On this, our departure day, the morning was warm and hazy. After a perfunctory cleanup of the gîte—perfunctory, but leaving the place much cleaner than when we arrived—we headed for the Mediterranean and thence northward along the coast beyond Agde to:

Bouzigues, 4 km from Mèze.

The restaurant is located on the northern-most shore of the Bassin de Thau, an enclosed body of seawater given over to the cultivation of oysters and mussels. We sat in a swanky, glass-enclosed dining room overlooking the Bassin. Before opening our menus we took a moment to look out over the sparkling water of the seafood farms. In the middle distance we made out, poking above the water’s surface, the wood and wire frames that support the growing crop. There’s our lunch, we thought. Or there it was until recently.

L’amuse bouche du moment: Four lightly cooked mussels on a very thin, creamy sauce touched with cumin. The mussels had a fine and distinct flavor. What a great start to lunch!

We drank a white Côteaux de Languedoc Terre Mégère La Galopine 1992, a wine with much fruit, and acid in balance.

Corbeille de coquillages du Bassin: A platter (not a basket, despite the title) of oysters, mussels, whelks and langoustines. The langoustines had been cleaned but not shelled. The whelks, a shellfish less familiar to us, struck us as chewy—a quality that took a little getting used to. Everything had that fine and strong flavor associated with absolute freshness.

Deserving of special mention were petits pains au levain, the partly whole-wheat rolls served along with the coquillages. The waiter told us the rolls were made fresh in the restaurant kitchen mornings and evenings. We used them as base for slatherings of  the restaurant's pleasingly mild aïoli, a mayonnaise with the merest touch of garlic flavor.

Poisson du jour: Salmon cooked on its skin--by the way, the skin ended up crispy and well worth rolling off and eating separately--on a mild saffron flavored sauce. The fish was served with a scattering of diced zucchini and tomato, on a bed of strips of the same—exhilaratingly simple and colorful with an impeccable immediacy of flavor.

Nougat glacé aux fruits confits, la sauce aux fruits rouges: An agreeably crumbly and crunchy nougat glacé containing a larger-than-usual amount of candied fruit, served on a fine red-berry sauce.

Among generally good mignardises, one outstanding item was a pâté de fruit, a deeply flavored jelly redolent of passion fruit.

The total at Côte Bleue was F640.

***

After lunch we rolled easily northward to arrive at our stop for the night about 5:00 pm:

Grâne

We received something of a welcome. No sooner had we settled into a state of advanced relaxation on the restaurant’s shady patio than the chef himself brought out complimentary glasses of the house apéritif—a Kir of vin blanc du Rhône flavored with raspberry and bilberry liqueurs. We couldn’t help thinking the poor fellow must have mistaken us for persons of consequence, such as restaurant critics.

Language note: Contrary to some dictionaries, the French for bilberry is myrtille.

The evening was perfect for dining outdoors—few bugs, no wind, warm enough with only the faintest hint of chill in the air—and by the time we had done with our Kirs and a second complimentary apéritif served with roasted hazelnuts enclosed in balls of puff pastry fresh from the oven, the waiters were already scurrying about setting up tables on the stone-flagged terrace.

We settled down to an in-depth study of the menu. Jean noticed that she had received a lady’s copy, a souvenir of an earlier era in which menu prices were omitted for fear of upsetting the feminine psyche. An amusing relic, perhaps, but Jean was not amused.

Aïoli de cabillaud et jeunes légumes légèrement crémé: As well as steamed cod and a variety of briefly steamed cooked young vegetables, the dish offered a small assortment of shellfish bathed in a mild aïoli. Unsurprisingly, the coquillages generally did not generally come up to the exalted standard of our lunch. But Patrick Giffon must be given his due—one item, a lightly cooked oyster, was quite as good as anything we’d had at La Côte Bleue.

Rable de lapereau fermier cuit en crépine à la tapenade d’olives de Nyons, purée d’artichaut: A saddle of young free-range rabbit cooked in a wrapping of caul fat so that the meat was uniformly moist and tasty, stuffed with tapenade made from Nyons olives and served with an artichoke purée. The rabbit meat was thick-sliced and served on an unobtrusive sauce. The purée was outstanding for its intense and fine flavor of artichoke. Not mentioned in the title, a side-dish of gratin dauphinois supplied tremendous savors of potato.

Cassolette d’escargots, ris et langue d’agneau au vin de Rasteau: A casserole of snails, lamb’s sweetbreads and lamb’s tongue presented on a rich sauce made with the sweet wine of Rasteau. The typically fleeting and delicate character of sweetbreads did not survive this presentation, but the sturdier flavors of tongue and the wine sauce combined to interesting and satisfying effect. The snails, served in their shells on puddles of aïoli, were individually pleasing.

Filet de canard rôti et compote de groseille à l’aigre doux. It seemed to us that the duck breast (underside only) must have been oven-roasted to the very rare stage, thick sliced, and finished in a pan to the rare stage. The slices were uniformly red and succulent—about as good as duck can be. The cooked red currants combined with the duck cooking juices to achieve the sweet-and-sour effect mentioned in the title. Like the saddle of young rabbit, this dish was also accompanied by gratin dauphinois.

Croustillant au miel de lavande, lait de chèvre glacé: A chocolate-sided pot of lavender-honey custard topped with a friable sheet of caramelized sugar, a goat’s-milk ice, and not mentioned in the title, a heart-shaped juxtaposition of strawberry and peach purées. All flavors were as fine as one could imagine. But the creation appealed not only to the palate but also to the eye: the gleaming red and ivory of the fruit purées, the pastel shades of the custard and ice, and the pleasing shapes achieved by partitioning the elements of the dish with thin chocolate walls in the manner of cloisonné.

Feuillantine de pêche blanche, sirop de vin de cassis, sorbet cacao: A poached white peach mounted on a brittle pastry base, served with a cocoa sorbet on black-current syrup. The chief pleasure from this dessert came from the white peach, cooked as it was to the apogee of intensity in the fruit’s characteristic flowery perfume. Parallel with the simplicity of that presentation, the sorbet offered only the more austere nuances of cocoa.

After lingering over good mignardises and coffee, we left the patio at 10:30 pm, just ahead of a brief patter of rain.