Today was topped and tailed by probably the best breakfast and best dinner of the trip.
While the breakfast was the now-standard croissant, bread, butter, yogurt and confitures, all of these were freshly made on the premises at La Petite Rouge, and delivered to our room along with tea, coffee and freshly squeezed orange and grapefruit juice. Every one of these breakfast elements were pretty much perfect.
Our dinner was at a relatively new establishment in Figeac, La Racine et la Moelle, a small place with a growing reputation run by a young couple (she’s French and in charge of the kitchen, he’s Irish and does the cellar and front of house). The menu is small, seasonal, incredibly flavourful and executed to perfection. Each piece of food was still recognizable for what it was and each of these elements added to an exquisite complete dish. The recommended wine pairing (which we took), a biodynamic Chenin blanc, Les Brumes, by Pauline Broqua from Entraygues (where we started the day) and that we are unlikely to ever find again, was sensational. Sorry for the run on run on run on sentence.
In between these (high brow) bouts of gorging, we also rode along the Lot through picture postcard villages, fields of grazing cattle, sheep and all forms of produce being grown. All of this, bar the last 10 km into and the next two leaving Capdenac, were on idyllic more or less deserted D roads.
The only climb we had was at Capdenac, where we had to climb out of the Lot valley for a few km’s to get into the Celé valley and then down into Figeac. The climb was pretty modest but it had a few steep sections, on both the up and down. A few minutes after we started our final decent into Figeac we came across a house with a fairly large yard, and in the yard was a very whimsical ‘display’ of figures made from logs and sticks - ‘Jardin de Bibi’. The sun was shining on the ‘petite jardin’ and we saw that one of the stick figures was proudly holding aloft a Hello Kitty doll, causing us to exclaim ‘You can never have to much happy’ - and then we rode off smiling to finish the day.
… and then we were off. Here’s Kirsten riding over Entraygues’s signature bridge over La Truyère … unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of the very unique whole bridge!
There were several collections of houses like this throughout the day along the river. No names on the map or any indication if they classified as villages … but they sure were beautiful
Interesting to see some renovation work being done here. Not sure if the metal I-beam is temporary or if it will become part of the renovated structure
And now the final gorge ….. far to coarse a word for what we were about to do. The food was sensational. Fresh, incredible flavour combinations and ….. yes …. Simply prepared ….. complex combinations of real largely unmanipulated food. This was my smoked tuna with grapefruit, fennel, radish and a citrus aioli.
We both had line-caught cod with a smoked salt butter emulsion and roasted courgettes and fennel with herbs (dill obviously!) the depth of flavour was phenomenal.
Finished off with a poached pear with kafir limes, ginger whipped cream, almond and fennel seed tuile, and a watermelon and celery sorbet (sounds weird but it worked!); K’s intense chocolate, almond, coconut and banana combo …. Batman flavours again … POW! SMACK! BIFF
