Le Parc

I collected Debrah from the airport on Friday at twelve thirty and we went straight to the restaurant for lunch. When I had phoned the day before to make a reservation for one-thirty, or 'treize et demi' (thirteen and a half - French custom dictates the use of the twenty four clock to communicate correctly) I was told in no uncertain terms that I musn't be any later than that. Right. It's almost as if they were doing me a favour by opening and serving food rather than me providing them with a living by turning up to eat and pay for our lunch. French arrogance never ceases to amaze me but I love it nonetheless.

As a result, we hot-footed it around Carcassonne to 'Le Parc', a newly decorated Michelin-starred restaurant, situated in a quiet road, intrigingly called 'chemin des Anglais' right underneath the Cite. This restaurant was opened a couple of years ago and Frank Putelat, the chef has, apparently, spent a fortune on the build and design, as well as going all out to get that revered Michelin star.

We were there by one o'clock and the car park was absolutely stuffed - clearly we were late. Indeed the restaurant was packed to the point where we felt a bit self-conscious walking to our table when everyone else was already past the aperiftif stage and onto first or even second courses.

The place was clearly expensively, though not necessarily tastefully, designed. Everything seemed to say that they were trying just a little bit too hard to impress - the monogrammed plates and butter pats, the carved stone cutlery holders with precise dents for fork. knife and spoon, the red tinted water glasses, the piped birdsong in the toilets, the crazy Philippe Starck type designer coffee cups with bent Uri Geller spoons hanging off them - it was all a bit extreme.
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Which would have been fine if the food had lived up to the hype. I had been told that the fixed price lunch menu was superb and excellent value for money. Sadly, the reality didn't live up to the billing - the canapes and the petit fours were excellent but the three courses in between were a bit of a disappointment, which was a real shame. When we can afford it, we would love to come back and try the rest of the menu including the bizarrely named 'Action .... Reaction' menu where the chef chooses your food and you pay a very large amount of money for the privilege!

As it was, the food and everything else didn't really matter because all we were interested in was seeing each other. If the coffee cups really had been able to hover, as I imagined they should, then maybe this blog would have had a different emphasis, but then again, maybe not.