Chez Miton and Au Fil de L’Aigronne: two Loire bargains

Instead of hurtling down south on the motorway as we used to do with the kids to minimise family squabbling, we’ve taken to a stately three day progression with frequent stop-offs to visit winemakers, eat or simply drive through France’s beautiful unspoilt countryside and blissfully traffic-free back roads.

It sounds expensive but apart from the crippling cost of petrol it needn’t be as these two recent finds prove:

At Chez Miton which is in the village of Chahaignes, about half an hour north of Tours you can have a two course lunch midweek for 12 euros (£10.33/$15.77) including service. The food is quite basic but it’s decent, generous and amazing for the price.

We ate a simple green salad with confit tomatoes, that good old French staple jambon et melon, pork with noodles and an excellent andouillette (so my husband told me - I never touch the stuff) with a sharply flavoured mustard sauce, which I can vouch for. Adding a dessert would have added another 3€. No wonder the place is packed.

The wine’s good too. We had a 50cl ‘pot’ of light, fragrant Pineau d’Aunis* from local producer Philippe Sevault for just 13€.

And in the evening we stayed at an excellent chambre d’hôtes Au Fil de L’Aigronne at Le Petit Pressigny south of the Loire which was recommended by fellow wine writer and Loire specialist Jim Budd on the strength of the fact that it’s bang next door to a restaurant called La Promenade which he also rates highly. The food was good but we had to endure some painfully slow and at times stroppy service. Maybe it was an off-night and they were over-stretched - it has consistently good ratings on Trip Advisor.

The B & B though is a bargain with friendly, generous hosts who throw a top breakfast with home-baked madeleines and local goats’ cheese in with their incredibly good value overnight rate of 60€/£51.64/$78.85 for a double room. (The only downside - Internet addicts may like to know the wifi is a bit dodgy.)

* a very old and rare grape variety from this part of the Loire.

The Swan at Lavenham

We Londoners are spoiled for choice when it comes to weekend breaks. A lot of people are drawn west to the Cotswolds or south to Sussex, Hampshire and the New Forest. For me, though, East Anglia takes some beating.

Its extensive coastline, big open skies and intriguing history make it a favourite place to clear my head and lungs and enjoy some tasty local food. I usually head across to the coast, but recently ventured to the picture-postcard town of Lavenham.

A pleasant couple of hours’ drive from London, Lavenham is one of the prosperous Suffolk ‘wool’ towns that were at the heart of Medieval England’s textile industry. They are distinguished by their multi-coloured half-timbered buildings and incongruously large churches and are located in gently rolling countryside.

We stayed at the medieval Swan Hotel – built in the 15th century and extended and renovated to bring it into the 21st century. Due to the higgledy-piggledy layout of the building, all 45 rooms are different, but, being tall, I appreciated our larger, newer room as it offered a bit more ceiling height. However, most (though not all!) of the beams are padded.

We'd been invited for a Frerejean Frères champagne dinner in the hotel's main Gallery restaurant, one of a series of events being introduced by the new sommelier François Belin who recently joined from the Goring Hotel.

He devised some bold matches including a main course of roast guinea fowl with confit leg meat and herb risotto with the Frerejean 2005 blanc de blancs and a not-too-sweet dessert of peach jelly, white chocolate mousse, lime and chilli gravel and raspberry sorbet with their rosé.

Dishes on the standard à la carte menu include roast duck breast with confit leg, vanilla mash and wilted greens and attractively wintery-sounding Cornish halibut with an open lasagne of oxtail and confit carrot, baby onion and spinach. You can also eat from a more informal menu including steak, burgers, pasta, fish and seafood in the hotel’s other restaurant, the more informal brasserie.

Although the wine list is comprehensive, with most bins priced under £35, it only includes two (albeit local) English wines – Giffords Hall sparkling and Lavenham Brook Pinot Noir rosé which seems a bit of a shame given the emphasis chef Justin Kett otherwise places on local ingredients such as Dingley Dell pork, Sutton Hoo chicken and oysters from Pinney’s in Orford. It would be great to see more English wines showcased in this environment.

Before leaving Lavenham we couldn’t resist a quick look at the shops which include the rather tempting Lavenham Butchers across the road from the hotel (1 High Street), and Turner’s weekly fish stall in Market Place (Fridays 11am–1pm) where we bought some local skate wings and brown shrimps which, with some black butter, made a memorable supper back at home in London that evening.

Rooms at The Swan cost from £195; dinner, bed and breakfast from £245.

