What a pleasure to find a restaurant so utterly concentrated on making simply-delicious food from the freshest possible, ultra-local ingredients and trusting that it will be beautiful, without any flourishes!  In this age of tweezer-food, micro-flowers, sauce dots and Instagram-able plates, it’s like dining in a monastery! And here, the monks dine very well!

Located near the Halles of St-Jean-de-Luz, Pluviôse is tiny, with just 12 seats.  The room is comfortable but nondescript, somewhere between a cozy cafe and a food and wine storeroom, with crates and cases stacked in every available corner.  The chef, an Australian who relocated to the Pays-Basque more than 10 years ago, is also the waiter, the sommelier, the dishwasher, literally every job in the house.  So don’t expect the fancy bells and whistles that are often found in restaurants that set the culinary bar this high.

The food here is really the point, and it is excellent.  Everything is house-made, including the bread, butter, house cheese, vinegar and more.  All ingredients are sourced hyper-locally, (the seafood and fish comes from a fisherman whose boat is 200 m from the restaurant). The bread is baked just before service so that it arrives with your first course still steaming from the oven (and is some of the best bread I have had in the region).  A yogurt ice cream, part of the dessert, was churned at the last minute and never went in a freezer.

Our 7-course lunch included a number of dishes that don’t sound unusual but surprised with their simplicity of presentation and explosive flavors: Butternut squash, grilled and served with house-made fresh cheese and pumpkin seed-parsley-garlic vinaigrette; tortilla espagnol, the classic egg and potato pie, here with onion bits that had been roasted in the wood oven until crispy and  aromatic; sashimi of grondin gris (an underappreciated fish that, served raw, was toothy, saline and wonderful) with daikon radish and piment d’Espelette oil;  grilled collar of the same fish with olive oil, sea salt and house vinegar; leeks cooked “en papillote” very slowly on the wood grill, topped with diced Meyer lemon (and perhaps my favorite dish of the entire meal);  merlu cooked on the braise with sauce  pil-pil and a salad of cabbage and sunflower seeds (merlu, a flaky white fish, is THE fish of the Basque countries, often cooked “pil-pil”, in which the gelatinous fish juices are emulsified with garlic and olive oil);  yogurt ice-cream, with local yuzu confiture.  Wow!

The thing is, every dish was excellent.  The service was informal but well timed.  It would be difficult to find fault with any element of our meal.

The wine list is chock full of natural and organic wines at very generous prices. A bottle of winemaker Thierry Puzelat’s excellent Clos de Tue-Boeuf “Le Brin de Chèvre”, a natural white from the Touraine region, was only 45 euros.  And the 2nd bottle we took for home was only 25!

Pluviôse
Address:  3, Rue du 17 Pluviôse, 64500 Saint-Jean-de-Luz
Tel:  (011 33) 06 67 41 78 07
Reservations: very strongly advised as the restaurant only has 12 seats. No website, reservations by phone.

What a beautiful day in the sunny southwest of France!  Cool, misty morning, then sunny with clear skies, low humidity and not a cloud in the sky.  What else is there to do but to fire up the Weber kettle?  Locally, zuchini has been coming on strong for a few weeks, eggplants and peppers have just begun to arrive. On the fish monger’s stall, a beautiful clear-eye maigre, a firm-fleshed white fish from the Bay of Biscay.  Not exactly sure what maigre is called in English – Alain Davidson, in his seminal book “North Atlantic Seafood”, calls it Channel Bass or drum fish, neither of which have I ever heard.  In any event, it grilled up perfectly.  I served this with some leftover nettle pistou that I had in the freezer from a previous meal.  Yum!

Simple, quick and delicious, grilling on the plancha is perhaps THE arch-typical cooking technique of southwestern of France.  A plancha is a heavy, flat-topped grill, and in the southwest, one cooks most everything on it.  Sausages, whole fish, shellfish (if you see razor clams on the plancha on a menu, order it!), chicken, duck hearts, the possibilities are endless.  Cooking on the plancha is so popular that almost every kitchen supply store sells them, in gas, electric or even for your BBQ. And very often, when cooking something on the plancha, it is prepared “en persillade”, which means finished with garlic, parsley and lemon juice (and usually a sprinkling of piment d’Espelette).

For you culinary hair-splitters, a traditional persillade should be cooked with diced fat from  jambon de Bayonne. However, I think that using olive oil delivers a cleaner, purer flavor.

Here is one of my favorite plancha-persillade recipes, and also my favorite way to cook sardines – hold on, is that true?  There are so many great ways to cook sardines. Lets say that, along with escabèche, this is my favorite way to cook fresh sardines (as opposed to conserves) when they are in season (and yes, for you West Coast types, there is a season for Pacific sardines, usually mid summer). If you don’t have a flat-topped grill (who does?), a heavy cast iron skillet works great. I served these as a main course with roasted tomatoes and a green salad.

