Cork: Vive la France!
WHEN you phone to make a booking at a French restaurant and a Christine Lagarde sound-alike takes your call then it’s natural to feel just that little bit more optimistic. The accent promises at least a certain authenticity.
When the booking is made — unknowingly — for Bastille Day on July 14 it would seem that we got all of our cockerels in a row and that the gods gastronomique had blessed our adventure. And so, gladly, it transpired.
La Bigoudenne is a small, unshowy, self-contained place run by Noelle (she of the Lagarde intonations) and Rodolphe Semeria on Fermoy’s main street. It is intimate, calming, and sans food-luvvie cacophony.
It would be unfair to say the setting is frugal but it is basic. It’s a place completely at ease with itself where the chef — Rodolphe — proudly serves tables until he gets too busy in his kitchen.
On Bastille Day evening the room was set up for seven tables, six were taken and it seemed that four were occupied by regular guests — always the most reliable and valuable endorsement. It’s that kind of a place; if it’s for you you’ll return again and again.
DW opened with a selection of starters — melon, Parma ham, goats’ cheese and rhubarb quiche, salmon with a yoghurt, and cucumber dressing. All summer-shower fresh and well up to the mark. The rhubarb and goats’ cheese alliance was a first for me and it worked surprisingly well. A must-try dish for our own kitchen on the very first plate.
I began with a selection of duck-based tastes: Rillette, confit — top class — smoked duck magret, and smoked duck gizzard with a handful or two of fresh salad. All earthy, almost musk tastes celebratory in their fat, succulent, rich duckiness.
Main courses were simple but beautifully cooked. They honoured substance in taste and texture, and were given character and depth through robust fruit sauces that can only come from a country where abundant sunshine provides more than enough fruit. These layers of taste goaded us about the summer we might have had.
DW had what was too modestly described as pork steak confit with apple jelly. The meat had been cooked well and rested properly so it was tender and almost a sponge for the warm apple jelly. The sauce had a subtlety and presence, an intriguing layer, very different to the traditional Irish apple sauce. It almost spoke in a different, more expressive language — which of course it did.
My main plate was shank of lamb caramelised with apricots, ginger, cinnamon, and cumin, and as I write my mouth waters again. The meat had been cooked for a long time but it had lost none of its personality. Rather it had reached a point where the richness of the apricots, ginger, cinnamon, and cumin were entirely appropriate. It was so good, and of course this is daft, it will be hard for a while to imagine lamb shanks cooked in any other way.
Desserts kept up their end of the table — shortbread with baked apple, caramel ice cream and a caramel sauce for DW and la grande assiette — pavlova, icy chocolate, and mascarpone — for me.
The wine was a mano-a-mano Fleurie Villa Ponciago La Reserve 2010, the kind of lovely, rejuvenating warmth you get from a wood stove in a glass. Excellent. As was the cider. A shared bottle of Cidre Artisanal Kerné was a splendid apéritif for the apple-and-cinnamon themed evening ahead.
As is occasionally the case, a highlight was plain, old nosey-parker eavesdropping. We were entertained by a couple and their guest discussing a near 50-year career in the employ of one of the last century’s most infamous and divisive beauties. Who? Sorry, the former employee, despite persistent prodding through questioning and le vin blanc, was the very soul of discretion. So must we remain. It would be wrong, however, to be so very coy about the charms and qualities of the Semerias’ lovely restaurant.
