One evening, our host from Focal, Dominic Baker, took us to a little French village - Saint Genest-Malifaux - just south over the mountains from Saint-Etienne. In "St. Gen" (as the locals call it) is a little inn called "L'Auberge du Sapt". An "auberge" is a small restaurant where the food they serve is grown in the immediate area of the restaurant.
Saint Genest-Malifaux
The restaurant building was built in the 1800's and has been updated over the years to modern standards. 
But the stone is still the original stone in the building. The restaurant is owned by the Sapt family - the mother and her sister are the main cooks. A daughter and son wait the tables.
Since it was an auberge, the food on the menu was beef, veal, lamb and salmon. Wait a minute. There are salmon runs around here? Dominic told me, "Yeah, there's a gray area where some auberge's can serve seafood. I don't know exactly how they get around that, but they do."
Since I was getting over the flu/food poisoning from the day before, I went with the safe choice and got the sirloin steak with a brown wild mushroom sauce. It was absolutely great. However, one of my colleagues, John Bevier, got the veal dish in an herb sauce. Oh! My! God! It was un-friggin'-believable. I thought mine was great, but he offered me a taste of his and it was a taste sensation that blew me away.
The red wine they served was the Domaine de Bonarieux Saint Joseph, a great cabernet from the Rhone Valley. It was robust and had a nice finish to it. It perfectly complemented my steak and mushroom sauce. There are a lot of good little wineries in the Rhone Valley. I hope to be able to find some of the Rhone Valley cabernets in the states.
The food is so good at L'Auberge du Sapt that they drive from Canada to eat there! This is a pick-up truck that was parked out in front of the restaurant. My boss and some of my colleagues from Montreal thought that was pretty wild to see in France.
L'Auberge du Sapt may have been the second best meal I had while I was in France, but I will say the building and the setting were by far the neatest.
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