Changing Chateauxs

One of the tapestries and the
Chateux de Villeveque

Most of the day was earmarked for biking to Chateaux Noiriex so that we could get in early and enjoy the hotel itself. For X-mas, Catherine wanted a night at a chateaux and so I found one outside of Angers that also had a Michelin star restaurant. Surprisingly there aren't that many Michelin star restaurants in the Loire, but this was one of them with a single star.

The bike ride itself was a little annoying. It started out nice as we had to make our way back over the river, but on the other side, we had to shortly get off the main Velo de Loire route and head north. This meant trying to piece together streets on Google Maps, which was only semi successful since the grades were inconsistent. One grade could either be a nice quiet paved road with hardly any traffic, or it could be a tractor path through a field. Another is either a busy a road with no shoulder or one that's much calmer and better for a bike.

We also ran into a little trouble with lunch. In France, restaurants are only open for lunch from noon to 2pm and really, they don't want you sitting down much after 1pm. So, we tried to find a restaurant around noon in one of the towns we went through. Using Google Maps, we kept striking out because either the restaurants were closed for the weekend, or just didn't exist. Mostly, these towns were crappy, small suburban towns with no character that apparently nobody stays in for anything commercial. Eventually, approaching 2pm, we made it to Villeveque and found a restaurant that was willing to sit us for a quick meal. It was a really cute place actually as it was inside an old water mill. Also, Catherine was very happy because she was able to get some duck confit and french fries to stave off the hangriness.

After lunch, we backtracked across the bridge to the Chateaux de Villeveque, which is actually just a small art/history museum containing the collection of somebody who died about 20 years ago. It is just a couple of rooms, but the highlight was the tapestries, which are in amazing condition compared to what we had seen before.

From the museum, we hopped on the bike for a quick 10 min ride to our hotel. We got hit by a flash of rain, but really, not a big deal. We'd been super lucky avoiding almost all the rain throughout the week that was swirling around us. It seemed that every morning it was sunny, but by afternoon, the clouds would roll in an threaten.

The hotel is definitely in the fancy category with a lot of staff, old school french decor and a terrace with a view of the valley that picks up the light both at dawn and dusk. Dinner itself was an experience. It's traditional white table cloth in the French style. Very different than the one stars in SF which are way more casual. However, the service was comical. It seemed like they really didn't have their shit together. They regularly forgot us throughout the dinner even though there were only about 15 tables and 10 servers, didn't give us the wine menu, but the piece the resistance was the desert course where they brought out a desert with candle and placed it in front of another couple, only to realize that they had served it to the wrong table. The whole dining room cracked up.

Though the service was bad, the food was well done, while a decent wine pairing. Probably not worth the price tag, but well done. I had a terrine of fois gras to start, followed by a white fish served over a shrimp paper that was very tasty. Then came the cheese cart, which was a unique experience for us. They come to your table with a large cart full of about 30 cheeses and you pick which ones you want for your cheese course and the waiter cuts off big hunks of each. I had seen a desert cart in Grenada Spain before but Catherine hadn't one before and spent a portion of the meal snooping at other tables to figure out how many cheeses were reasonable to order. She concluded that somewhere between 3 and 5 was right and spent the next half hour relishing her selection of everything from a mild, soft goat, to a funky Camembert style. Desert was a peach sorbet in a verbena syrup, but once again, the peaches in the Loire, just were not very flavorful.  The evening was definitely an experience that finished with stumbling up the stairs to our room.