La Bastide Saint-Antoine
It is at this point that I must confess that I have had the good fortune to visit more than my fair share of France’s great restaurants and particularly those of the Côte d’Azur. I recently added to my collection of memorable meals with a visit to La Bastide Saint-Antoine outside Grasse just inland from Cannes.
The restaurant occupies not a room but the gardens of this impressive hotel-restaurant set-up and it is certainly a luxurious setting for a lunchtime meal partly due to the views over the nearby valley. But enough about the location and on to the food.
As an amuse-bouche I was presented with a small cup of fennel soup and three small dishes containing melon with balsamic vinegar, an aubergine puree in filo-pastry and a celery mousse with a sesame crisp (as pictured above). Although all three were appetizing they were not as flavourful as I had expected. The celery mouse was certainly my favourite as it had the greatest intensity of flavour and the texture was suitably light without being insubstantial. After this little introduction I had fried goose liver with quail thighs, then pork with gnocchi, mushrooms and courgettes and finally a layered chocolate dessert with raspberry and beetroot chosen largely because I had to try a combination of chocolate and beetroot.
Now I know I run the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious and ungrateful (and I am not for one minute saying I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the meal) but it didn’t quite live up to expectations. In both my starter and main course I found the food a touch too salty, the gnocchi had an overly farinaceous taste and the beetroot accompaniment in the chocolate dessert, by which I had been so intrigued, turned out to be an uncomfortable partner to an otherwise well-balanced chocolate creation.
This is not to suggest that there were not elements of brilliance. The liver was cooked to perfection: there was no resistance when I cut it and yet it did not disintegrate. It takes a high level of skill to be able to judge when a slice a liver is at its optimum point of cooking and this had been judged to perfection. Similarly the pork was wonderfully cooked. It was tender and had a surprising depth of flavour which can often be lacking. And, of course, the combination of a light chocolate mousse with a dense chocolate cake base, between which nestled a layer of raspberry jam, was sublime. I always think that the acidity of raspberries is the perfect counterpart to the bittersweet quality of good chocolate and here the pairing worked beautifully even if it was a little undermined by the earthy taste of beetroot which, although normally the attractive feature of beetroot, here seemed unpleasant and unresponsive to the other elements of the dessert.
The best dish I sampled was ordered by one of my fellow diners. It was a langoustine tail which had been poached and then stuffed with an array of vegetables. The langoustine was perhaps the softest I have ever eaten; not a hint of the chewy texture one is sometimes faced with. Now it may be cynical of me but I attribute this difference on the quality of the dishes to the fact that I ordered from the set-lunch menu whilst my fellow diner ordered a la carte. Considering how reasonable the lunch menu is it is perhaps to be expected that the food would not be quite as impressive as the a la carte menu but I do not find this an acceptable situation. As I imagine the majority of its clientele order the set lunch menu and considering word-of-mouth is of great importance to most restaurants to not equal the quality of food in the set and a la carte menus is an ill considered policy. I am willing to admit that it is more than possible that I visited at an unusually busy time (or perhaps just a plain old bad day as all restaurants have) and that normally all the food would be of the quality of the a la carte dishes but as it stands I would have to say if your looking for fantastic food on the Côte d’Azur you are better of trying Le Château de Chèvre D’Or in Eze or Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo.
La Bastide Saint-Antoine
48 Av Henri-Dunant
Grasse
00 44 4 93 70 94 94
Le Château de Chèvre D’Or
Rue Barri
Eze
00 44 4 92 10 66 61
Le Louis XV
Pl du Casino
Monte Carlo
377 98 06 88 64
The restaurant occupies not a room but the gardens of this impressive hotel-restaurant set-up and it is certainly a luxurious setting for a lunchtime meal partly due to the views over the nearby valley. But enough about the location and on to the food.
As an amuse-bouche I was presented with a small cup of fennel soup and three small dishes containing melon with balsamic vinegar, an aubergine puree in filo-pastry and a celery mousse with a sesame crisp (as pictured above). Although all three were appetizing they were not as flavourful as I had expected. The celery mouse was certainly my favourite as it had the greatest intensity of flavour and the texture was suitably light without being insubstantial. After this little introduction I had fried goose liver with quail thighs, then pork with gnocchi, mushrooms and courgettes and finally a layered chocolate dessert with raspberry and beetroot chosen largely because I had to try a combination of chocolate and beetroot.
Now I know I run the risk of sounding incredibly pretentious and ungrateful (and I am not for one minute saying I didn’t thoroughly enjoy the meal) but it didn’t quite live up to expectations. In both my starter and main course I found the food a touch too salty, the gnocchi had an overly farinaceous taste and the beetroot accompaniment in the chocolate dessert, by which I had been so intrigued, turned out to be an uncomfortable partner to an otherwise well-balanced chocolate creation.
This is not to suggest that there were not elements of brilliance. The liver was cooked to perfection: there was no resistance when I cut it and yet it did not disintegrate. It takes a high level of skill to be able to judge when a slice a liver is at its optimum point of cooking and this had been judged to perfection. Similarly the pork was wonderfully cooked. It was tender and had a surprising depth of flavour which can often be lacking. And, of course, the combination of a light chocolate mousse with a dense chocolate cake base, between which nestled a layer of raspberry jam, was sublime. I always think that the acidity of raspberries is the perfect counterpart to the bittersweet quality of good chocolate and here the pairing worked beautifully even if it was a little undermined by the earthy taste of beetroot which, although normally the attractive feature of beetroot, here seemed unpleasant and unresponsive to the other elements of the dessert.
The best dish I sampled was ordered by one of my fellow diners. It was a langoustine tail which had been poached and then stuffed with an array of vegetables. The langoustine was perhaps the softest I have ever eaten; not a hint of the chewy texture one is sometimes faced with. Now it may be cynical of me but I attribute this difference on the quality of the dishes to the fact that I ordered from the set-lunch menu whilst my fellow diner ordered a la carte. Considering how reasonable the lunch menu is it is perhaps to be expected that the food would not be quite as impressive as the a la carte menu but I do not find this an acceptable situation. As I imagine the majority of its clientele order the set lunch menu and considering word-of-mouth is of great importance to most restaurants to not equal the quality of food in the set and a la carte menus is an ill considered policy. I am willing to admit that it is more than possible that I visited at an unusually busy time (or perhaps just a plain old bad day as all restaurants have) and that normally all the food would be of the quality of the a la carte dishes but as it stands I would have to say if your looking for fantastic food on the Côte d’Azur you are better of trying Le Château de Chèvre D’Or in Eze or Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo.
La Bastide Saint-Antoine
48 Av Henri-Dunant
Grasse
00 44 4 93 70 94 94
Le Château de Chèvre D’Or
Rue Barri
Eze
00 44 4 92 10 66 61
Le Louis XV
Pl du Casino
Monte Carlo
377 98 06 88 64
posted by Lucy at 9:50 pm
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