So, the young TE Lawrence and his friend Scroggs strode past Mère Poulard with a “We both decided to leave the omelettes and do a little serious work while there…”
Not me. I am a professional tourist so I can hardly not visit a place with form as long as this. The restaurant has been here, serving its omelettes too illustrious guest, in the same way, for more than a century.
Mère Poulard’s restaurant (and small hotel) opened in 1888 - coincidentally the year of TE Lawrence’s birth - and was already well known to Parisian and English holidaymakers staying in the burgeoning resort towns like Dinard farther along the Brittany coast. Annette Poulard was originally chef for historical architect Edouard Courroyer, who was in Mont St Michel from 1873 on a commission to restore Mont St Michel for the French Department of Culture.
The restaurant is extremely busy when I arrive, but clearly they do a quick trade and I am told the queue will be just a few minutes – which is fortunate as it turns out, because while you wait you can see the omelettes cooking. They are prepared in the same fashion used by Mère Poulard herself, in copper pans over an open fire. A couple of men, garbed in scarlet, are hard at work around the oven, working in harmony – in such harmony that the apprentice even seems to mix the batter in time with an imaginary beat.
In just a few minutes I’m into the dining room. And the fascination and oddity of the Mont is right there to be seen. The dining room has been built right up to the rock itself, literally tacked on. An ecclesiastical arch stands before a section of blackened granite. Even so, with its tall windows, mirrors and scarlet décor, the dining room is light and bright. The walls are smothered with a record the restaurant’s history - posters exhorting Edwardian travellers to visit the region and, looking closer, photographs of their famous guests: Monet, André Malraux, Jean Cocteau.
The decorative theme, an emphatic red, extends to the table-cloths - white linen striped with scarlet – to the red roses on the tables and to the red waiters’ shirts. And to the drink I order: Cidre Rosé de Mère Poulard. They have their own house cider here, a rosé version of Brittany’s brut drink, which turns out quite tart and strikingly fruity.
In all of this, there is just one person dressed as inappropriately as me in my (dark green) cycle gear. A man in a Brazilian national football shirt (and shorts and trainers, on a grimly cold day), which stands out like a lemon in a punnet of strawberries. Garish yellow makes even scarlet blush.
There’s an upbeat air to the place. The chatter of the diners sitting within inches of one another and the distant clatter of the kitchen are overlain periodically with the switch and tick of omelette batter being whisked in a zinc bowl.
Turns out the famous visitors were not just French – among them have been Generals Patten and Montgomery, Lindbergh the pilot, Hemingway and Trotsky – really?
Strangely, a patrol of soldiers, fully tooled up, passes on the street, their camouflage clothing looking strange among the bright colours of rain-wear. They appear as odd as a lion moving through a herd of nonchalant zebra. It makes me wonder what on earth are they expecting?
My omelette appears. Slid onto a square plate from its copper frying pan. Accompanied by mushrooms in a poele, a smaller copper frying pan.
The burnished colour of the pan and omelette - offset nicely by the tablecloth - looks magnificent. It is outrageously fluffy, like a vast smiling clam, lips spilling luscious eggy froth. It seems almost sad to cut into something so perfectly of its moment, but hey, I ordered it to eat, so I shall. It’s the fluffiest omelette I’ve ever had and among the tastiest.
I’m not looking around much at the moment, but quite a few political figures have visited - Maggie Thatcher, Francoises Mitterand and Hollande. Oh, and Woody Allen too.
A chatter is disturbed as a rumble rises beyond the dining room. Urgency in the kitchen, shouts and short tempers. It is the height of the lunchtime trade I guess.
On the way out I spot another photograph. Old too. Edward VII. He visited in 1904, just two years before even the young Lawrence came by.
Mère Poulard is a whole industry on the Mont nowadays. You can even buy sablés biscuits in her name, along with ‘Les Cookies du Mont St Michel.’ And, unsurprisingly it is phantasmagorically expensive, at 48 euros just for the omelette and a cider. (That’s probably another reason that two 18 year olds decided not to partake).
On which, now for the Mont itself – I have serious work to do… Read on…