Lou Pescadou

After more than a week of city and town life, as fantastic as it has been, (back posts to come -featuring the amazing food we have been experiencing!) craving the sun and the beach, we headed along the French coast from Marseilles down towards the Spanish boarder and closer to our next major destination Barcelona.

Following a day on the most amazing black pebble beach, we headed out of dinner, intrigued by what Lonely Planet referred to as a restaurant that had been serving the same menu since 1965! Gosh they must be good at it by now... so we headed into Lou Pescadou, also partially intrigued since it was 15€ (about $27 AUD) per person set menu for 5 courses, VERY cheap compared to what we had been eating.

Essentially, for people like me that only possess school French (and in my case supplemented by a decent dose of food and wine French), the menu was a simple version of fish bisque to start served with crotons, raw garlic to rub and grated gruyere cheese. We were given a large pot to help out serves from. Like magic the raw garlic was grating straight onto the croutons that we where then to throw into the soup. Unfortunately from the stench of our skin the next morning we went a bit crazy with this.After the soup we were served some mussels that had been steamed with what I suspected was some wine and Provencal flavours; local herbs, tomato, garlic and some white zucchini and capsicum.

Next was a huge cast iron pot of a house made pork pâté, that we were given a knife and left again to help our selves, it was incredibly rich with what I’m sure is every type of offal imaginable.After the pâté we were offered a beef or fish course. The fish was a lightly floured and pan fried plate size flat fish, perhaps like a sole? Served simply with a wedge of lemon.The final sweet course was a slice of what when I was a kid, I’d call Neapolitan ice cream. The quality was very basic but it was served with a generous glug of some type of local liqueur, as if we needed it by this stage, as the only beverage options at Lou Pescadou was carafes of wine; local white or rose, served by the litre carafe... Well what more can I say than, one was not quite enough but two was a little foolishly holiday spirited! Especially for PDCs head the next morning hehehe
Though the food was basic, it was delicious, interesting and obviously had a strong local following from being squeezed between locals at long tables running the length of the dining room, all night.
The value and sense of generosity was outstanding, the wine was burdenly cheap at 5€ a litre, and the staff where smiley, what more can you ask for?

Jack