Our life in Villefranche has begun to settle into a normal routine. Aude, our wonderful French tutor, comes to our apartment from 9:00 to noon each weekday except for Wednesdays. She is a great teacher - she is friendly, smart, gentle with us, yet is firm with us when we use the wrong conjugation or forget a vocabulary word. Everyday we notice how much we don't know, but we also can appreciate that we know more than we did before.
Last night we decided that we would go out to dinner. Since we do not see Aude on Wednesdays, we can go out on Tuesday nights and still get our homework done by Thursday. We were all set to go to a restaurant that we had walked by a million times but had never visited. On our walk there, we went passed La Belle Étoile, a great but rather expensive restaurant that we really like. It was open, and we were tempted, but we walked on to La Grignotière, our original destination. We are very happy that we did.
We were the first in the restaurant since it was only about 7:30, but soon other guests arrived, all of whom were speaking French. The two women who run the restaurant were very nice and spoke to us only in French which made us feel very good. The ambiance was beautiful and the food was great.
We split the warm goat cheese salad. There was a dollop of pesto on top of each round of warm almost melted goat cheese and the toast was soft.
We each had one of the specials.
For those of you whose French is not so great, the first special was a kebab of leg of lamb. Jane got this special.
I got the médaillons de lotte fraiche - sauce amorcicaine. We are not sure if they meant American, but we will never know. Lotte is a local monkfish so it was very fresh and really good as was the sauce which I think was made of cream, tomato and herbes de Provence.
The side dishes were ratatouille, a mash of root vegetables and a potato. In Jane's case, it was a baked potato; in mine it was a boiled potato, but it might have been boiled in butter.
For dessert we split a special dessert that has no particular name but is made with a coconut meringue, vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipped cream with sliced almonds.
It was necessary to finish the meal with a small glass of limoncello, an after dinner drink that is omnipresent in Villefranche.
It was a great evening in all respects, and we had a wonderful walk home through the quiet streets of Villefranche.
Notwithstanding our wild evening on the town, we arose by 7:30 this morning and went for a walk along the beach when we reached the other side of the harbor we could look back at the rising sun shining on our wonderful Villefranche.
Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal
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