2 /5
Évaluation
★
★
First impressions were bad as we walked from the carpark to the restaurant. A general sense of shabbiness and neglect, the garden even weedier than my own (and that's saying something!) The welcome less than warm, with a long wait to order (while later-arriving tables - probably regulars - had their orders taken first), We had the 2 course lunch from the blackboard (19.50 Euros, 24 for 3 courses). The pate en croute was advertised as coming with a "reduction de porto", but the sauce had been "reduced" to the point of near invisibility and the handful of sticks of apple and sliver of tomato were insufficient to give the dish any alternative life (even thought the pate itself was rather good. The swordfish was served with Guacamole (insufficiently zippy to merit the name), roast avocado (a total aberration definitely DON'T try this at home!), and a so-called sauce vierge aux agrumes (couldn't taste anything citrusy, seemed like small dice of tomato or red pepper - hard to tell) and a white splodge of something else with no identifiable flavour. This seems to be one of those chefs (sadly not rare in France these days) who either needs to try LESS or try more, but right now the technique doesn't match the ambition (or is the word pretension?)A glass of rose (4 Euros) - bizarrely from another department when the restaurant is in the heart of an excellent wine region - was inexcusably badly chosen.Coffee (3 Euros) came with no accompaniment save a horrible sugared nut in the sugar bowl and, as such was overpriced. Indeed the whole formula seemed overpriced compared to the 31 Euro 3 course plus amuse-bouche deal at the dazzlingly good Presbytere at Vailhan enjojed the next day (see my other review) where 2 Euro coffee incidentally comes with a freebie pot of chocolate ganache worth the 2 Euros on its own! And here the deal is exactly the same in the evenings, whereas the "bargain" formula at la Source is lunchtimes only. Amazingly, these two restaurants rank equally in the Gault Millau guide but the level of achievement and quality of overall experience could hardly be more different.