It’s coffee and croissant time in Arcachon. We’re in the South of France, unmistakeably. When Parisians bring – prends – a plate to the table, they pronounce it as ‘pron’. Here, it’s ‘prenne’. Everyone in the street is tanned and fairly laid-back. It’s the south.
But Arcachon is also right on the Atlantic coast. There are pine trees, not palms. And the sun doesn’t always shine. That’s why, this morning, the shopkeepers and the strollers along the seafront are only fairly laid-back. No one is absolutely sure what the weather will do. And for now, it’s cloudy, and a little chilly.
If you were plonked down at random, in France, you’d know where you were by the way they do breakfast. In the Côte d’Azur waiters will be hosing down the pavements while the people in the cafés lounge around in sarongs and linen shirts; there will be a subdued stillness before the mad heat of the day breaks. Here in Arcachon, there are fleeces and yachting jackets over the shorts. The café and patisserie owners, so reliant on the spontaneous trade from Bordeaux, have long faces. It’s a European-Atlantic thing, whether you’re in La Rochelle, San Sebastian or Cascais. The weather doesn’t open up easily and neither do the people.
So we do what all sensible people do here: find the best patisserie in town – Martin Joel (44 Cours Lamarque de Plaisance) – and grab a cannelé. The cannelé is a gift of the Bordeaux people to the world. It’s a small cylindrical pastry with a gooey custard centre. It does that classic French patisserie thing of being sweet, yet somehow austere. I might compare this pastry to a particular kind of Frenchwoman, but that’s Eric’s job. Eric is a very heterosexual French chef. He compares most foodstuffs – or the good ones at least – to women. This is not typecasting, but faithful reporting.
The three of us, a Frenchman, an Italian and an Englishman, sit munching and sipping. The Frenchman is getting, truth be told, a little sentimental over the cannelé. Eric Chavot is an Arcachonnais who has been a chef in London for 20 years, earning two Michelin stars in the process. We’re staying at the house he has just bought down the road, but this is a rare visit, his first in nine months or so. The Italian is Giacomo, the photographer. He is worried about the light. And there’s me, the Englishman, who’s worried about how much food we are going to consume in the next 24 hours.
We’re here by coincidence and on a whim. Once upon a time I stayed a night in Arcachon on a drive back home from Spain and thought this is a bit of a well-kept secret – must revisit one day. Eric cooks at the Capital, my favourite London restaurant. He said: ‘OK, let’s go to Arcachon and eat some things.’ I said: ‘Fine. What shall we eat?’ ‘Darling,’ he said (Eric calls everyone darling) ‘we will eat everything.’
We wander down the street towards the front. We pause at La Belle-Iloise (19 Avenue Gambetta, labelleiloise.fr), a shop selling nothing but tinned fish – a real riot of tuna and sardines, all in wonderfully garish old-fashioned tins. Eric buys sardines, Giacomo takes some shots and, on the basis that I shouldn’t go longer than ten minutes during the day without eating, I munch a free sardine on a toasted baguette.
The sun, which has (in the wonderful old French phrase) been sulking, emerges from its cloudy boudoir and deigns to show itself to the promenaders of Arcachon. It’s an opening-up, a bit like the moment when your glass of claret decides it’s precisely warm and oxygenated enough and releases its flavours. The wide bay gets colour and depth, the waves sparkle, the yachts glint, the striped T-shirts are out, and the rich folks walking their dogs give you a formal nod as they pass. This is still the Atlantic. No one is letting it all hang out just yet. There’s a chill left in the breeze – just enough to make you feel a little hungry.
