by Ned Boulting
There was no question of dinner on-site that night. Our keys had been laid out on the counter. The landlady was already in her pyjamas, with the French version of Temptation Island blasting out of a television in her back room.
Once we’d thrown our bags in our rooms, we convened seconds later, hungry and a little angered by the turn of events that had left us once again standing in a grisly hotel reception without a dinner plan. Matt dragged Madame away from the television for a second time and consulted her. She seemed to suggest that there would be a chance of getting a bite to eat about half a mile down the road. This struck us as a little unlikely, since it was just a busy bypass, and we would be heading out of town.
To our astonishment though, after a ten-minute walk we found ourselves in a little square framing a fountain in the middle, and two restaurants, with tables outside. Where this had materialised from I have no recollection, and at the time no understanding. It seemed to make no sense at all. Then, in a second stroke of good fortune, we made the right choice between the two restaurants.
What followed was both funny and fabulous. Menus were handed out. We staggered through them, and made our choices. When the lady who owned the restaurant came out to take our orders she simply refused to accept them, telling us instead that we had made incorrect selections and that she would bring us something quite different. She did the same with the wine. She laughed and cajoled and generally bossed us around. But she provided us with a remarkable feast. I ate a rich beef stew. We sat with idiot grins strapped to our faces, soaking it all in. The wine was fine and salty. The night was warm. The Tour felt very good at that particular moment.
Later on that evening the lady’s daughter was ordered out to come and talk to us. According to her mother, we would have so much in common. It transpired that she was a rugby correspondent. She knew nothing of cycling and cared even less. We knew little of rugby and cared even less. After a few moments of polite nodding and amused silence, she thanked us and took her leave, shaking her head in irritation at her mother’s assumptions.
It was one of those rare nights on the Tour when the race and the clamour and the stress just backed off, and we could breathe and drink and relax. It was also the first of hundreds of places I’ve visited and loved and of which I have completely failed to make a note. And now it’s too late.
It often is on the Tour.
It was very late too when, a year or two later, we descended some creaking staircases into the fusty dining room of the Hostellerie de la Poste somewhere near Tours. By a miracle of compassion, the patron had agreed to keep the chef on if we hurried to the table. So we did.
The place was empty, expect for us. It was stuffed full of reproduction eighteenth-century furniture, all falling gently asleep under the antique electric flickering of a vast reproduction chandelier. One of the floorboards was loose in the middle of the room, and as each of us crossed the open space to reach our table, our footsteps made a tabletop crammed with crystal decanters rattle violently. One by one we took our places.
The food, as I remember was full of butter, and a bit full of itself. The wine, a bottle of Château du Val de Mercy (one of the rare occasions on which I actually committed to memory a memorable bottle of wine) was as beautiful to drink as French wine often is. The outstanding feature of the evening, however, was the menu itself.
When the moment arrived to order and, even though I didn’t want it particularly, I had no other choice than to apologise for my lack of French and in a clear, crisp and slightly over-enunciated voice articulate my wishes.
‘I would like the Spotted Ham Pot “House” Radishes Crunching With The Mustard Emulsion, please,’ I declared pompously. I wish I’d been able to order the Marbled Ocean In Its Frost, and the Leeks, Plugs and Mushrooms, too. But embellishment would have been unnecessary.
Already, we were all shamefully overwhelmed with schoolboy giggling, as the poor waiter looked on, clearly disappointed with our attitude and inwardly damning Britain and the British. Later on that evening, Matt tilted his chair too far back, and fell over, making the decanters nearly explode. We paid the bill and left.
It’s the aberrations that I remember best.
And one evening in particular. Like the mini-Stonehenge scene in Spinal Tap, it’s still funny. Often at three o’clock in the morning, when I am beset with the usual anxieties, I will take time out from fretting about my life to analyse once again what exactly it was that went on which left Liam clutching a head of fennel and pouting at the camera.
