Road Tips

Cornes d'Aurochs - Saint Etienne, France

I wasn't feeling well the Monday evening we were in Saint-Etienne during my trip to France.  The salmon I had earlier in the day didn't agree with me.  I almost skipped dinner, but I thought I'd go and hang with the crew for the evening. 

I'm glad I did.  We went to a funky little restaurant with a country/farm theme to it - Cornes d'Aurochs (see map), which roughly translates into "Horns of the Ox."  It is run by the charismatic Bruno Billamboz (shown at left) and his wife, Adele. 

Cornes d'Aurochs has a lot of old time farm implements and tools on the walls and on shelves.  They have little models of cattle and farm animals and a lot of little tractors.  Since the Quad Cities is the home of John Deere, I had to take this picture of this miniature John Deere tractor.

For dinner, we had our choice of a chicken dish, lamb or beef.  I went with the beef, which was a thin piece of sirloin steak in a wild mushroom sauce.  It had a medley of vegetables along with it.

Other than the fact that I wasn't feeling all that well, the food was very good.  I hardly finished the steak, though.  I was so gassy and bloated, I just felt like I was going to blow up. 

Still Bruno and his wife were very nice people.  In their broken English, they found that I was from Iowa and being that their restaurant was farm themed, they were very impressed that someone from Iowa was eating in their place.  And that had to be a first for any Iowan eating in a restaurant in France.

Bruno's big thing is to take pictures of people under his huge ox horns he has hung in his restaurant.  My colleague, Todd Hurry, took this picture when Bruno had me sit there and he sent it to me.  Other than the fact that I felt like shit, the picture is rather funny.

As an aside - I stood up and looked at the tag on the bottom of the plaque.  The ox horns were mounted by the Jonas Brothers taxidermy studio of Broomfield, CO.  I about crapped (literally and figuratively) on the spot. 

Years ago, I had a friend - Steve Miller - who lived across the hall from me when I first had an apartment in Newton, IA.  Steve was dating this girl whose mother married Joe Jonas, one sons of the Jonas Brothers, who are world renown taxidermists.  We went out there a couple of times and I visited Joe's studio in Broomfield.  It was absolutely one of the most fascinating places I've ever visited.   

Of course, nobody believed that I knew the taxidermy studio that did the horns for Bruno.  But at that point in time, I really didn't give a shit.  I was more interested in getting back to the hotel to - unfortunately - purge my dinner. 

The food was very good at Cornes d'Aurochs.  But it's not fun being sick on the road.  Especially when you're in a foreign country and 4500 miles away from home. 

Le Musee d'Art Moderne - Saint Etienne, France

We arrived in Saint Etienne on a Sunday afternoon, wrung out from flying across the ocean, being up all night, and our body clocks all screwed up (2 p.m. in France is 7 a.m. body time for me).  With our stomachs doing jumping jacks looking for food, our host, Dominic Baker took us to a place where I'd eaten before on my previous trip to France, the restaurant at Saint Etienne's Le Musee d'Art Moderne (The Museum of Modern Art). 

The museum opened in December of 1987 and features modern works of art from Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, Francis Picabia, and Kurt Schwitters.  Yeah, I know, I'd only heard of Warhol and Picasso before. 

I didn't get to see much of the museum, being that I was starving and would rather look at a work of art on a plate than on a wall at 2 p.m. on a French Sunday afternoon.  We had our choice between a seafood dish (I forget what it was) and a steak tartare that just screamed, "Pick me!!  Pick me!!"

And I did.  And it was great.  But, then again, with my body clock at 7:30 a.m., I could have eaten a shit sandwich and thought it was good.  I've eaten worse things after an all night drunk.  Only I wasn't drunk.  Well, other than all the free wine I got on the flight over because my overhead light didn't work and the nice stewardess from American Airlines let me drink wine for free the rest of the flight.  But, that had long worn off by the time I was in Saint-Etienne.