Lucy Bridgers stayed at The Swan as their guest but has told me she plans to go back! FB

The charming eccentricity of Rye Bay Scallop Week

One of the more endearing aspects of the current British food scene is the number of festivals devoted to a single food. I’d heard of oyster festivals, crab festivals and cheese festivals but I’d never come across a scallop festival before.

In Rye they have an entire week devoted to the bivalve with some hilarious-sounding events such as Scallop Quiz Night (is it the scallops being quizzed or are all the questions about scallops?), Scallop Bingo, Scallops on Stage (a chorus-line of high-kicking scallops?) and Rye Wurlitzer and Scallop demo which I can’t even begin to imagine.

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter:

Four young scallops hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.

Anyway we played it safe and went to a relatively conventional, rather grand five course scallop and wine dinner at The George in Rye, a handsome-looking Hotel du Vin-ish sort of establishment in the high street, which was held in their resplendent ballroom round a single long candlelit table.

And they certainly didn’t stint on the scallops. We had coquilles St Jacques (with a Gran Verano Chilean Chardonnay*) pan-fried Rye Bay scallops with pea purée (2012 Sauvignon Blanc), scallop ceviche with dried black olives (an unusual addition that kicked a full-bodied 2011 reserva Chardonnay into touch) and a lobster risotto with poached scallops paired with a 2011 Pinot Noir reserva.

I was slightly anxious whether the dessert would be scallop-based but happily it was a white chocolate soufflé with raspberry and amaretto crumble - served with local Kent winery Chapel Down’s Nectar dessert wine.

The timing of the festival in chilly February might sound surprising but according to local fisherman Paul Hodges it’s ideal both for the trade and the consumer. “It’s a quiet time for fishermen because a lot of fish go into roe while scallops are in season” he explained. “And it's a quiet time for local hotels and restaurants”.

Scallops are found in deep waters all along the English channel and there’s intense competition to locate the scallop beds. “It’s like looking for a treasure trove - you can come away with a full boat or come back with nothing” Hodges told me.

Clearly the festival catches the imagination, as it did mine. People apparently come from considerable distances to attend it - including, unbelievably, a contingent from Japan.

If you’re in the area this weekend you can still catch the last two days. Check out the events and offerings on scallop.org.uk

*All the wines came from Chilean winery Apaltagua.

Two other fishy fests

They’re into fishy festivals in East Sussex. Not to be outdone by its neighbour Hastings has a seafood and wine festival in September (14th-15th in 2013) and a herring fair in November (9th-10th) at which they hold a ‘Silver Darlings' banquet - the colloquial British name for herrings.

I was invited to the festival as the guest of The George In Rye

An insider's guide to the fish restaurants of Marseille and Cassis

Travel writer Philip Sweeney hobnobs with the locals, checks out the best places to eat and discovers why fishing for bouillabaisse isn't as easy as it once was . . .

Pagnolesque, pastis-swigging boules players they may look still look like, but the fishermen of Marseille have a hard time of it today. Ex-fishermen outnumber practising examples. The captain of a pleasure boat I took around the Calanques, a former trawler skipper, listed the problems: depleted fish stocks, EU interference, soaring price of diesel, difficulty selling boats if you can’t make a living using them: owners are actually destroying good vessels, apparently. From 700 twenty years ago, the Marseille fishing community is down to 230 today.

The worst affected are the big tuna boats and the lamparo night fishing trawlers. The petits metiers, one or two man crews, some still operating the brightly painted traditional wooden pointus, are holding up reasonably well; lower outgoings, more flexible sales. The big boats sell all their catch at the main Marseille fish market, down west at Saumaty, past the ferry docks, flyovers, silos and warehouses, the old central Criée on the Quai du Rive Neuve having become a theatre.

The small fishermen also sell directly to the public. A couple of dozen set up their stalls in the mornings on the Vieux Port, squeezed back to the quayside by the massive road works with which Sir Richard Rodgers is turning the rough old Quai des Belges into a gleaming new pedestrian paradise for Marseille European City of Culture year, 2013. Half their stock is live fish, waiting in shallow blue trays or buckets with bubbling air lines: loups, rascasses, rougets, lottes, known in the South as baudroies, chapons, the baudroies’ even uglier cousins, galinettes, vives, conger eels, piles of the multicoloured rock fish necessary for bouillabaisse stock.

To the western side of the harbour lines of restaurant terraces await the tourists, bouillabaisse displays at the ready, nowadays translated into Chinese as well as German and English. In many cases the fish on show is sunken eyed and the prices rip-off. In some, the food is classy, but so are the prices.

