Le Lavandou restaurants

[salima]

We are flying to Toulon next Sunday and are staying just outside Le Lavandou ( halfway between Toulon and St Tropez) for a honeymoon week. We are planning to rent a car and I wondered if anyone had any specific restaurant hints in the area or any dishes that they would recommend we try?

[robert brown]

Salima. Les Maurins des Maures in Rayol-les Canadel is fun. We went there for bouillabaisse, and while it came up short in the soup department, it was generous and quite okay. It's a combination bar-restaurant in a nice situation. I can't tell you about the other dishes, mostly fish. It's worth a visit and quite lively and colorful. Le Lavandou is also lively and picturesque and Bomes-les-Mormosas is beautiful.

[Sunday Lunch]

Congrats Salima!

Stayed for a few days in Le Lavandou about 20 years ago. Had a wonderful time.The place to go for Bouillabaisse (fish soup dish-complete main meal) is Les Tamaris on St Claire Plage. From what I can gather they are still in operation and getting good comments My only caution is to order one dish for the two of you. We are pretty capable gourmands, but believe me, even after three hours ,and two bottles of wine, those Boullliabase offerings were too much even for us. You also might want to try the various couscous dishes offered in the area.

All the Best.

[menton1]

My favorite town in this area is Grimaud (not to be mixed up with Port Grimaud). A lovely perched village only about 8 km from St Trop, it is a different world. A beautiful medieval centre. As pretty as, but much less touristy than Bormes.

We had dinner at a place called Le St-Joseph, a very nice bistro-type restaurant. Nice lamb dishes, and "cuisine de terroir".

Le St Joseph

Montée St Joseph

Grimaud

04 94 43 28 84

Edited August 22, 2004 by menton1 (log)

[robert brown]

I forgot to add that the bouillabaisse at the Maurin des Maures must be ordered a day ahead.

[John Talbott]

1. Same question, four years later.

I'll be at a wedding in Le Lavandou, so dinner Saturday and brunch Sunday are covered but other meals Friday and Saturday are wide open. I have only eaten at the one star Le Sud in Le L.

2. My thought is to stay in the Hyeres Port area where it is said there are ample bars and restos but I get little info from the food guides. Anyone familiar with the food scene there?

Thanks, John

[pierre45]

1. Same question, four years later.

I'll be at a wedding in Le Lavandou, so dinner Saturday and brunch Sunday are covered but other meals Friday and Saturday are wide open.  I have only eaten at the one star Le Sud in Le L. 

2. My thought is to stay in the Hyeres Port area where it is said there are ample bars and restos but I get little info from the food guides.  Anyone familiar with the food scene there?

Thanks, John

←

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Eh bien ,cher ami Tu peux consulter le www.guidegantie.com/fr.

Bonne chance

[John Talbott]

You're absolutely right, Pierre, I completely forgot. Will do. Tx.

[John Talbott]

This weekend I had the opportunity to eat at several places between Toulon and Le Lavandou, the best outside Le L itself.

For lunch, I decided to treat myself to the one-star Michelin place in Aiguebelle, 5 km past Le Lavandou where I had to be later for a wedding. I’d read about the chef (Mathias Dandine) and his eponymous resto in the JDD a while back in one of those profiles where he picks his faves in Paris under 35 €. It was a true one star meal with great local, seasonal ingredients; this guy really knows how to cook. The 4 amuse gueules were a tempura’d shrimp, a rolled cuke strip around fresh cheese, cured ham with a toast over it and tapenade over that, a tiny cup of gazpacho, but different from the others I’d had this week. Then a veloute of parsley with a big dollop of another creamy substance, topped with fresh herbs and greens. The heart of the meal came next; rouget fillets with fennel cut like spaghetti and two dollops of tomato paste and tapenade-like anchovies as well as a different Iberian ham. The final fish course was lotte with artichoke hearts in a sauce described as made with pepper and ginger but a lot of crustaceans sacrificed themselves too. The sauce alone was the entire trip. Dessert was/were poached cherries in a sauce and with a sorbet of verveine. Finally came 8 mignardises, all classics and good. The bill, 90 € with a fine ½ bottle of Var white, was justified by my celebratory mood and will be laid off to sources as yet to be identified.