But the steak tartare was served on a bed of rice with a light cream sauce over the top.  It was a spot-hitter.

We did have some wine, I can't remember what it was, nor did I care - I just wanted food and some good French wine.  I was so burnt out by the time I was done with lunch, my "give-a-shit" factor was pretty low.  But it was a good time for our first meal in France. 

Like I've said before - there aren't a lot of great places to eat in Saint-Etienne, but they are fun.  And Le Musee d'Art Moderne is a pretty fun place to eat. 

L'Auberge du Sapt - Saint Genest-Malifaux, France

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.

Les Domaines Qui Montent - Saint-Etienne, France

On our first day at the Focal factory, they took us out by the Saint-Etienne Airport to a unique little place called Les Domaines Qui Montent (which, I was told, roughly translates to "The land that goes up" or "the land of hills", which makes sense since the area around Saint-Etienne is so hilly).  Domaines are the common term for estates where French wines are made.  Some are bed and breakfast type villas.

Les Domaines Qui Montent was a newer building (sorry, no pictures - I left my camera back at the Focal plant) that housed a combination restaurant and liquor store.  Their selection of French wine, I was told, was impeccible.  A number of the guys in our group grabbed two or three bottles - some grabbed more to take home with them. 

There was 16 of us in the group (our host, Dominic Baker, brought three of the ladies from the office with us) and they sat us at a long table in the back of the wine area. 

Now, so far I've told you of some wonderful food that we had in France (and I've got many more places to talk about) but this one, we hit a stinker.  Lunch consited of a small salad, then they brought out a bowl of egg pasta noodles and a warm pan of cooked salmon with a cream sauce on them.  The salmon didn't taste very good to me, the noodles were kind of cold and the sauce on the salmon was sort of bland to me. 

The salmon also was some of the most boney salmon that I've ever had in my life.  One of my colleagues took the right approach - he just had the pasta. 

The highlight was the wine - a good French cabernet and a wonderful French chardonney that was better than the cab.  I like the fact that the French drink wine at lunch like it's milk or pop.  I think we should adopt that practice here.

All in all, Les Domaines Qui Montent was a neat place to visit, but I wasn't impressed with the food.  In fact, later that night I got sick.  Now, I don't know if it was the flu or food poisoning - no one else in our group got sick - but the purging out of both ends had a strong fish smell.  I was down and out for about 24 hours.  And for the rest of the trip, I couldn't stand the smell of fish so I didn't order anything other than fowl or beef.  Which is too bad because I really like fish.

That was the only bad meal we had on the trip to France. 

Chez les Fondues - Saint-Etienne, France

One of the more fun places we ate at in Saint-Etienne was our Sunday night meal at Chez les Fondues on Rue de Marengo (see map).  That's right - it was an honest to God fondue restaurant. 

I've learned that traveling from west to east when there's a time zone difference of six hours or more is to get to the city you're going to in the morning or the early afternoon.  Your body time will still be on what time it is back home, so more than likely you'll be pulling a 30 to 36 hour straight stay-awake shift (that is, if you're like me and can't sleep on planes).  The trick is to stay awake as long as you can and to go to bed at the regular time on the first night you're there.  We didn't leave to go to the restaurant until about 7:30 p.m., French time, so I wasn't certain I'd be able to stay awake at dinner.

Chez Les Fondue is a small little place that seats, maybe, 30 people.  We had a party of 14 including our host, Dominic Baker, the chief engineer and international sales manager for Focal; and Jacques Mahal, the founder and president of Focal (shown above at right). 

After first bringing out about four bottles of wine, they brought out all the fondue pots, along with the pots of melted cheese.  Then they brought out bread and piles of cubed steak, chicken and pork.  Then they brought out cubed pieces of fried potatoes (yes, they called 'em French fries). 

