Eating out in Saint Malo

After all the excitements of yesterday morning, we had lunched very late, and made a leisurely return to our hotel through the streets of the walled town. By the time I had finished posting about our adventures, it was time to go out and look for dinner, although neither of us was very hungry. We enjoyed exploring a little further, reading menus and wondering what might tempt us, and eventually settled on Bara Gwin, just round the corner from the hotel. They had no tables indoors, but we compromised on a table (set for four) under the awning, rather than one of the smaller ones right at the road's edge - which is why you see durham_rambler sitting next to a window still bearing the publicity for last week's Quai des Bulles comics festival (wearing the satisfied expression of a man who has just seen off a bowl of moules marinières):

I had the house galette, which involved generous quantities of goat's cheese and potatoes, and a sprinkling of walnuts; and we shared a 'route du rhum' ice cream - vanilla and rum-and-raisin, with a shot of rum (the Route du Rhum solo yacht race has apparently been going since 1978, but it seems to have raised its profile lately). We shared a carafe of unconvincing muscadet (deep yellow in colour, and perfectly drinkable but completely anonymous). I first drank muscadet as an undergraduate, visiting Richard in Rennes when we were both spending the year in France our course required; I have rarely drunk it since without thinking of him, and we raised a glass to absent friends.

The name 'Bara Gwin' was nagging at my memory: isn't there a French verb baragouiner? And doesn't bara mean something in Welsh? (my culinary Welsh suggests that bara brith is a kind of fruit loaf). And doesn't gwin mean white? Well, half right. It turns out that Bara Gwin is Breton for bread and wine (which suggests that there was no Breton word for wine, and the name arrived with the drink) and that baragouiner means to talk gibberish, and is indeed (probably) an insult to the Breton language, though one of some antiquity. I'm glad we've got that cleared up.

This morning was grey, with a threat of rain, so we put aside any plans for more ambitious walks, and set off to stroll around the ramparts. This, too, is something I had done on that long ago visit with Richard: he was, as I recall, looking for vestiges of the lost tramways of Ille et Vilaine, but I also remember him gazing for some time out to sea (a habit we later referred to as 'communing') and talking about the tomb of Chateaubriand on the island of Grand Be - Richard was fonder than I am of Romanticism...

Anyway, we had a very pleasant if not very long walk this morning, and took our time and admired the view, and discussed why Saint Malo isn't a World Heriage Site (mysteriously, it seems not to be) and when we reached a dead end just as the rain was setting in, we descended from the walls and started looking at menus. So, Sunday lunch at the Café de l'Ouest short version, it was extravagant, but it was worth it.

I lunched on four hand-dived scallops in pools of butter (with a huge chunk of tasty sourdough to mop it up) accompanied by a panful of truffle risotto. I'm not always a fan of truffle, but this was delicious. And this time the muscadet was absolutely classic. Almost as good as the food was the theatre. At least half a dozen waiters in long aprons bustled about the salle; durham_rambler could see over my shoulder the person whose job it was to open the oysters; and I could see behind him a French couple who seemed to be celebrating a special occasion, with champagne and lobster. The lobster was brought out for them to admire and photograph (and the waiter posed with it to enable this) and later flambéed with a whoosh of flame we felt three tables away. durham_rambler's desert was a coupe colonel (which is lime ice and vodka), which was brought to him as a glass of ice cream and a bottle of Grey Goose (French vodka). My 'Suprenante café' which I was promised was their version of the café gourmand, was surprising indeed: a gilded chocolate sphere, broken open just nough to show me that there was treasure within the thin shell - tiny meringues, chunks of nut brittle, a fruit jelly, worms of pink mallow, a macaron in an almost toxic shade of green, a chocolate truffle, toasted flakes of almond... In the end we ordered two more coffees, and worked on it together.

We took a slightly zigzag route back to our hotel, via another bookshop. And we are not likely to be dining out tonight.