Puligny-Montrachet off

To Café Rouge last week for a lunch time celebration of our wedding anniversary. Also notable for being the first time we have eaten outside a restaurant for a while, with their terrace being both comfortably warm and shaded.

Knowing that their issue corkscrews were not up to much and the Puligny-Montrachet corks were a bit of a challenge, I almost took my own corkscrew in, a corkscrew with a wide bore and a big handle. Wide bore meaning it was unlikely to pull out of even a tight cork and big handle meaning you could apply a bit of muscle. I decided against, wrongly as it turned out, as their issue corkscrews made a bit of a mess of things and the bottle was confiscated for staff consumption later. While I puzzled about why everybody makes such a fuss about a few bits of cork in your wine: it's easy enough to fish them out. With the result that we took what turned out to be a rather ordinary Chablis. Even worse, the waiter thought that the Puligny-Montrachet was being dropped - which is a shame, it having been the best restaurant wine that we had ever found in Epsom. Maybe Caspers came close with their red, but that is a while ago now.

Started with their sharing starter for two, which was rather wrong too. Unusually for a chain, whoever put this starter together had not given enough thought to presentation and the whole thing looked a bit uncouth. Plus they had put some red pepper in the very modest dollop of hummus, which I did not approve of at all. Little sausage described as Toulouse, not up to much. Olives OK. Bread good. Hot cheese good, perhaps rather a lot of it. More or less a foodies' version of cheese on toast.

Main courses much better, Chicken Cesar for BH and half poussin with chips for me.

Chocolate mousse good, taken with a drop of Sauvignon Blanc, the Chablis having been done by that point.

Wound up with a spot of Calvados. And despite the errors, the ambience had been good, the meal a success. And we had enjoyed watching all the passers by; all very Paris.

There is still some traditional boarding left in Epsom, not the more usual plastic version, this on view from where we were sitting. Must be a right pain to keep in reasonable decorative condition. Note the deep shade.

We think that we learned that our waitress, whom we have had several times before, came from Silesia and knew all about Breslau. I think the general idea was that there was a reasonable amount of friction between old-style Silesians and new-style Poles, but she just kept her head down. A salutary reminder that it is a bit crude to think of everybody from Poland as just a Pole, a bit like thinking of everybody from the UK as English. She also told us that she thought that people from Warsaw were apt to be a bit up themselves, a story we have heard from provincial French people regarding people from Paris. The sort of thing I have been known to both think and say when we come across Surrey people in big cars and with loud accents when we are on holiday in the Isle of Wight.

The haul from Epsom Library. The book on the right was first published in 1927, was bought by the library in 1950 and came complete with all its nearly full old-style lending sheet, brown tickets etc. I always have a bit of a soft spot for such, so at a fiver it was no contest. See reference 3 for another example. A good companion piece to our DVD of 'Topsy-Turvy'.

Home to read the obituary of Bernard Hepton, whom I thought had been Prosper in the ITV version of the Forsyte Saga. BH was quite sure that I was wrong, and she turned out to be right, with a chap called Michael Mahoney being the Prosper in question, a chap whom I had remembered from ITV3. Not that I could have turned up either name all by myself, even with a drop on board. Nor did it cross my mind that Hepton was probably a bit old for the Prosper role in 2002 or so. That apart, I suspect that BH is better at faces than I am, as I seem to making mistakes of this sort quite often these days.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/06/rival-to-aloe.html. Our last visit.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/ein-schlesier.html. Concerning Breslau.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/12/abebooks.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/12/fake-21.html. The nearest the blog comes to Caspers.