Another day another restaurant

The lower display lists all the rules and regulations
governing your use of the funicular railway

Spending a week on a business trip involves nightly forays into town to have dinner. On the one hand it's an appealing concept, being able to eat out each night at a different restaurant, discovering something new each time. On the other hand there's always the downside of a bad restaurant experience and the sense of lost opportunity that brings. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I head out into the night, a short list of potential restaurant candidates in my head. I've been going through restaurant reviews online, and while walking out from the hotel I try to remember how I would have done this in the pre-Internet days. The good old Michelin Red Guide would have played a role of course, assuming I'd had brought one along on the trip. We used to put our dining faith in the hands of one organisation and its reviewers; now we try to sort out the serious from the trolls and scammers on the Internet instead. Which results in a better dinner I wonder?

Although I have another restaurant in mind, as I walk past the Continental restaurant I am suddenly struck by a lack of enthusiasm for another lengthy walk through the back streets of Pau, and I manage to convince myself to break one of my restaurant rules (Never eat in a hotel restaurant unless you're staying in a place where the alternatives are even worse). The Continental restaurant is next door to the Continental Hotel, and although it's not officially part of the hotel, it seems to have a very incestuous relationship with it. I go inside anyway, and am now committed, despite the rather bleak vista of the large and almost empty space inside.

There's a table of three near the door, strategically placed by the window. This, I know from experience, is standard restaurant strategy: seat your first guests by the window, so it looks to the casual passer-by that the restaurant has lots of people inside, and therefore must be a popular and good place - disguising the fact that the place is actually almost empty. I get allocated the next table along, also at the window, helping to perpetuate the illusion that this is a popular place.

The already-seated party turns out to be an American family; mum, dad and daughter. During the course of my meal, I don't hear the father at all and the mother only every so often. But the daughter makes up for that, talking the entire evening. Americans - and I generalise of course - tend to stand out in French restaurants. There's many reasons for this, but one of them, amply demonstrated tonight, is that they talk loudly and a lot. Go into a French restaurant and it's a generally quiet place with muted conversations happening in the private space of each table. Go into an American restaurant and you're instantly confronted  by loud voices from all directions; nothing quiet or private about any of it.

As the evening progresses, more people arrive. At one stage there are five tables with lone diners, which sets the tone of the sort of place this is: these are business travellers staying at the hotel.

I order a half bottle of wine, and am treated to quite a show when it arrives. Two waiters appear and one of them - he turns out to be the manager - turns the serving of the wine into a training session for the other waiter, explaining how to remove the foil, put the corkscrew into the cork "never turn it too far, and be careful with half bottles because the corks are shorter" and so forth. I'm stunned. It's one thing to do some on-the-job training, but right here on my table without even so much as a word of explanation or perhaps confirmation that I don't mind? Maybe I'm being snooty, but there are ways of doing things, and this isn't one of them. Right at the end of this impromptu show, the manager explains, rather redundantly, that the jeune homme was a trainee. Really?

Actually, the manager looks rather like a trainee himself, with his white dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar (with a tie), his shirt-tails half out, and a general scruffiness about him. He somehow epitomises the restaurant: it has pretensions of being a somewhat upmarket, slightly formal place with nice tablecloths, strategic plants, good glasses, wait staff dressed formally and so on. Yet when you scratch the surface ever so slightly, a casual scruffiness appears. And we haven't even talked about the food, which although it was perfectly acceptable, was in no way memorable.

The red wine is Domaine Guilhemas,  Béarn AOC, by Pascal Lapetre  vignerons de père en fils depuis 1909 (4 generations). Just a little reminder that you're in France, where they've been making wine quite a long time. It is good.

The trainee waiter comes and clears the main course. Without any preamble he begins to recite the dessert choices: moelleux au chocolat, gâteau basque, glaces et ... je ne sais plus (I don't remember any more). The best part is he does the whole thing without the slightest trace of emotion, feeling, or showing that he's actually interested. Even the "I don't remember" at the end of his list is simply included as if it were another dessert in the list, rather than an admission of any kind. Somehow, this nicely finishes off the evening for me; it couldn't have been better if it had been scripted.

The following evening I am out on the road again, on my nightly voyage of culinary discovery. It's cold tonight, and there's drizzle about. I have a destination tonight: Le Lavoir, which is a restaurant I've been wanting to try since my previous visit to Pau. Last time I was here, each time I went to try the restaurant it was closed either "exceptionally", or because I was there on one of the days it was normally closed. This time I'm prepared and I've checked the restaurant's hours. Tonight is the first night of the week that it's open. I walk briskly (it's cold) straight to the destination, which is about a kilometre from my hotel and arrive to find that, yet again, the restaurant is refusing to be nice to me: it's closed again!

So I go to Chez Canaille, the place next door, which is my backup plan. It's also a place on my list, although quite a bit further down.

It looks quite nice inside, and there's a table with a large group already inside (strategically placed so it can be seen from the street, of course). There's nobody else in the restaurant. The waiter is friendly and things are looking good. Then I scan the menu, which is quite elaborate, and begin to realise that there's nothing on it that actually has a lot of appeal to me. I'm not looking for pigeons, wild black boar, scallops, or sweetbreads. But there's hope, because this restaurant prides itself on its specially aged beef (origin controlled...)

I notice that the large group is speaking English and with dismay realise that it's a table of oilfield people. This is not a good sign.

I choose the Faux Filet since the other cuts are either huge (600g of beef on your plate?) or meant to share with 2 people. The meal arrives amazingly quickly, arousing my suspicion from the start. How could they have had the time to prepare and cook it?  I'd ordered saignante (rare) but this was pushing the boundaries. The meat looked the part, but it was barely even warm. A beautiful tender meat completely ruined by being full of sinew and other, to me, inedible bits. I imagine that had it been cooked more it would have been tough, so the chef - I am perhaps using the term lightly - has decided to cut his losses and not risk actually cooking it very much. The accompanying thick-cut chips were floury and old. The salad was tired with lots of bruising and brown bits.  It looks like the plate (actually a wooden cutting board) had been sitting there with chips and salad for some time. Pass the meat on the grill for a couple of minutes, plonk it on the board with some coarse salt and then serve.

I decide not to risk dessert (I had read bad reviews about the desserts, and the meal had certainly not impressed) and leave disappointed and unfulfilled. Two strikes in a row in my restaurant evenings.