Two-man bands - simple country restaurants in France and Switzerland
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Often the best eating is done in small, simple restaurants run by a partnership of just two people: one in the kitchen and one front-of-house. Here's a selection of places in France and Switzerland that fit the bill.
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The best eating I’ve done in the past year has not been in restaurants with fleets of people behind the scenes and front of house. The most memorable feasts came from places staffed by just two people: one (usually the male of the species) in the kitchen, another (generally the female of the species) in the dining room.
Take the alluringly named Auberge du Paradis in – of course - St Amour (Beaujolais), owned by Valérie and Cyril Laugier. Chef Cyril lived for several years in Istanbul, and brings a nice Byzantine touch to the food. He serves only 25 covers, and all dishes can be had either à la carte, or woven into a two different menus.
We started with (and never strayed far from) Jean-Guy Révillon’s fruity, flowery, feminine St Amour, served slightly chilled - proper Beaujolais like it used to be. The menu changes regularly, but to give you a feel, for starters there were rillettes of herring, or cannelloni with red peppers on a salad of rocket and buffalo Mozzarella, or an iced soup of melon and beetroot, or cucumber chunks with flash-fried slivers of chorizo and caraway-speckled wafers.
For mains there were some original fishy offerings - red gurnard with tomato beignets and superbly under-done tuna on cumin-flavoured polenta. The hamburger franco-americain would have sent Ronald McDo into a funk: freshly ground local Charollais beef liberally herbed and spiced, cooked to juicy pink perfection, sandwiched between slices of serious bread and served with all manner of interesting trimmings. The quails’ legs splayed out over spelt risotto (the latest trendy cereal) with preserved lemons, nectarines and ginger probably wouldn’t have impressed Colonel Sanders, except on the finger-licking front.
Then there was a dinner full of the flavours of the Maghreb at La Maison des Lauriers, near Uzès. A maison d’hôte (B&B) which also caters for non-residents when there’s room, it is owned and run double-handed by Kim and Marie-Claude (he Tunisian, she Parisian). They’ve lived and cooked around in Ibiza, Tunisia and Avignon, and have now set up shop in a gorgeous golden stone house in the village of Arpaillargues. The garden resonates alternately to Anne-Sophie Mutter’s violin concerto, Pink Martini, the Magic Flute and Moroccan music - dinner is out on the terrace whenever it’s warm enough. There’s no menu; you get what’s given. We feasted on a series of salads (sweet onions with cinnamon and dates, fennel and walnuts, courgettes with radishes), and a plate of the tenderest squid. The main course was a classic tajine of chicken with preserved lemons, nibbed almonds, coriander and couscous. A dish of diced melon and nectarines seasoned with mint finished us off nicely.
We enjoyed the music of another two-man band in the tiny Osteria Calprino in Paradiso above Lugano in Ticino, the Italian part of Switzerland. The area is not notorious for good-value eating, so (alerted by the man in the red bib in the Michelin guide) we fell gratefully into this unlikely-looking dive. The well-padded padrone [who has subsequently gone on a crash diet and is now a shadow of his former self] greeted us with apologies for the size of the place – ‘here everything’s small – except me!’ The antipasto featured five different kinds of salumeria plus mixed pickles, which we downed with a jug of rather thin house Merlot. The day’s special was roast kid (capretto), falling off the bone and served with the kind of externally crusted, internally melting sauté potatoes that dreams are made of.
The only drawback was that the atmosphere was seriously smoky - through the haze we could discern some ostensibly no-smoking areas, but as these were deserted and all the action was in the main (tiny) dining room, we traded atmosphere for a Marlboro-induced fog. It's wonderfully good value, and the wine list features some of the finest Ticino wines (Delea, Tamborini, Vinattieri). We’re going back.
Auberge du Paradis,
71570 St Amour Bellevue,
France.
Tel. +33 3 85 37 10 26.
La Maison des Lauriers,
21 grand’rue,
30700 Arpaillargues,
France.
Tel. +33 4 66 03 65 92
e-mail: contact@leslauriers.com
website: www.leslauriers.com
Osteria Calprino,
Via Carona 28,
6900 Paradiso/Lugano,
Switzerland.
+41 91 994 14 80
