French Letter: From real estate to real cuisine in Occitanie

I promised myself I wouldn’t bang on this week about the awful weather we experienced during our recent trip to Occitanie in southern France, where when it wasn’t pouring with rain, the wind howled, and Jacques Frost spread his icy fingers over the landscape. 

I simply ask you to accept that it was at least as wretched in Languedoc, Aquitaine and the Charente as it was in central Brittany hundreds of miles to the north. 

The problem is that my wife and I were house-hunting – not for a permanent home, you understand, but for a bolt hole that would give us somewhere milder and more colourful in which to pass the worst of the winter. 

My choice of Pézenas – a bolt hole for Molière, no less, back in the 1650s – was entirely fortuitous. An old friend, a journalist of long-standing whose wife is a wealthy corporate lawyer, lives in a village not far from the town in a house so grand that during its three-year renovation, it became a tourist attraction.

In a recent telephone conversation, he boasted that Hérault, the department with Pézenas at its heart, halfway between Béziers and Montpellier, was almost the last part of “real” France that remained undiscovered by outsiders. 

Having spent five days in the area, I would have to say that he was stretching a point. In the many local restaurants in which we and another friend, joining us from Cannes, enjoyed some of the finest food we have eaten in recent years, a straight majority of our fellow diners were English. 

And, as we discovered during a melancholy tour of a sequence of dark, narrow houses with stone steps and damp basements, much of the cheaper real estate on sale was owned by Brits suffering from post-Brexit buyer’s remorse.

One house we were shown had an extensive basement that we were advised could be rented out as a separate flat. It had an earth floor and no windows, so I somehow doubted this. It might have suited a hermit or a hunchback, but did not incline me to break out the champagne. 

Another was more like a lighthouse, with a concentric stairway that, as we used to say in Fleet Street, went onwards and upwards, leading, finally, to a half-finished roof terrace that may or may not have had planning permission. 

The one we disliked least might, at a pinch, have suited our purposes – the English proprietor had obviously spent years bringing it up to scratch – except that, again, it comprised a series of claustrophobic single rooms, one on top of the other, which, if we had thought to bring a cat, would surely have resulted in a visit from PETA, the French equivalent of the NSPCA. 

But I mustn’t grumble. There are some beautiful homes on sale in the Herault (though few as grand as the one owned by my pal and his wife). It’s just that we can’t afford them. 

So it’s back to a week here and a fortnight there, in hotels or rented apartments, which is not, in fact, a bad option. You may not make lifelong friends or explore the deeper reaches of la France Profonde, but over the years, you see so much more and are less likely to end up bored. Besides, like Rick and Lisa in Casablanca, we’ll always have Paris. 

I mentioned restaurants a paragraph or two back, and I have to say that the food in Occitanie is as good as it gets. I’m not talking Michelin stars here, just honest, family-run businesses that serve up freshly-cooked meals typical of the region accompanied by the wines of Languedoc that in recent years have come to be recognised as the best value in France. 

In one village, awkwardly named Puisserguier, we found ourselves parked opposite what looked like a greasy French spoon calling itself, rather grandly, the Café des Arts. 

Lunch beckoned, and we thought we’d give it a go. What a joy it was! The chef, clearly no stranger to the pleasures of the table, saw us examining his menu on the chalkboard on the street outside and invited us in with a promise that we would not be disappointed. Nor were we. 

The positively gigantic Cassoulet Maison he cooked for us was like something straight out of Lescoffier. If nouvelle cuisine was just sooo last century, this dish, on its salver, would have gone down well, with both sides, during the Hundred Years War. 

Our friend, who reviews restaurants and was once pudding correspondent for Waitrose Magazine, pronounced it the best cassoulet he had ever eaten – a judgment he echoed in consideration of the truly magnificent Tarte Tatin with homemade ice cream that followed. 

I had the misfortune on this occasion to be the designated driver, which meant I was restricted to just two glasses of the local red. But I made up for it the next day at a restaurant back in Pézenas – one of several high-class establishments in the immediate vicinity – called L’Assiette Anatole, which pairs the finest wines of the region with a skillfully prepared selection of dishes influenced, I would say, as much by neighbouring Catalonia as the Languedoc. 

It is possible that we overstayed our welcome chez Anatole, not finally dismounting from our stools until well after four, to the evident irritation of the chef, who claimed, after the cheese course, that he had completely run out of deserts. 

But there was one final surprise. Hidden away in backstreet Pézenas is Hana Sushi, an authentic Japanese restaurant, whose diminutive owner, bowing repeatedly, takes an affecting personal interest in each of her customers. 

There are only four tables, so a reservation is recommended. The bonus – on top of the excellent food – is that you are served by an extremely posh young Englishwoman who speaks all known languages and will guide you with precision through the menu. Not to be missed. 

We left Pézenas still shivering but with the welcome feeling of a job well done. The weather turned even more ghastly as we drove north, past Narbonne, past Toulouse and up beyond Bordeaux. 

We overnighted in Saintes, in the Charentes, in a hotel that warned us it would be shutting the bar at six, reminding me that the French, outside of Paris and a few other big cities, simply don’t “get” pub-life and like to be indoors after dark. 

On our final stop, at a motorway service area in the Vendée, I somehow managed to lose my phone, which turned out to be a bit like having an arm amputated. I might have noticed this sooner but was distracted on the drive home by having to peer into a dense fog that made it impossible to see more than two car lengths in front of us. 

Orange has since suspended my phone, which they say is of no use to anyone who doesn’t have the password. We’ll see about that. But I shall miss the hundreds of photographs taken during the last five years that – entirely predictably – I had neglected to transfer either to the Cloud or to my desktop computer. At least I’ll not make that mistake again…..probably.