It was like the fondue you did at home back in the 70's and 80's when it was so "hip" to fondue.  You put a piece of meat on the end of a little spear, stuck in the boiling hot oil, kept it in there for three to five minutes (depending on how done you wanted your meat - I had nothing but the beef, so I was sticking it in for 90 to 120 seconds, tops), pulled it out and ate it.  You'd take bread or the potato cubes and dip those in the cheese fondue pot.  It was great. 

Then they brought out this thing that was some sort of a melting device and they stuck this half-moon hunk of stinky friggin' cheese on it.  I wasn't certain what it was, but when I tasted the cheese melting off the device I immediately fell in love with it.  I was just introduced to the heavenly cheese called Raclette.  It smelled like hell when it was room temperature, but it was heavenly when it was warmed up and melted.

The Raclette cheese would melt off this little contraption (similar to the one shown on the left) and you'd scrape it with this sort of narrow wooden knife.  You'd put it on bread, or on potatoes, or on meat or whatever.  Hell, I'll bet you could even put it on dead mice and they'd taste great.  It was that good.

The name Raclette comes from the French word "racler" meaning "to scrape." I was told that Raclette began in Switzerland at the end of the 19th century.  Workers who gathered grapes for the annual harvest had made a fire and legend has it that one of the grape gatherers cut a piece of cheese with a hot knife.  The cheese began to melt with a golden brown color and stringy texture.  The worker immediately scraped the melted cheese of his hot knife and on to a piece of bread he had in a backsack and it tasted wonderful.  Raclette was born. 

Raclette has long been a tradition in both Switzerland and France, although one of my colleagues told me that he'd had Raclette once before about 20 years ago at a small ski lodge in upstate New York.  But he said it tasted nothing as good as this. 

Chez les Fondues was so fun, the food just kept coming, the wine kept flowing.  I was literally busting at the seams.  I'd not eaten so much for a long, long time.  All in all, it was one of the most decadent displays of gouging ones self on food that I've ever participated in. 

AND THEN, just after 10 p.m. locally (3 p.m. body time - I was now up 31 hours in a row) they brought out Chocolate fondue for dessert!  Holy shit!  I was ready to explode from eating too much and ready to pass out from lack of sleep, and they brought out Chocolate fondue with marshmallows, peach slices, pear slices, strawberries and other things to dip into the chocolate. 

Jesus, what didn't they bring out to put on a stick and put it in melted chocolate?  And it was SWISS chocolate, to boot! (Saint-Etienne is about 135 miles from Geneva, Switzerland - see map.)

I was so frigging stuffed after all that food that there was no way that I could eat anything else.  After many protests to my colleagues that I couldn't possibly eat another bite, I did break down and dipped a marshmallow into the warm chocolate.  Oh man!  I don't eat chocolate very often, but this was absolutely great.  I had to have another one.  And another.  I was REALLY ready to explode.

You ever eat so much that your body physically hurts?  That was me that night.  Thank God for the slow walk back to the vans or I would have really been in a world of hurt. 

Chez les Fondues was fun, but it was too much food, too much cheese, too much wine, too much chocolate.  And I loved every minute of it. 

Hotel Mercure Saint-Etienne Parc de L'Europe

During my stay in Saint-Etienne recently, we were housed at the Hotel Mercure Saint-Etienne Parc de L'Europe.  That's quite a long name for a hotel that is a three star hotel in Europe (and what I would categorize to be a low two star hotel in the U.S.).  The hotel is located next to one of the many parks in Saint-Etienne - Parc de L'Europe - and one of the more popular parks in the city, as well.

The Hotel Mercure Saint-Etienne Parc de L'Europe is part of the Accor hotel chain, a European-based chain that has worldwide hotel chains such as Mercure, Ibis, Sofitel, Red Roof Inn and Motel 6 as part of their empire.  The one in Saint-Etienne is nothing more than a business hotel and is somewhat situated in a residential area of the city (see map).  The one thing that it has going for it is that one of the finer restaurants in the city is located in the hotel - La Ribandiere.  But Saint-Etienne is a highly industrialized city (they have over 400 manufacturers listed on a map in the hotel) and there aren't a lot fine restaurants in town. 

