Tag Archive: France

Wine tasting in Bordeaux

Bordeaux is a wonderful city, with plenty of lovely looking shops and a limitless number of eating options. And with the most significant wine AOCs scattered around it like spokes on a wheel (Graves/Sauternes to the south, St Emilion/Pomerol to the east and Medoc to the west) there couldn’t really be a better base for …

Continue reading »

Review: Septième Péché, Bordeaux

Bordeaux is a delight for foodies of a certain stripe. If your idea of pleasure runs to chocolate, macarons, cheese, patisserie and fine wine then this is the place pour vous. It also has oodles of interesting looking places to eat, once you get over the standard set that appear in all the “Top 5 …

Continue reading »

Review: Le Gabriel, Bordeaux

Look, this is just getting ridiculous. Here’s a general request to all the fine dining restaurants I’ve tried in France over the last couple of years: pop out, buy one of the delicious little gateaux from any of the fine patisseries within a few yards of your restaurant, pop it on plate and present it …

Continue reading »

Review: Le Gambetta

We had a wonderful meal in Saumur, one that really reaffirmed my faith in French cooking after our culinary washout of a trip last year. Unfortunately this wasn’t the meal I’m reviewing here*. I enjoyed dining at Le Gambetta, but it was a frustrating mixture of the jolly good and the merely okay. The restaurant …

Continue reading »

Wine tasting in the Loire

The Loire is a big river in a big valley, and so the wine region of the Loire is – you’ve guessed it – big. We didn’t quite appreciate this and probably set out to explore too much of it in one long weekend. So that’s my first piece of advice: if you’re here for …

Continue reading »