April 7, 2022
Maison Conti (a restaurant review)
Having no sense of taste or smell, I’m not the most natural one to pen a restaurant review. Still, special recognition of tonight’s meal is warranted.
Since we don’t camp out or cook our own meals, we’ve surely dined at more than a thousand restaurants in Europe by now. I don’t have any kind of food memory, and only a few meals really stand out for me when I think back on our travels. There was our memorable meal in Cordoba when I forgot my wallet and had to leave Rachael at the restaurant for an hour to go back to our hotel (which I couldn’t find) and then back to the restaurant (which I couldn’t find either) that stands out both for the experience and for the white gazpacho I’ve never had anywhere else. A salmon crusted with almonds and pistachio in Taormina, Sicily. An orange rouget with a chocolate pear tart in the Dordogne. An apple/parsnip soup in Oban, Scotland. A meal at a pizzeria in northern Italy almost 30 years ago, when the waiters were so animated that it seemed like they slid across the floor with their slick leather shoes rushing meals to the table.
And, the horrible counterexamples: one of our first first meals in Europe almost 30 years ago, coq au vin at a one star tavern with rooms in Joigny; a fondue meal in the Jura that made me violently ill; and above all, our meal in Nowy Targ, Poland: a ‘pizza’ covered with a thick layer of catsup, accompanied by a ‘salad’ of iceburg lettuce topped by a half inch thick layer of mayonnaise.
Possibly my favorite dinner memory in Europe though is from here in Pézenas five years ago on our tour of the Pyrenees from Bilbao to Sete. The meal was excellent as I recall, but it was the total experience and above all the endearing server and her family that made for such a memorable experience. I’ve held on to the memory of her bringing the menu board to the table and practically singing the menu to us ever since, and then of meeting her and her husband the chef together after our meal. The next day we saw them again, in the alley beside their restaurant, tending to their five month old daughter Rose. I think above all I was charmed by them as a couple - so positive, obviously in love with each other and their life together. It was all so completely upbeat and optimistic.
I’ve wanted to come back ever since, and it was a factor in stitching our stop in Pézenas into this spring’s tour. So it was more than disappointing when I couldn’t find the restaurant yesterday. I walked to its location just a block from our B&B, but it’s just a shop now. I looked in, the layout generally squared with my memory of the place, and the owners made it sound plausible that it had been a restaurant five years ago.
I was saddened for myself, but above all for what I imagined might have happened in the meantime. Five years is a long time in the restaurant business. It might have been a business failure, or been crushed by Covid; or sadder still, the couple might have failed in their relationship.
I misremembered. The restaurant was two doors down, on the other side of the alley: Maison Conti. It was Rachael’s night to pick the restaurant and by chance this was on her short list. We were looking over the menu posted on the street when a woman walked in. It’s her - Mélanie, as we know now - I recognized her instantly. And the restaurant is the same, probably better even. Her Serbian husband Nicolas is still the chef, they still appear very much in love. Rose is five now, and the second daughter is two.
I brought up our post from five years ago to show Mélanie our photographs, and she grew very excited - she took my iPad back to the kitchen to show to her husband, asked for copies of them, and then started leafing through photos of their daughters on her phone. It was wonderful, as was the meal that followed.
In a world that seems to be spinning out of control and growing madder by the week, this was the perfect salve. If we lived nearby, in Narbonne say, we could bike over to Pézenas for a night, have dinner at Maison Conti, and bike home the next day.
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Ta-Ta-Tin sounds like a bad joke that’s been making the rounds here. I’ll try to explain: Tarte tatin (auntie’s tarte) is very common, and well loved just about everywhere. Sue made one the other night, and it was delish. The joke is: “Do you know how to make a poulet takin?”
“You put the poulet in the four ( oven) and t ‘tend” ( tu attends = you wait). Sounds better said fast in French, but you get the drift. I was wondering if your hosts had put the name on the menu the way you spelled it, in the spirit of the joke.
Cheers,
Keith
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Glad you are enjoying the roads and trails in France. Pat and I rode the Narbonne canal a few years ago and also found that it was definitely a bit more than the small wheels enjoy! But, we will be back in France at end of April to complete a ride we started before Plan B took us south through Narbonne and beyond. Although I am not much of a contributor, I do enjoy reading your journal.
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