Best Eating Out in Languedoc: RESTAURANT COTE COUR

RESTAURANT COTE COUR - 19, Cour Mirabeau, 13100 Aix-en-Provence

First of all - the food is absolutely fantastic. The starter, the main course and the desserts were all of highest quality. The starter we had was soft boiled egg with an emulsion of bacon - fantastic. For main course we had shoulder of lamb that had been cooked for 36 hours. It was perfect. The dessert was apples in thin stripes rolled like a pine cone with ginger marmalade. Also very tasty.

The chef is Ronan Kernen who took part in the 2011 Top Chef in France.

With such a fantastic kitchen and chef it is a pity that the rest had a few things to be wished for. Obviously they were under-staffed as everyone was running which was very stressful. One of the waiters bumped into my wife?s chair three times without noticing. If she had been drinking red wine in that moment her dress would have been ruined. The noise reduction in the restaurant was very poor. I could not talk to my wife and nobody else could talk to anyone, so everyone were talking very loud. It was more like a cheap pub than a top restaurant.

Besides that we were seated near the serving bar and the kitchen, which was just divided from the restaurant with a simple partition. The noise from the kitchen when the staff threw empty bottles into a bin was terrible.

For a restaurant of this quality the wine list was very limited. They only had one wine of red, white and rose on half liter bottles. As they did not have any half liters left of the red we had to buy a whole bottle, which is a bit too much for two. They had the same wine on full bottles so it would have been easy to sell half a liter of that and the rest by the glass.

Another strange thing was that I could not order the wine from the waiter together with the food - I had to talk to the sommelier. After a while a person came and asked what we like to drink - we thought he was the sommelier. He however did not know anything about wine and he filled my wife's glass while I still tasted the wine. The sommelier was someone else, which we could see on the golden grapes she had on her jacket.

It was also a short discussion if my wife, who does not eat sugar of medical reasons, could have cheese instead of a sweet dessert. The waiter had to ask the head waiter who approved of it. We have only been to one restaurant through all the years that have even questioned such a thing.

I am a little sloppy when it comes to checking the bill in restaurants, which my wife is not. At quite a few locations during our trip in Provence we got the bill from other tables, which always were higher than ours. This time however, my wife asked me when we had got back to the hotel, how much it cost and I looked at the bill and told her. That cannot be right she said ? it should be at least 30 euros more. I however looked at it as a unintended compensation.

Those who read Swedish can follow our entire trip in Provence on http://france-midi.blogspot.fr/2013/06/resa-i-provence-forsta-etappen.html and on http://france-midi.blogspot.fr/2013/06/resa-i-provence-andra-etappen.html

Source: http://best-eating-out-in-languedoc.blogspot.com/2013/06/restaurant-cote-cour.html

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