A great lunch with some new friends

Today we caught up with “the girls”, Monique and Joanne (two of our Canadian barge mates), for lunch. They had stayed on in Aigues-Mortes and had arranged for a car to bring them to Nîmes for a day trip, arriving around 10:30 am. After showing them the apartment we headed off to the market. Monique was interested in finding and olive wood board, but we had no luck at the market, and unfortunately about half of the stalls were not open.

We then wandered around the old town stopping at a few shops, making our way to the Roman Arena as they had not seen it yet. We walked around the area until it was time to go to lunch, which I had booked on Patrice’s recommendation. The restaurant “La Table Du 2” by Franck Putelat is located on the top floor of the Musée de la Romanité, a fairly new museum of the Roman history of Nîmes and the surrounding area.

The restaurant was beautifully designed and our table had a wonderful view back to the Arena. We all decided to go with one of the fixed price menus. Joanne went with the menu of the day, and the rest of us went with the Autumn menu. We started with a bottle of Magélie Rosé Champagne, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. We had pumpkin and chestnut soup with pumpkin oil and triple cream - it was one of the most delicious soups I have ever had. Joanne also had a pumpkin soup but it was different to ours. For main we had pork done two ways with lentils and a savora (a French condiment with mustard and many spices) sauce, and Joanne had beef. For dessert, Joanne had a lemon meringue eclair and we had Chocolat - Rocher, which was a chocolate, hazelnut and praline dessert. It was wonderful but very rich and quite large. We had a great time over lunch and we hope to keep in contact and meet up again sometime in the future.

After lunch concluded at 3pm I headed off to get my nails done as they were so long they had turned into talons. The girls engaged in a bit of retail therapy and Ian went for a wander through the museum.

Once again we had a quiet evening in with charcuterie, cheese, fruit and wine.Read more