When it comes to restaurants, I’m not really that demanding. I want the basic ingredients to be seasonal and good. I want the cooking to show restraint: nothing puts me off more than an overly complicated plate. And I want the chef to have a heart that shines through in the food.
I have a vision of my perfect apartment in Paris. It would be high up – stairs don’t scare me – with a small balcony and a sweeping view over the zinc rooftops, punctuated here and there with church spires and glimmering domes.
Never one to miss a new Paris pastry shop, I made a taxi screech to a halt when I spotted La Pâtisserie des Rêves back in September.
For the school holidays, I took Sam to London to brush up his English. Well, that was the official excuse.
The surreal extravagance of our last meal in Liguria left us with a quandary: how could any restaurant live up to that experience, which was all the more incredible for having caught us off guard?
When I want a complete change of scenery, I get in the car and drive for 40 minutes. As soon as we cross the border into Italy, everything is suddenly different: the people, the language, the music, the clothes, the coffee (especially the coffee).
Mirabelles, like their cousin the quetsch (known as damson in English), are a specialty of the Alsace-Lorraine region. It’s thought that René of Anjou discovered them during the Crusades of the 15th century…
Les Cévennes is a region barely known to tourists and even less so to foreigners, and that’s the way I like it. Even so, it would seem a tiny bit selfish to keep quiet about my latest holiday in those wild mountains between Nîmes and Montpellier, which was different but every bit as extraordinary as last year’s.
I usually think of pissaladière as one of those dishes that it’s best not to toy with too much, so when I saw that it had been reinvented for the Hi Beach by ultra-creative chef Mauro Colagreco of Le Mirazur in Monaco, I couldn’t resist ordering it.
I had my first taste of the Hostellerie de l’Abbaye de la Celle a few years ago when Philippe and I, with two-year-old Sam in tow, spent a few days meandering through Provence, stopping at all the country auberges run by Alain Ducasse.