I met Christian Buffa, chef/proprietor of one of the classiest, the Miramar, buying a particularly apopleptic-looking chapon to complete a demonstration bouillabaisse, and went back to sample his bourride. The Miramar has an elegant 1960s panelled interior behind its terrace, polished service by a 50% Far Eastern team, and large carte of tempting classic cuisine, which doesn’t come cheap. Fifty nine Euros for bouillabaisse or bourride: the bourride, which I prefer, comes in the same two stage form as the bouillabaisse, soup first, with croutons, cloves of garlic to rub on them, and aioli, then the fish and potatoes, just cooked in the broth, on a platter. The Miramar’s soup is utterly delicious, an assortment of rock fish in stock, cream and aioli all emulsified into pale brown velvet, subtler and richer than the reddish tomato based and rouille infused liquor of the bouillabaisse, good as that is.

In search of something cheaper and simpler, I tried the Boite à Sardine, a narrow shop up on the Boulevard de la Liberation with a steel fish counter inside and a few tables on the pavement. Funky enough, with locals outnumbering the tourists, the latter perhaps frightened off by the oubliette-like toilet/storeage cellar. Some of the food is a bit alarming too. Really good rougets at the moment, I was told: eat them whole, the liver is extremely good. Maybe, but the neat sets of miniature entrails from my rougets went straight under a convenient oyster shell; luckily I was also sampling the Boite’s excellent range of fifteen types of oyster, some delicious mussels and razor clams, supions, the little squid typical of Marseille sautéed in oil, garlic and parsley, and plenty of other plate cover.

Next, off east to Cassis, and another fish shop/ restaurant, the Poissonnerie Laurent. Leaving the Vieux Port by the coast road, you pass a series of rocky inlets, progressively wilder as you leave the city. The first is the charming little Vallon des Auffes, a mini Vieux Port nestling below the raised seafront promenade, home to the classic restaurant Fonfon, but also the cheaper and better Chez Jeannot, where I ate excellent pizza and succulent supions fried in flour with Jonathan Meades, the former Times restaurant critic now resident in Marseille. (Meades‘ other favourites include Toinou and François Coquillages for shell fish and Chez Vincent and Etienne for supions, by the way). Beyond lie the calanques, rocky fjord-like inlets with tiny harbours and humble looking cabanons, fishermens’ huts, which you feel like snapping up for a cheap pied dans l’eau till you find a converted one goes for a quarter of a million euros.

Cassis in an exquisite little port with boules players under plane trees, rows of quayside cafés, steep old blonde stone alleys, then the surrounding hills, with the villas and plush apartment blocks of serious old money, plus a newer population of footballers and the few Marseille gangsters who aren’t in Marbella. And right up to edge of the town, the beautiful vineyards of the twelve domaines comprising the old appellation of Cassis, about which more shortly.

The best time in Cassis in the summer is morning, before the tourists flood in. On the quay is a miniature version of the Vieux Port Marseille fish market, down to three local fishermen. One of them is Laurent Gianettini of the Poissonnerie Laurent, who bought his pointu, says his brother and restaurant manager Eric, instead of a Porsche. Eric doesn’t have to be joking: restored 1930s pointus start at 35000 Euros.

Sitting outside the Poissonerie overlooking the harbour, I ate excellent supions à la provençale, little whitebait –like friture with two rouilles, one dry and potato-based in the old style, one shiny with oil, a grilled loup. The poissonnerie gets 80% of its fish from outside the region now, including the Atlantic, and sells local fish mainly to keep the trade going, and the bouillabaisse authentic. Frankly, it would pay them to buy in sous vide bouillabaisse and pre-packed fish, like more and more restaurants are doing, whether they admit it or not. Still more gloom, in piscine economic terms, but somehow difficult to fret over, on a vine covered terrace, between an emerald sea and a bottle of chilled Clos Sainte Magdeleine Cassis.

Le Miramar, Marseille, www.bouillabaisse.com 0491914109

La Boite a Sardine, Marseille, www.laboiteasardine.com 0491509595

Chez Jeannot, Marseille, 0491521128

La Poissonnerie Laurent, Cassis, 0442017156

Marseille Tourism details: www.marseille-tourisme.com

Cassis Tourism details: www.ot-cassis.com

Philip Sweeney travelled with Rail Europe, www.raileurope.co.uk, 0844 848 4070, Travel Centre, 193 Piccadilly, London W1j 9EU. Fares from London to Marseille from £119 standard return.