An altogether wonderful lunch! I’d rate it an 8.0 and I’ll go back when the dollar goes back to par and someone else is paying.

For dinner, a few hours before, I had cruised the restaurants along the port at Hyeres, where I was staying in a Ryanair-type place (3 € to park, 7 € to get a towel, 5 € for a TV clicker, 10 € for air, etc), not wanting to schlep into Hyeres center, and found them fungible – except one that stood out called viceversa, only the versa was upside down and backwards, cool. In any case I had a plate of excellent cebo, Spanish ham from pigs that are entirely grain-fed, and a glass of fine local wine and that was that for 20 €.

Go back? In a flash.

In Toulon, I had two very mixed experiences:

For complicated reasons, I headed down to Le Mourillon to eat at a place, which the Miche listed as closed at lunch only in July and August, which didn’t quite make sense being in a beach resort but hey they’ve got fact-checkers, don’t they. But it was closed up tighter‘n a tick. So I went to the nearby Bistro de la Reserve. The local (Var) wine was 11 € a bottle, made from grapes and eminently drinkable, especially with the amuse gueule of olives (natch) and tapenade on pretty good toast. The menu had two types of fish soups but also one wild fish grilled with olive oil. The nice lady came by: the dorade is really good she said, and only 22 € for 300 grams (can that be?). OK, fish soup out the door; dorade in. A first she suggested, nah, a little salad – ah, but they’re all big and expensive, think I. She suggests a few scallops with salad; OK. And indeed 5 of the 6, sautéed with the coral, were excellent product, the 6th was unspeakable; not a bad average tho – 83.333333% - and the salad had no spoiled ends and the tomato slices were actually fresh local stuff. Then the grande daurade arrived. Perfectly burnt on its skin, undercooked inside, it looked great, but there was this strange smell. Oh oh. The huge pile of beans reeked of rosemary, there were sprigs of it everywhere, the rice had some strange pistou-like topping, but that’s all OK; out of the corner of my eye, I saw a guy trying to shake salt, pour salt, dump salt on his fish. He was onto something; the fish was bland; the olive oil, not tart like it was in Astoria or as it now is in Greece, did nothing, the lemon helped a bit, but my nephrologue/cardiologue would not have approved of my pouring the entire salt shaker over it. So I did what my friend Elan does, I picked, pushed and dumped. With a coffee serré, bien fait, served with a touch of old rum, offered, the bill was 48.10 €.

Would I do it again? Well, that’s a bit complicated, because of (1) the suddenly beautiful, sunny warm weather, (2) the divine setting, and (3) the street theater, or should I say, the sea theater, which was fantastic and unexpected. Midway thru the meal I saw this big frigate (now you’re going to have to trust me on this, I know it wasn’t an aircraft carrier, they have only one and it’s always en panne, but it was a warship) off in the harbor/bay and a helicopter and two small boats (I know, anyone from Annapolis knows what’s a ship and a boat) doing something. At first I thought it was real, then a TV shoot, then I realized they were practicing lowering a man down, having him “control” the situation and then lifting him up – again and again. It was kind of great - for a boy (sorry feminists.)

My other was a forced run: My rental car had a possibly costly problem, it was Sunday and I know from experience, the Avis staffs are minimal. So I did what any food expert would do, I asked the nearest person which of the five restos (including Maitre Kanter) near the station was best and served at this early hour (11 AM), before my TGV. My local food consultant, the Avis lady, said Le Terminus, which looked the most crummy and I went. The menus are 11 at 14.50 on Sundays, wow, can I afford it? I had an enormous salad nicoise, the first and last of which I think I had 30 years ago in one of those fungible pedestrian street restos in, of course, Nice. The tuna, eggs and dressing were really good, but the tomatoes were cold and hothouse, the salad greens tired and wilted and the potatoes too many. I then had the moules frites; the best thing I can say about them is there were a lot, of both, and the tomato sauce was superb. But where did they get those mussels? And the fries, oh my. But incredibly, they pulled it out with a super crème caramel. The bill = 27 € with coffee, no bottled water, nothing else.

Go back? Who knows?