My room on the second floor was somewhat smallish and spartan.  The view out of my window (right) was not too great.  It was of a high-rise apartment building, one of many in the immediate area of the hotel.  Actually, I was somewhat surprised at the large amount of apartment buildings in Saint-Etienne.  I was told that over 20% of the total population of Saint-Etienne (which is about 225,000 in the metropolitan area) live in small apartments.

I found out later on that the upper floors were being renovated into more of a modern mode.  I wouldn't say my room was tired, but let's just say that I've stayed in Comfort Inn's at $59 a night that were much nicer compared to the room that I stayed in.  (By the way - the rooms were listed at $92 Euros a night - roughly $116 US.)

But the bathroom did have a bidet.  I joked with my colleagues after we checked in that I certainly liked "that there foot bath thing in my bathroom."  They initially didn't know what to think until I cracked a half-ass smile when I realized they thought I was serious. 

One of the big reasons I didn't post anything for a week is that I had to choose between taking my camera or my computer.  I opted for the camera.  I figured that I may have a chance to use a computer that the hotel may have.  But that went away when I found that they charged for usage of the computer in the lobby - 5 Euros ($6.25 US) for 15 minutes. 

Plus the fact that the keyboard layout was sort of funky - it was obviously set up for French language and wasn't a normal "Qwerty" set up.  (Click on the above picture to see an enlarged photo of the keyboard.)  I tried to use it once and realized that I'd use up a good portion of the 15 minutes trying to figure out where the hell the individual keys were on the keyboard.   

The front area of the hotel was very nice - they had a nice little flower garden and a terrace that looked out over to the park.  It was nice to go out in the morning after breakfast to hang out looking at the flowers waiting to go over to the factory.

And speaking of breakfast, the Hotel Mercure Saint Etienne Parc de L'Europe had a nice little spread for a continental breakfast.  Each day I had a homemade croissant and three or four 6 oz. glasses of orange juice.  Why so many?  Because they had this awesome juicing machine where you would put oranges in a little chute, they would feed into a cutter mechanism that would slice the oranges in half.  Then they would catch on a wheel that would squeeze the juice out of the oranges.  There was a mesh tray drain at the bottom that kept the pulp out of the juice, and then you had a little spigot that you'd pour your juice into a glass.  It took about 4 oranges to get a 6 oz glass of juice.  But it was great.

It was so great that my boss, Daniel, said that he wanted to look into distributing the juice machine in North America.  However, I found out that it's already being distributed in the states.  I also found that the suggested retail price of the machine they had at the hotel was just a scad under $4000 (US).  But it was way cool. 

Here's some pictures from the Parc de L'Europe across the street.  Parc de L'Europe is a good sized park, I'm guessing somewhere around 5 to 6 acres in the center of the city.  I went for walks through there on three or four occasions early in the morning.  Here's a picture of the main walkway through the center of the park.  I like how the sun is filtering through on the trees in the background, but the ones in the foreground are still in the shadow of the hill behind me (Saint-Etienne is a very hilly city). 

They had a large jungle gym in the park, too.  I thought it was pretty cool.  You'd never see anything like this in America, mainly because we have such a litigious society and the first time a kid fell off this thing, his parents would be swimming in money. 

Here's a neat statue at the front of the park.  I tried to get the sun filtering through the sculpture, and it would have worked had I taken time to screw around with it.

One of Saint-Etienne's "sister" cities is Des Moines, IA.  Since I grew up near Des Moines I thought it was kind of neat that I was in one of Des Moines' international sister cities.  However, the only acknowledgment to Des Moines that I could see in Saint-Etienne was this sign for an alley near the hotel.

For mid-priced European standards, the Hotel Mercure Saint-Etienne Parc de L'Europe is a nice place.  I hope they have the lower floor rooms remodeled the next time I go back - which may be next year.  They're making noises they want us to come back each year now.  I guess I don't know if I like that idea or not.