A night on the town

As we had failed to reach the Mange-Grenouille restaurant by phone, we decided to stop by on our way into Saint-Aignan and see if we could book a table for that evening. When we arrived, the restaurant was closed though, but there was a telephone number on the menu card and we jotted it down to call it later.

Our next stop was the pharmacy. Apparently some ‘drugs’ (in the medical sense of the word) are a lot cheaper in France than in Belgium. B. and J.L.’s family and friends being aware of this, had ‘placed an order’, leaving B. with an impressive list of ‘drugs’ to bring back from their holiday. As it was late Saturday afternoon, the pharmacy was closed and we decided to return during the week to do the necessary shopping.

Off we drove to the commercial zone outside of town to get some fuel – called ‘gazoile’ in France and ‘diesel’ in Belgium – for the car. With a full tank we were sure to have enough to take us through the rest of the week, despite the many excursions I had planned on my friends’ request. By then it was time to call the restaurant. Imagine our disappointment when the man on the other side of the line told me ‘Nous sommes complet ce soir’ (We are full this evening). We immediately thought of the obvious alternative ‘le Crépiot’, which had recently re-opened after a fire last September.

Self- and re-assured we set out for the next bit of shopping: some food items, napkins, plastic plates and glasses for Monday’s BBQ. I could have spent hours at ‘Facile’s’, a large department store selling kitchen, decoration and party goods! The place is huge … If you don’t find what you need here, it doesn’t exist. Especially the party section is amazing. The same stuff comes in all kinds of colours, and wandering through the aisles leaves you with the impression of being inside a rainbow. But there is no crock of gold at the end of it … just a cash register! I think I did rather well, spending only 50 Euros. The damage could have been a lot worse. One of the unusual things we bought were, what I like to refer to as, ‘scoubidoes’. Do you know what they are? To be fair, what we bought weren’t really ‘scoubidoes’, but the name fitted them beautifully. More about that in a later post.

Le Crépiot, later that same evening around 10.30 p.m. 

The queue was gone but the place was still buzzing!

We returned to the centre of the town, where we found a queue standing by the door of ‘Le Crépiot’ restaurant. We joined it to find a slate on the door reading ‘Désolé, nous sommes complets.’ (Sorry, we’re full!) Oops! What to do now? There was a pizza vendor’s van in the town square and we were seriously considering buying a pizza there and going home, to have it with a nice bottle of red wine from my friends’ cellar. Then J.L. remembered another restaurant, a place doing savoury ‘crêpes’, a specialty from Brittany, and salads. I’m not sure about the name of the restaurant ‘Le Bridouen’, or something like that (note to my local friends, please correct me if I’m wrong!). Like the other restaurants in town, the place looked really busy, but at least there was no sign on the door saying they were ‘complet’. We ventured in, keeping our fingers crossed. Would we feast on ‘crêpes’ or pizza tonight?