Skip to main content

LE FAITOUT, BERLOU - RESTAURANT REVIEW

Beautiful setting. Good friends. Agreeable service. Tasty food. End of review.


That's never the case, is it? You deserve more.


Berlou is a small village in the hills well north of Beziers. You just find the village, park, and there's Le Faitout, an old stone building on the Rieuberlou, a fast-flowing stream that eventually finds its way to the Orb. We chose to eat outside on a mild spring day so we can't report on the interior amenities. No need. Beautiful day. Beautiful views.

Five of six in our party chose the special of the day. We began with an amusee, a puree of anchovies and tomato. The start consisted of a ring of mackerel salad with a bit of fresh minced radish arranged on top. A small duck breast followed, covered with honeyed onions and sitting on olive oil-infused mashed potatoes. All courses arrived with edible flowers. Our host ordered the trout, presented to him whole before cooking for his approval. I was the only one in the party to try the dessert - vanilla-bean panna cotta with strawberries. (The sacrifices that we make for our art.) Coffee came with a frozen chocolate confection. During the meal, the six of us finished off two bottles of suitable pink from the local cave cooperatif.

All was prepared properly, served properly, and properly priced. A most pleasant meal. I can't be more exact about pricing. I was a guest and didn't ask. But the menu listed combinations for the menu du jour - starter and main, main and dessert, or all three - starting at 16 euros. Tasting menus ranged up to 52 euros for five courses.

Visit Le Faitout. Beautiful setting. Agreeable service. Tasty food. End of review.

Read more of my reviews HERE.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RESTAURANT TEN, UZES: RESTAURANT REVIEW

Ten sits just off the market square in Uzes, one of the prettiest villages in southern France. The newly renovated space is airy and comfortable with tables of sufficient size and sufficiently spaced to provide for a pleasant dining experience. Service was cheerful, fully bilingual, and attentive without being overbearing. The food presented well to both eye and tongue. And the rate of approximately 30 € per person for a party of five included starters, mains, a dessert or two, two bottles of local wine, and coffees at the finish. Reasonable if not cheap eats.  So why am I hesitant to give an unqualified thumbs up?  It took me a while to figure it out. Uzes is a quintessentially French village in a quintessentially French region of southern France. There are those who will say that the Languedoc is just as beautiful but less crowded and less expensive than its eastern neighbors. I know. I'm one of those people. But the fact remains that for many people, villages like Uzes are t

Kreuz Market vs. Smitty’s Market: Texas Barbecue in Lockhart

I was born and raised in New Jersey. I didn’t taste Texas barbecue until I was twenty-two years old. What the hell do I know about barbecue? And what could I add to the millions of words that have been written on the subject? Well, I know a bit about food. I’ve managed to check out a few of the finer joints in Texas – Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in Dallas, Joe Cotton’s in Robstown before the fire, the dear departed Williams Smokehouse in Houston, and the incomparable New Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville . So I can speak from a reasonably wide experience. This will not be a comprehensive discussion of the relative merits of Texas barbecue as opposed to the fare available in places like Memphis or the Carolinas. It’s simply a take on our recent visits to Lockhart and the relative merits of Smitty’s versus Kreuz from our point of view. I’ll get all over academic in a later post. On our way out to the ranch in Crystal City, we stopped at Smitty’s. You have to look

LE CHAT QUI PECHE (THE CAT THAT FISHES), ARGELIERS: RESTAURANT REVIEW

You would think that after over five years of searching for restaurants serving good food at reasonable prices, I would have made my way to Le Chat Qui Peche before now. After all, it's only about ten minutes from our house, in a beautiful spot along the Canal du Midi. But it took a friend to suggest that we would like the place. So we went. And we did. Port-Argeliers isn't much a port, just a spot along the Canal du Midi that boats use as a stopping place. Like a town that might be described as just a wide spot in the road, there hardly seems to be a reason for it to exist other than the fact that it does. So Le Chat Qui Peche, at the foot of a narrow but driveable bridge over the canal, commands a view of the canal that can't reasonably be described as bustling and scenery that might best be described as bucolic. We were among the first to arrive on a lazy summer day, breezy so we chose an outdoor table with less of a view but sheltered. Our server practiced his