Wined, dined and rested.

So if unlikely restaurant venue number 1 was a swimming pool café (see other blog post), unlikely restaurant venue number 2 is…… well, the name gives it away “Les terrasses du mini golf” in a tiny seaside town called Luc sur Mer on the Channel coast in Normandy.

 

Unpromising or what?  Mini golf? Really? We wouldn’t have bothered, but we had an overnight ferry to catch, boarding at 9.45pm in Ouistreham and were determined to have one more really good meal before we left France, but it had to be quite close to the port. So we drove along the coast road down from Caen, passing through various little northern French bucket and spade towns that in April were clearly not expecting tourists. We stopped and looked at everything that was open, as did many other people driving up and down the same road, but only some restaurants or cafes were open and either they didn’t look very interesting (what is this French obsession with pizza anyway?) or they were full. We’d walked past the “mini golf” a couple of times already without realising there was a restaurant there, but something made us look again so we shrugged and decided that even if it was yet another pizza place at least we’d have something to eat before having to go home, and time was running out.

 

Well, what a surprise awaited us – we walked through the door into a bustling, and very full, cleanly decorated restaurant full of the chatter of happy French diners and the smell of seafood.

 

When we asked for a table there seemed to be nothing free, then the waiter said cheerfully “Don’t worry, we’ll open up this section for you” and led us round the side to a table right by a window overooking the greyish waters of the Channel. Better still, it had just been drizzling and now the evening sun had elbowed its way out from behind a cloud there was a rainbow especially for us……

 

 

The food was simple fish and seafood, done really well. We had some delicious scallops – the interior was soft, sweet and intensely flavoured while they were slightly crispy where they had been seared on the outside – served with a herby wine reduction with shallots and tiny portions of tortilla española……

 

 

…. and two of us shared an enormous and perfectly cooked, melt in the mouth skate wing in a cream and Calvados sauce, with a beautifully buttery potato purée.

 

We were even tempted by puddings, with one of us (who shall remain nameless) indulging their passion for îles flottantes, and another a similar inclination for moelleux au chocolat……

 

 

Both of these dishes can be found in restaurants across France and other countries, but they still have to be tasty and these – despite the chef’s unfortunate predilection for scribbling all over the puddings with a chocolate pen, oh and the nasty squirty cream – were pleasant to eat and tasted like what they are supposed to taste like.

 

The service was cheerful and friendly, with our waiter insisting that he was going to wave to us as our ferry sailed past later that evening. He even agreed to bring us our food quickly because our time was somewhat short – and this is really not easy to achieve without being asked to leave the premises because it is so insulting in France to suggest rushing food.

 

As we left it was dark and I noticed that there was indeed a mini golf, and it was even floodlit, suggesting that perhaps people really genuinely did come here sometimes to play mini golf.

 

Mmm. Not my cup of tea. But that restaurant is going to see us again…….

UDATE summer 2022. Well that restaurant did see us again, we returned in August 2022 all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and excited to return. What a disappointment.

I suppose the height of the summer is never a good time to try and find the kind of friendly service and carefully-prepared food that we experienced last time we came here, but Les Terrasses du Mini Golf gave SUCH a different impression when we went in August.

The person doing ‘front of house’ was comically surly and unsmiling, at first ignoring us totally as we stood there politely waiting to be seated even though she was just a few centimetres away, doing something on her phone. We had arrived early and asked for a table by a window but were told none was available then we were shown into a nearly empty dining area and pointedly seated away from any window. (Perhaps she had heard us giggling at her extraordinary rudeness as we waited!) For most of our meal there was no-one at any of the window tables. One of the young waitresses was cheerful and tried to make us feel welcome but the others just dumped food on the table without even looking at us.

I’d like to think that the restaurant we first discovered makes a magical return out of season, but frankly the August experience was so awful I couldn’t persuade my fellow-travellers to go there again; we found a much friendlier place elsewhere that we will return to next time!