It was Bastille Day. It often seems to be. And for once, rather than sitting out the French national holiday on the concrete terrace of a Kyriad hotel overlooking the back of a Carrefour car park, it seemed we had lucked out. We were in Aix-en-Provence. The beautiful town has its slightly ugly parts, of course, and before you get the impression that we were staying in some beautifully restored townhouse on the Cours Mirabeau, rest assured that we had located the only one-star hotel in town. Dark, fetid and awful, we dumped our stuff in its gloomy rooms and disappeared into town to eat and watch the French get all dangerous with fireworks.
So there we were, fortunate enough to have found a table outside, despite the crush of people gearing up to party. It was nearly ten o’clock, and the town was only just beginning to fill up. We studied the menu, and ordered starters according to our well-rehearsed customs. Liam requested something challenging, possibly with added cruelty. Woody would have asked for something light. I almost certainly had a gazpacho in mind (the evening was hot). Matt knitted his brow, and then rubbed his temples.
‘Do you know what? I think I’m not getting enough vitamins. Too much dairy. I need something good to eat.’
‘Have the old assiette de crudités,’ prompted Liam, not unreasonably. Why anyone would ever want to order a plate of sliced carrots and a raw spring onion I had no idea. Yet, Matt went for it.
‘Et pour moi, je prends l’assiette de crudités. Voilà.’ He finished decisively, flapping the menu shut in the waiter’s face for extra flamboyance.
What, then, went on between the request and the execution is anyone’s guess. But what was placed in front Matt was either a peculiar joke, a hallucination or the only answer to an over-stacked and overflowing vegetable rack. But it was the biggest bowl of unprepared, huge and raw vegetables I am ever likely to see offered up as a light starter.
Staggeringly, it contained two complete heads of fennel, a clutch of spring onions, a cos lettuce, a red lettuce, a head of cauliflower, at least five large tomatoes, three endives, a green pepper and a red pepper.
Our jaws hit the deck. But we solemnly took to the task, the table pulling together to come to Matt’s aid. We’re good like that in times of need. After a solid half an hour of unfettered vitamin intake, we gave up. We’d barely scratched the surface of this extraordinary starter.
More often than not, though, it is not the meals served in restaurants with the pretension of being ‘gastronomique’ that stick in the memory, rather it’s the chance encounters, the welcome, simple meals in welcoming, simple places that spread the love, the feeling of well-being. A wide, smile-cracking pleasure it is, to sit in the warmth and be fed.
There are a number of hotel chains that populate the fringes of French towns and their associated industrial zones like barnacles. They differentiate one from the other in one critical way: while Campaniles, Kyriads and Ibis all boast restaurants, Formule 1, Etaps and Balladins leave you high and dry.
The food these budget hotels serve is surprisingly good, and very cheap. Although, since they generally only exist to service France’s army of travelling salesmen who trawl the country on a tight budget hawking their various wares, they can often appear quite overwhelmed by the arrival of the Tour’s multinational menagerie.
Once about a hundred of us all descended on a Kyriad hotel in some anonymous part of the country, which was seemingly staffed by only one local teenager. Within minutes of the first wave of Tour workers sitting down and glaring
impatiently at her, she was floundering utterly in her attempts to keep up with the tempo of orders coming her way. Her coping mechanism in this instance was to dissolve into giggles at every word uttered in her direction.
It was one of those encounters that leaves the English-speaking world mystified and irritated in equal measure. She appeared on the face of things to be quite incapable of understanding anything said in French to her, if it was nuanced with anything approaching the accent of a non-native speaker.
‘Pour moi, les pâtes, s’il vous plâit,’ I offered, concentrating hard on my diction.
She shrugged her shoulders and giggled.
‘Les pâtes? C’est bon?’
‘J’en sais rien.’ Shrug. Giggle.
She looked over her shoulder away from us, appealing for help from a solitary Frenchman eating at a table next to us. Could he help her interpret the desires of this collection of idiots from abroad who speak only in disjointed glottal stops and random fricatives?
