Category: French

I quite like escargots, which are mainly an excuse to have garlic butter, but the Savoy offers something new. It is baked Dorset snails with sweet garlic, red wine and brioche crumbs. I didn’t like it nearly as much as escargots, finding the brioche crumbs a distraction from the...

It was quite a meal at the Savoy. First came lobster bisque, though I tasted one of the Dorset snails a companion ordered. Then came beef Wellington, medium rare with Vichy carrots. The piece de résistance was the crepe suzette. First butter and squeezed oranges, then Grand Marnier and...

A seafood bisque is a creamy stew of crustaceans, typically lobster, langoustines, crab, shrimp and crayfish. It’s a way of using up ones that are imperfect or not considered good enough to market. Typically the crustaceans are sautéed in their shells before being strained and cooked with cream and...

One thing they do very well in Nice is fritto misto, a mixture of seafood lightly deep fried.  This one had lots of squid, prawns, sardines, and some unidentifiable small fish.  Most of it was served whole, leaving the delicate job of extracting the bits you don’t want to...

At Cote they called it a French breakfast.  It looked remarkably like an English breakfast.  There was scrambled eggs – two of them – plus bacon and mushroom.  There was also black pudding, though they called it boudin noir, a French blood sausage.  The bread was different, though.  Instead...