Notes from the front.
Sept 16
Ibis hotel near the Marseilles airport. Arranged a taxi into the old town in Marseilles to have dinner at Fonfon, one of the places we were told had good authentic bouillabaisse.
Jenise and I ordered bouillabaisse and our spouses (spice?) went for a la carte, my wife, as she wasn’t too hungry and Bob because he has an allergy to shellfish, which both Jenise and I assured him would be a component of any self respecting bouillabaisse.
The spouses had an excellent ‘salad’ which was done up as a bagel with seafood on it, but I think both avoided actually eating the bagel, which served more as a setting for the seafood than a component of the dish. Delightful fresh tuna shredded and dressed with lemon juice and an herb that neither Jenise nor I could identify.
Our bouillabaisse showed upp and included eel, loup, and scorpionfish among others. The lovely soup base was served alone and the fish was individually cooked and served on the side as the varying cooking times required would have rendered it a mushy stew if done in the broth at the same time.
We started off with a bottle of Cassis blanc, a 2009 Ch. De Fontcreuse, which came in a sort of squat champagne style bottle, complete with slight reinforced punt (but the wine was completely still). Very nice, dry, decent nose with melon and floral elements, and complemented the starter of crostini with 3 spreads, and then the bouillabaisse itself, by which point we’d finished the the three initial sauces and segued into a not too hot aioli, and another pot of rouille (very good). These Cassis whites tend to be of the ‘you had to be there’ school, as I’ve never seen them back home and they need to be drunk up when young. No idea what the blend is on this one, but generally they can include marsanne, clairette, ugni blanc, bourbelenc and even sauvignon blanc in varying amounts
The soup was quite good, but to our surprise totally lacking in any shellfish (perhaps we have been lead to believe that clams and crustaceans are traditional because we see them everywhere?) but over all Jenise and I both rated it good but not paradigm makingly so.
We switched to a Rose – 2009 Ch. Pibarnon from Bandol (I’d have gone for the Tempier, but we were going there the next day, so I figured it would be nice to try the Pibarnon, whose red wine I knew and respected). Very decent showing, fairly pale pink in colour, the expected grapey (and to a degree, grapefruity) aromas, and dry and tasty, if not at the acme of my idea of the perfect pink. A blend of 50% each mourvedre and cinsault (from saignee and pressed wine respectively), according to Parker.
This morning we hook up with the 3rd couple of our assault on French cuisine, and with the team complete, we pick up the cars and head out to visit the picturesque town of Cassis, and then to Bandol, thereafter to have a nice drive through the country side, find rooms in Aix-en-Provence for the night, hit the market held there on Fridays and then head for home base in our rented house in the small village of Sablet in the heart of the Rhone, about 1.5 hours drive north.
Really!? Or a round, chewy piece of bread from France that reminded you of a bagel? A real bagel seems an awfully odd thing to find in Provence.