With a nod of the head in my direction, he translated for her. ‘Il veut les pâtes.’
‘Ah. Alors, pour vous les pâtes.’ She noted down my order with a little giggle.
Later on that evening, the chef, already working with smoke coming out of his ears as well as his little kitchen, was called upon to assist with the taking of orders, his young co-worker having dissolved into a heap of teenaged uselessness.
Then the ice-cream freezer blew its fuse and burst into flames. Which was a good job, because we were struggling to translate ‘Magnum White’ into perfect enough French to make our order understood.
The food was good, though: my pasta was perfectly prepared and the others had some sort of stuffed quail with complex textures and worrying little bony bits. For no good reason at all, they gave us a free bottle of rosé. We left the table covered in mess and full of good humour.
There are also meals which won’t be forgotten because they are homespun or spontaneous affairs, where the owners of auberges, chalets and gites have provided for us from their own fridges. There was the couple in the Carmague who left a plate of cold meats, cheese and bread out for us on the terrace of their beautiful farmhouse. And a bottle of thick, deeply red wine. When we arrived it was nearly midnight and we ate overlooking the little vineyard that had produced the stuff. In the morning we bought a case of their wine for next to nothing, as we sat at their breakfast table overwhelmed by a choice of twenty different home-made jams.
A week after that, we stayed in a chalet in the Pyrenees run by an English couple from the Home Counties. Our midnight arrival was marked by the shattering sound of one of those wine bottles, which fell onto their drive as we opened the car door. But they too had laid on a feast for us. By one o’clock in the morning, we were each clutching a glass and trying not to feel too self-conscious in their hot tub.
The next year, our sat nav let us down badly. We were trying to find an auberge in the countryside near Gap. It was getting late and we were lost. Eventually I realised that I no longer had any choice other than to phone the owners and plead for directions.
This is not an easy proposition if your French is as restricted as mine, mainly because it almost always starts with the unanswerable question from which all solutions and/or misdirections must follow: ‘Where are you at the moment?’
I gazed through the windscreen. We had reached a T-junction. Ahead of me was a clear choice between turning right into a bit of France to the right, and turning left where a further, more left-sided bit of France would open up in front of us. I had no idea where we were. Hence the need for the phone call.
More by luck than linguistics, however, we soon found the place. It stood on its own in a tiny hamlet, next to the post office. We unloaded our gear, and, on approaching the lady sitting outside at a table just about to eat her dinner, we posed the next critical question.
‘Est-ce qu’on peut toujours manger ici quelque part?’ She shook her head. The restaurant hadn’t even opened that day and, besides, there were no other guests. We must have looked as abject as we felt.
Just then, her husband returned in the car from a fruitless search-and-rescue expedition (he’d driven off to find us). But of course, he declared on hearing of our predicament, his family was just about to sit down for a late dinner. If we didn’t mind the simplicity of the food, we’d be welcome to join them. We didn’t mind, and so we joined them. Within minutes of carrying our stuff to our comfortable little rooms in an annex above the post office, we were sitting down with Norah, Remy and little Enzo to a fresh tomato salad, bread, oven chips and steak. It tasted great. Remy opened a bottle of rosé. We saw that off in a matter of minutes, and raised the game. Running to the back of the car, Liam returned swiftly bearing a bottle of Bordeaux and Côtes de Bourg. The Renault always clinks suspiciously.
As the wine flowed, so did the chat. Remy wanted to talk about the disintegration of respect for sportsmen, particularly with regard to the French football team who had let themselves down so badly a few weeks prior to that during the World Cup in South Africa. It was, thought Norah, a mirror image of the disrespect eating away at French society. Enzo, a hyperactive seven-year-old who, his parents confided, rarely went to bed before midnight and would often sleep in till midday, was more interested in the free Tour de France stage calendar which Woody magicked from somewhere. It kept him quiet for minutes at a time. In the morning I gave him a vuvuzela, which I had brought with me from South Africa, and we took our leave before our sudden friendship with this splendid family ended, as they faced up to the reality of life with a highly motivated plastic horn blower.