SARDINES A LA PLANCHA EN PERSILLADE

Ingredients:
Sardines, use only very fresh fish
Olive oil
Garlic
Italian parsley
Lemon Juice
Salt and pepper
Piment d’Espelette

1. Gut, clean and rinse the sardines well. Dry well on paper towels. Season with salt, pepper and piment d’Espelette.
   
2. Peel the garlic, remove the germ if necessary and chop very finely. Juice the lemon. Stem the parsley and chop roughly.
3. Heat olive oil to cover the bottom of a cast iron skillet until hot but not smoking.  Cook the sardines until very nicely browned on both sides and cooked through. If they are large, cover the skillet during browning so that the fish cook through.
   
4. Removed the cooked sardines and keep warm.  Off the heat, wipe out the skillet and then add fresh olive oil (this will be your sauce for the sardines, so be generous), heat gently then add the garlic.  Stir continuously until the garlic is lightly toasted. Add the chopped parsley, season with salt, pepper and piment d’Espelette then de-glaze with a generous amount of lemon juice.
   
5. Check the sauce seasoning, then pour over the sardines.  Serve immediately with lots of crusty bread.
   

Literally across the street from the Bay of Biscay, Le Socowa is the  French version of a beach front fish shack. With that in mind, you would expect that organization would not be a strong point, which it is not:  they almost never answer the phone if you call for a reservation and as far as I can tell, they don’t have a website.  Similarly, the service is a bit casual:  the waiters are clearly stretched to cover all the tables on the terrace when the sun is out, chatty and easy-going when the clouds scare away the tourist hoards. But where Le Socowa punches above its weight is in serving very fresh, very simply prepared seafood sourced that day from the fishing boats docked at the port of Ciboure, 5 minutes away.

Consider the meal we had there this spring.  With aperos, crisy croquettes a la morue, moist salt cod barely held together with béchamel sauce, then breaded and deep fried. To accompany a bottle of rosé from the Basque countries, a number of small plates including very fresh sardines grilled on the plancha with only a squeeze of lemon, slow simmered octopus with plenty of Spanish smoked paprika, and anchovy filets, house cured with white wine vinegar and olive oil.  For the main course, a “parillada de mer”, a seafood mixed grill including head on pink prawns, merluchon (the arch-typical white fish of the bay of Biscay, a relative of cod that I think corresponds to “hake” in English) and chiperons (tiny squids cooked whole), all served with saffron rice pilaf and broiled tomatoes. To finish, a plate of Basque sheep’s milk cheese.  All impeccably fresh and very very simple.

Le Socowa is the sort of simple, honest, regional restaurant it is a pleasure to run across when discovering a new city.

Le Socowa
Address: 45 Av. du Commandant Passicot, 64500 Ciboure, France
Tel:  (011 33) 05 24 33 37 05
Reservations: accepted but not really necessary outside the season…in July and August, why are you in a beach town anyway?

Just added to the menu at Café Presse this morning: Cold salad of marinated white beans, roasted Delicata squash and Brussel sprouts, black currants and kale-parsley pistou, served with your choice of grilled marinated Portobello mushroom VG or olive oil poached Alaskan Pollock filet.

Alaskan pollock filet, dredged in seasoned flour and pan sauteed, served on Ratatouille, a Provencal-style vegetable ragout made with peppers, onions, eggplant, summer squashes, tomato, garlic, basil and nicoise olives.

Pan roasted wild-caught Alaskan pollock filet served on a saute of heirloom summer squashes, chanterelle mushrooms and sweet onions, with a Basque cider-herb pan sauce

Washington coast rock fish filet served with roasted sweet pepper-orange coulis and a warm salad of nectarines, cherry tomatoes, sweet onions, corn and cilantro.

Still time to try this daily special which we will be offering this evening:

Seafood terrine of bay scallops, prawns and white fish, served with spicy sauce rémoulade and a salad of frisée lettuce, fennel, capers with cornichon vinaigrette

At Le Pichet and Café Presse, we love featuring lesser known, little fishes that are both sustainable and good for you. Pollock is one of these, a fish that never really gets the respect it deserves. A smaller cousin of Alaskan true cod, pollock in the past was often considered too small for filets and therefore ended up as processed fish sticks or surimi. Which is a shame because it is not only very tasty, with characteristics much like true cod, but it is also very environmentally friendly. Alaskan wild caught pollock is one of the most abundant wild seafood species in the world, it’s harvest is certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council and rated “Good” by the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch.

Now on the menu at Cafe Presse and featured at both Le Pichet and Café Presse during Wild-caught Alaskan Pollock week, February 28 to March 8, 2020.