A Brit chef’s French adventure ticks all the boxes in Languedoc

For the first time since I began working for the FT, I’m writing about a meal I didn’t pay for. I was travelling with a bunch of food, wine and restaurant professionals in the Languedoc, and I was invited. It was a spectacular meal, with good people, at a restaurant with a great story. So what am I to do? Keep it to myself?

The Grand Café Occitan is like a dodgy watercolour by an amateur artist. I mean that fondly. It’s on what passes as the main street of Félines Minervois, a hamlet for which the term “one-horse” massively overstates the equine population. It looks like somebody with a ridiculously romantic notion of rural France conjured it.

It’s a foursquare building that could have been a bar, or might once have housed a post office, or a single-pump petrol station. Its door is planted right in the middle of its stuccoed front, a courtyard off to one side. The kind of place Rick Stein or Keith Floyd would have driven past and dreamt of turning into a restaurant. Which is pretty much what happened, except that the Brit who’s taken the place on is Tristram Bowden, formerly of St John Bread & Wine, one of my top five restaurants ever, who’s moved there with his wife and baby and is currently exhausting himself, making gorgeous food and, I imagine, hiding from TV producers who want to make a ghastly show about his “French adventure”.

Anchoïade is the forgotten dip. Oil, vinegar and garlic work their usual magic, creating the base ointment, then there’s a benevolent admixture of quality anchovies. The sauce is so strong it needs nothing complicated to be dipped into it. Small endive leaves, more sweet than bitter, were a good start, plus a few very thin slices of sourdough, grilled to lace and a bunch of radishes. So simple, so completely wonderful. I’m not sure an Englishman can actually believe he’s in France until garlic is burning his lips.

Then there were thick slices of bread, oiled and grilled, smeared thick with chèvre and mounded with lumps of tomato. Big, ugly, ungainly buggers, quite unlike our own true hydroponic clones. Peeled and then torn into lumps before dressing.

A plate of mixed charcuterie starred pig head terrine, reminiscent of Huw Edwards’ hair-do, not over-gelled, just enough for coherence and authority. There were chunks of cheek with profound, swiney flavour, while slices of ear brought a crisp snap. Two kinds of saucisson, so fresh their colour was alarming and their texture fudgy, then some rillettes de porc, smooth and fine, no granularity, no rough stringiness, tantalisingly like flavoured lard. And there were cornichons. Plump, lightly pickled with a touch of lactic acid rather than the vinegar that tarnishes your buttons at 40 metres. They were plump, generous and the way they played with the silken fats in the pork was like a new kind of grammar.

I’m troubled by “French fries”. It seems unfair to blame an entire nation for McDonald’s chips, a crisp, dry product, lightly tanned. They’ve got nothing to do with real French chips. I’m positing a theory that here they use high-quality fats, perhaps duck fat or olive oil, and therefore fry only once, at a lower temperature than us. Some might call the result soggy but actually the potato is almost confited, so the inside is soft and has developed a genuine sweetness while the outside is a deep mahogany shade. These are best served with the juice from moules marinière made with cider. Which is fortunately exactly what I had.

I would drag myself four miles over shingle, naked, for the sniff of a steamed mussel, but even the best are surpassed by their own juices. Mussels taken from the sea bring a quantity of saltwater with them. The mollusc, much like myself, is in large part a store of tasty fat, which renders wonderfully into cidrous or winey steam, combining with an invigorating amount of sea salt. The juices are complex, punchy and need mopping up with bread . . . or chips.

There was a brise soleil made of rush matting up above us that mitigated the pitiless sun and made every person and object beneath look spectacularly romantic, so when they brought a big blue cast-iron pot to the table it looked such a ’grammable cliché that it was hard not to laugh, at least until they lifted the lid and pointed out joints of roast rabbit, chunks of aubergine, olives and green beans.

It’s with dessert that Bowden’s Britishness comes out. A tart made with almonds and apricots, the crust is thin and savoury, very much in the French manner but the thickness and texture of slice puddingy enough to quicken this Englishman’s heart. I love those slim and soigné flights of pâtissier’s fancy, the elegant cakey jeux d’esprit, but you need something with a bit of altitude and heft at the end of a superb meal. Something that will stand up to a quenelle of rich, cultured cream the size of a hand grenade.

Perhaps the perfect ending was a mound of cracked meringues, cream and red fruit that I’d normally call an Eton mess with an accompanying political joke, but you’ve been spared that because he had the audacity to serve it on a pool of crème anglaise, for chrissake. Like an île flottante. A ludic, innocent celebration of entente on about eight different levels.

It would be wrong and rude to say that it takes a Brit to cook French food. But we have a wonderfully romantic image of our neighbours and, when a really talented chef chooses to express that respectfully through cooking, the results benefit all.

Tim Hayward is the winner of best food writer at the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards 2022

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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