included at 37 euros (this is important to me as a Dutch person).

Sources felt very The Menu, initialy making it feel like a mistake for a solo visit, especially since I am not well-versed in non-casual fine dining.

It’s basically a sparcely decorated big black box, with all customers facing a wall-sized window overlooking the countryside (where the food is sourced). A week later I don’t want to get too much into the nitty gritty of it, but once we got started I didn’t regret coming to Sources by myself. I was particularly enamored by an amuse remiscent of seafoam (in the nicest way possible: think refreshing summer beach joy, not drowning in waves), a little crispy caramelized cèpes cream puff situation and a smoked local butter. The duck, with a light touch of smoke, and beetroot and the dessert of apricots and rosemary icecream were also nice (I feel all these words, ‘good’, ‘nice’, ‘okay’, ‘great’, sound sarcastic in 2023 and I have lost my ability to convey feelings of satisfaction without landing in overexagerated clickbait-land, but I don’t know how else to express that my mind was not blown but I left happy).

I’ll definitely be back to try La Forêt des Sources (and probably also more of Sources, but in company). It was interesting coming from the sort of silent reverence of the Sources to the hustle and bustle seeping out of the bistro-end as I was paying up at reception, it sounded much more my speed but would perhaps have been even more awkward for dining solo.

Apologies to the chef and staff who seemed to think I was Someone when I was merely a solo diner, being awkward.

What else?

• I’ve updated my grandfather’s rendang recipe (shock! horror) to make it in the pressure cooker and added some flavors to boot, I’m hoping to make a vegan version soon

• I made an old time favorite, cilantro and lime grilled chicken, but with oyster mushrooms (which haven’t left the shelves yet, last year they were long gone, so finger’s crossed they are no longer seasonal here). If you want to get off your meat I highly recommend (king) oyster mushrooms for anything that used to be chicken on your menu, adding this link to this king oyster teriyaki recipe for good measure

That’s it from me for this week, do let me know in the comments what your ideal French menu would look like and what your good/ bad ratio is for eating out.

* This is one of the areas of France where many Brits have settled, most of our neighbors are Brits and a lot of restaurants are British-run, a little further afield they refer to the closest part of the Dordogne as Dordogneshire