After lunch at the Halles de Bacalan, Nancy and I walked over to the Cité du Vin.
Somehow we were able to pick out the building without even knowing the street address. The design reflects, or a least is supposed to reflect, wine swirling in a wine glass. It’s much easier to see that in the aerial view on the website, linked above. Inside, the exhibits call on all of your senses as they cover every aspect of wine around the world throughout time. It’s terrific, and well worth at least two hours of your time.
At the close of our visit we went up to the top floor where we each were given a glass of wine, which we sipped on the outside deck overlooking Bordeaux. Actually I ended up sipping both glasses, one a right bank Bordeaux and the other from the left bank. Both were delicious.
We hopped the tram back to Bordeaux and then hopped off before our home to take advantage of an open house at the Opera house.
We took a meandering walk back to the hotel to regroup. On our way, we passed through the Place du Paulin, a little oasis between two busy streets and home to three restaurants. I did some research and the clear winner was Le Puy Paulin.
I called ahead and reserved a seat on the Place. We ordered and the bread, a baguette this time, arrived promptly,
accompanied by a tapenade!
I’m a tapenade fan, and this one stood out. I’m not sure what the key was, but it had my palate singing.
Nancy ordered the Basque region red trout
a small salad,
and a vegetable side that escaped my camera and, indeed, my notice. How, you ask, could that happen?
I was distracted by a large slice bread topped with mi-cuit foie gras.
Mi-cuit foie gras is cooked at a low temperature so that it retains that silky smoothness and rich, fresh, buttery flavor. I was indeed distracted.
I followed with the sweetbreads, a special.
The sweetbreads arrived with broccoli, carrots, potatoes, green beans, and eggplant in a mushroom sauce so abundant that the dish almost amounted to a stew. And what a flavorful mushroom sauce it was! The sauce was rich, and really set up the creamy sweetbreads and accentuated their buttery texture and rich flavor. The sweetbreads came with fries.
Like the fries at Noailles, these were far from crisp, a quality I like, but they also had been cooked in animal rather than vegetable fat. What they lost in crispness they’d more than made up in flavor, especially when they found themselves dipped in mushroom sauce. Very good indeed.
This was our next to last dinner in Bordeaux, and it was a fitting climax to the trip. We’d loved exploring the city, especially with all of the pedestrian-only streets and the ease of the transit system. Bordeaux was perfect for flaneurs like us We found ourselves agreeing that it was much like Paris, only better, without the crowds and the hassles of a major city. We highly recommend Bordeaux as a destination. Put it near the top of your travel list.
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