Before driving off, however, we balanced Liam’s camera somewhere precarious and took a self-timed picture in which we all managed to smile simultaneously.
But, although dinner is a lottery, and breakfast, no matter how you dress it up, is something to be endured, lunch is a thing of beauty. Ever since the days when Channel 4 used to show the Tour, the same production company has made the programmes. And over those many many years, the same caterers have fed the programme makers. A considerable (and in the interests of commercial confidentiality, undisclosed) portion of the annual production budget goes towards the preparation and presentation of fabulous, hearty, regionally sourced fresh French food.
An extended French family who live, for reasons I have never established, in Forest Hill in south London, have the catering contract for lunch. The day they lose it is the day I resign.
Romain is a pleasant, harmless maniac. In his mid-twenties, no more than five foot seven tall, a little round of physique with a military haircut and a matching beard, he collects free Tour stuff with a passion. Most days, therefore, you will find him wearing some sort of T-shirt, donated to him by an American TV network, in an ever-advancing state of decay as the sauces of a hundred lunches are rubbed into its fabric, and the sweat of a hundred stocks eat into its weave.
He will normally offset this with a baseball cap from a German station, worn at the jaunty angle of a Brooklyn MC. Sometimes, if he is feeling particularly outré, he will wear two. Just because he can. And because he’s a maniac.
Romain’s mother, Odette, who barely looks a day older than him, works tirelessly loading and unloading the fresh produce from the back of their hired Petit Forestier refrigerated truck, wiping down surfaces, fixing the temperamental coffee machine, and basically ensuring that all the life-sustaining trimmings are in place and in operational order. By the middle of each Tour, Odette begins to turn dark hazelnut-brown, and as her tiredness increases with the murderously demanding schedule, so her low-key, chilled cheerfulness becomes a more and more precious commodity. A simple, ‘’Allo, Ned’ can bring a smile to an otherwise damp and miserable mountain morning. That and the endless supply of apricots, peaches and plums.
Odette is married to Philippe, Romain’s stepfather. He towers over the whole enterprise, a bolt-upright, bespectacled pony-tailed giant. Clearly born in the wrong century, Philippe could have enjoyed a passable c
areer as a cameo actor in every series of Blackadder other than perhaps the fourth. A medieval knight, an Elizabethan explorer, a Regency fop. He has it all in his compass. As well as making a tartiflette that fills you up just by looking at it.
Apart from being a gentle, wry, dependable man, he cooks with great love and significant pride. Philippe sets the day’s menu, and while Odette and Romain are detailed to churn out the volume, he whips up the fresh mayonnaise, finesses the jus or puts together one of his exceptional cold soups which are served as an amuse-bouche in daily rotating variation. He has a taste for introducing fruit in the most unexpected places, which down the years has taught us all a thing or two. Not for him the pineapple-chunk-on-the-slice-of-ham routine of my seventies British upbringing. He’s much more of a post-modern how-about-a-bit-of-grapefruit-in-your-artichoke-salad type.
It’s proper cooking. Knocked out every day on gas rings balanced on trestle tables set out under a couple of easy-up marquees in whichever bit of France (or Belgium, Italy or Andorra) we happen to want our lunch served that day.
So, these three characters, accompanied by a supporting cast of peripheral family members and friends who drift in and out of the Tour (Romain has recently married and his wife joined in the fun in 2010), determine to a large extent the mental health and spiritual welfare of a host of Tour operatives. It is a growing congregation, which extends further and further each year, as their reputation for serving up the most outstanding catering the Tour de France has ever known spreads throughout the compound.
You need only look at the expressions of all the others as they wander past our catering tent to sense what deprivation they must feel. While Philippe and Odette look after the needs of the anglophone world, as well as the Scandinavian countries and the upper echelons of ASO, the rest of the world must fend for themselves.
