Moule Quest 3

We did something entirely unusual today, and took a whole Sunday afternoon off, to go play at the beach and have dinner out at an oceanfront restaurant before the tourist hordes really descend after the 14th. Our summer experience is a shuffle game - pre-July 14th (and post-September 5th or so) we enjoy the tourist areas to the max, then through late July and all of August, we hide out at the smaller, less-known beach spots where the locals congregate while La Baulle fills with British Range Rovers.

When I moved here, one thing I missed terribly was chicken wings. They do have them here - we can buy three flavors at Super U - but they are not an ingrained, celebrated part of the food culture here as they are in the US SE. No one would ever dedicate an entire restaurant to chicken wings, for example, and forget spicy ones... the Magma wings from Davidson County (Eat one whole wing and you get your dinner free) are a distant silly memory. And, they're just not as good here, due to lack of the more interesting sauces. I found a replacement passion during my second year, however, in the form of "moules-frites"... that is, mussels and fries. This is served everywhere here.... in fact, it virtually is the area's version of hot wings, at least in terms of ubiquitous cultural placement. And mess! As with good wings, it's impossible to eat moules without covering yourself in sauce, which is half the fun.

I've probably eaten enough of these things to fill a hot tub since we got here, and have had them from utterly bland to positively orgasmic, with all shades in between (Though they are nearly always quite good, since they are mostly harvested right here off our shores, and extraordinarily fresh). They are very seasonal - they only really appear in force in the summer - and the region then descends into a moule-devouring frenzy comparable to a pack of hungry Lexington locals turned loose on fresh BBQ. We rove around trying them at different places in my ongoing quest for the perfect moules. To date, this restaurant holds the title - the Marie Galant, by the docks at La Turballe. Their "Moules-Frites Marie Galant" house specialty is so good that it actually made me dunk my fries in the sauce just to get more of it, and anyone who knows me will know the odds against my willingly mixing my foods.

Luscious.