LA TABLE DE MEL, THEZAN-LES-BEZIERS: RESTAURANT REVIEW

Not everyone visits restaurants regularly. Not everyone enjoys driving to get to a meal or the drive to get home after a meal. Not everyone enjoys eating in public. And not everyone is willing (or able) to pay for someone else to do the cooking. But many of us don't mind the drive, don't mind eating in a room full of strangers as long as their kids behave, and don't mind paying for the experience as long as we receive value for dollar...or euro.

I have to tell you that I'm getting tired of eating at the same restaurant. I don't mean the same restaurant at the same address. I mean the same, typical French restaurant with a lunch special that gives you value for dollar...or euro...and throws in the occasional surprise. We've eaten at dozens of them. All slightly different, but all with a thing or two to recommend them. The latest? La Table de Mel in Thezan-les-Beziers.

I chose La Table de Mel as the meeting place for friends in for a visit to their holiday home in Magalas because of a picture in an online review, a picture of shrimp and chorizo in cream sauce with a nice little basket of fries and a side salad. I like shrimp and I like chorizo and I like cream sauce and I like fries. I'll even eat salad now and then. Combining them all seemed like a good idea. Thezan-les-Beziers is about halfway between our two houses. Why not?

Nestled between a hair stylist and a veterinarian, across the street from a warehouse entrance, La Table could be just another workman's lunch joint. It's not. It's a nicely appointed space, clean and new, with outside tables under shady sails. You can hear the main road a hundred yards or so away if you choose to sit outside but the noise is by no means distracting. We were among the first in on a sunny Friday and we were the last out, friends catching up. My guess is that most others were lunching from work.

My three table mates each chose the 14€ formula and each started with the salade chevre chaud, a well-portioned start with the gooat cheese on toast points and a generous slice of serrano underneath them. The ladies chose the fish for their main. David went for the steak/frites. Each plate was as advertised and as is usual in these places, a reasonable portion properly prepared. Plenty of frites with the French beef, a portion of yellow rice with the white-fleshed fish, and tomato provecale for all. My menu choice of shrimp and chorizo in cream sauce was one of those little surprises that I mentioned earlier, interesting and rarely seen elsewhere. With it's own little side salad, a basketfrites, and one of those tomatoes, worth the 16€.
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The girls went for little portions of standard French restaurant desserts - one had tiramisu and the other red fruit in fromage blanc. David and I went for the other of the little surprises, brioche pain perdue with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Very nice.

With a demi of wine and two beers and a fruit juice, the bill came to about 17€ apiece. Thus, La Table de Mel is that same French restaurant with a reasonably priced lunch special and a couple of surprises. If we're in the neighborhood of this one again and hungry, we won't hesitate to drop in.

HERE is their Facebook page. I consolidate all of my restaurant reviews HERE.

The chorizo has a spidery look to it now that I see the pic.

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

CHÉ OLIVE / LE ZINC, CREISSAN: RESTAURANT REVIEW

No, it's not Chez Olive. It is indeed Ché complete with red star and black beret. I have no idea why and I wasn't about to ask. The French are the French and not to be analyzed too closely when it comes to politics, especially these days. Creissan is the next town over from our village of Quarante. We pass through it often and Ché Olive is right there on the main road at the entrance to town. (One of the signs still says Le Zinc. Olive says he prefers Ché Olive though.) Olive opened it a couple of years ago after leaving the Bar 40, Quarante's basic local watering hole that's undergone a bit of a renaissance lately. We hadn't heard much about Ché Olive from our usual sources for dining recommendations. So we just kept passing by. For reasons not central to this review, we decided to stop in for lunch on a mid-week in late December. The bar is cozy, the restaurant open and bright and modern. Newly renovated and perhaps a bit sterile. We were the f

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