Dolce far niente pt 2

Le Bougnat des Pouilles (Troyes)

In my last post you could read about my first Provence impressions - foodwise at least. Now it's time to talk about... MORE FOOD of course! When going abroad I love spending time discovering (super)markets, local food... You get the picture. But something else I obviously can't forget about is RESTAURANTS!


Provence has great food to offer, lovely restaurants, often in the most beautiful places you can imagine. So today I'll make a recap of some places I thought were really good. Three things you should know before reading on:

1. We were in the Luberon region, about a one-hour drive from Aix-en-Provence.
2. I forgot to take pictures at every single restaurant we went to. Couldn't wait to dig in - no time for pictures nah.
3. Mental note for next time: write down names and locations of restaurants. This time I'll try to please you with random appreciations of random restaurants at random locations. Summarizing, we could say I've been a bad blogger.

First night we had a layover in Troyes, where we visited two places.

The first one is a wine bar called "Le Bougnat des Pouilles". We wanted wine, I saw they had a "Gault Millau" recommendation... Done deal. Wine was good and they had a great tapas offer. You can pick 5 tapas out of quite a large assortment for €5. It's nothing fancy but the stuff they have is GOOD. Nothing more you can ask for. We had chorizo, black olive tapenade, poivrons confits, goat cheese cream and a cream / spread made from chorizo. We love chorizo. We love this place.

After that we had dinner at Chez Félix in Ruelle des Chats. Of course I had to try "andouillette", a regional specialty which will make probably half of you gag. It's a sausage made out of pig intestines, wrapped in even more intestines. And YES it was really good. Then we split desserts: fromage and choux. YUM! Good thing about this place is that the interior was really nice as well, kinda in between Scandinavian and French style.

So YES: go to Troyes!!! You won't regret it! Lovely town, lovely food...

The other restaurants I remember:

1. Take-away pizza in Goult. It's a really small town, so you can't miss the pizza place. Order pizza, have wine at the café across the street while waiting. You can even eat your pizza on the café's terrace. Score!
2. "Le Carillon", in Goult as well. A bit more fancy, really nice place. Friendly service. They serve more classic dishes - I had some delicious rabbit for example.
3. "Gilles" in Eygalières. Mainly an Italian restaurant, but their steak tartare was good as well. Some great rosé!
4. "Le Môme" in Aix-en-Provence. Food looked delicious. Don't know how it tastes though, because the place was packed. But it was recommended to us by a local Aix guy so it should be good!

How do you feel about trying local specialties like andouillette? Anything else I should try next time?

Love,
Julie