Where's McDonalds?

We went for a little walk yesterday before dinner and we walked down a path leading away from the hotel. It turns out that this hotel has a massive property complete with beautiful forest, lake, and miles of deserted paths for running (after looking at our pictures today, it looks like I didn't get a hold of the camera last night).

After our walk, we went back to the hotel and got ready for dinner. Like we said in the last post, we had the concierge make a reservation at a restaurant for us because we weren't willing to spend a fortune on duck and organ meat at the hotel. So far we've had great luck finding places with at least one person that spoke some English. We knew our luck was about to wear out as we drove to the restaurant. Our concierge gave us a map and we found ourselves driving about 12 km. through country roads to a mom and pop type restaurant in a tiny town.


Usually when we've walked into a restaurant the host rambles something in French and we do our best to look like deer in headlights so that they default to "oh, I see you speak English" and we carry on with the evening. This time, they rambled something in French, we put on our dumbest 'Huh?' face and she just repeated herself. We pulled out a few words like 'Sorry' and 'One Minute' and she smiled politely and left us alone.

At this point, we knew we were the nightmare table. We were the only English people speaking in the house-turned-restaurant and had the divider to the kitchen not been there I'm sure we would have seen the servers playing rock-paper-scissors to see who had to take us.

We opened the menu and both kind of looked at each other. Usually we could at least find 'poulet' on the menu. This time, no luck. Thankfully, we ripped the menu decoder out of a book or we would really have been in trouble. Both of us were thinking, "please let Langostine mean cheeseburger." As we started translating some of the words we were learning the French for 'coarse pork pate,' 'lobster,' and 'cod.' We were starting to panic a bit and were perplexed. We told the concierge Ryan was fussy which is why we wanted to go to another restaurant. Apparently, 'fussy' didn't translate.
We basically did an Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Moe and crossed our fingers. First course ended up being some kind of cold lobster spread. I knew what it was immediately but Ryan had trouble deciphering what he was eating. I didn't tell him because I knew he wouldn't eat it if he knew. It was kind of gross but I did my best to eat as much as possible because we really didn't know what was going to come next.

The next course was veal, prawns, and rissoto. Awesome, right? Well, could have been except that the veal and prawns were barely cooked... as in, a quick sear around the outside and a lukewarm centre. We both slivered off the sides of the meat and hoovered up with rice. By this time, we had been there for an hour and were ready to go.
Next came the cheese which we were thankful for. We knew what we were putting in our mouths and that it didn't need to be cooked. For the most part, they were delicious. There were a couple selections I couldn't eat because they tasted like someone farted in my mouth.
We were now on hour two of dinner and itching to get out. We had waited for dessert for 45 minutes (it was a set menu). It was past 10 p.m. and we wanted out. We were starting to get really antsy and suddenly, all bitchiness dissipated because these little ditties showed up. The most delicious macaroons we had ever had. I wondered if it would be rude to pick all of them up in one go and just shove them in my mouth.
We're just finishing our coffee in bed and are getting ready to head out to two more chateaux. We're looking forward to it but it's probably a good thing these are the last two we're seeing. It's kind of like walking through the Louvre. All these amazing works of art... you spend 15 minutes looking at the first one... 10 at the second... an hour later, you're walking at a brisk pace and barely glancing at the artwork. Ya, ya... Jesus on a cross, fat naked lady, lillies in a pond... where's the restaurant? We're still at the 'these are amazing' stage and we want to leave while we're still there.