Last Meals in France: At Au Hazard Balthazar & Ferme de Berle

Restaurant Au Hazard Balthazar in Martel

This is a great inexpensive restaurant that has prix-fixe menus and one-dish meals. I had a salad of charcuterie which included geseers, bloc de foie gras, paté and rellettes, and all for 14 Euro .We also had potatoes fried in duck fat. They were so good that Michele bought duck fat and made them almost every night we ate at the house. The owner is named Patrick and the ladies in the group made a fuss when they saw him. The food went very well with a Bergerac Rosé de Saint Vivien 2006.

 

 

The last lunch we had out was at La Ferme de Berle, a working farm that serves food. It is near the town of Collonges- la-Rough, where all the buildings are made of a red colored stone. We got lost trying to find the little town of Berl where the restaurant is located. There were no other customers in the place and the woman in charge did not want to serve us at first.

After telling her how far we had come and how we were looking forward to being there, she gave in. She gave us a choice of a peach or walnut wine that was in a bottle that had a round sphere on the top which measured the amount of wine poured. The first course was a tomato salad that gave new meaning to the tomato. That was followed by a great paté. We could not stop eating the bread. The veal stew was served with a potato cake, and both were excellent. All of this combined perfectly with a bottle of the local rosé. Dessert was a clafoutis, a sort of cherry cake and I had two pieces. It was a great place to have our last meal in France.

More Périgord Restaurants: Le Sombral & Moulin de l’Abbaye-Brantme

Auberge Le Sombral “Les Bonnes Choses” at Saint-Cirg-Lapopie.

This restaurant looks like any other in this charming town high above the valley We arrived late, and were almost not seated. The day was very hot and the town was full of tourists but the food and the wine made up for everything.

The first course was Talmouse, Roughford cheese in puff pastry that was delicious, followed by duck confit. I ate a lot of duck confit in Le Périgord but this one was the best. Great care was taken in the preparation because the skin seemed to melt in your mouth. The Château de Mercues 1994 Cahors was the perfect match with the food. It was one of my top restaurants.

Moulin de L’ Abbaye-Brantme en Perigord.

Lovely setting along the river, prix-fixe lunch with wines to match. Expensive, but we not only had a bottle of wine and asked the sommelier to match a glass of wine with each course. One of the whites had too much oak and he exchanged it without question.

I started with bloc de foie gras, followed by foie gras and pigeon, which was excellent. Then came cheese and a chocolate ‘cone-shaped’ dessert. We drank a Château Montus 2003 produced by Alain Brumont made from tannat, and sometimes a little cabernet sauvignon, from Madiran. Big, dark and 15.5 % alcohol but a great wine. Blackberries and a hint of prune, it’s a very full-bodied a wine that makes itself noticed on the palate.