The Auberge de la Sélune, which takes its name from the river passing at the end of its garden, sits in a series of traditional stone buildings – with some glass additions - in the oldest section of the town of Ducey les Chéris. As I mention elsewhere I took a walk around the area, partly to explore but mainly in an attempt to rid myself of a muscular weirdness brought on by four days of fairly rigorous cycling – basically it felt as though there was an angry octopus crawling around under my skin. On my walk I could be found alternately standing, staring vacantly in my physical exhaustion, and rolling my shoulders like a boxer, in an attempt to salve the octopus.
But eventually dinner calls, so I return to the Auberge, take a seat on a terrace surrounded by roses, and order a beer - an artisanal ‘Ombrée’, meaning shaded, or tinted. And I consider this tour and its comedy of dinners…
Dinner at the Auberge will be unlike my lovely first evening in Lyon la Forêt, where life veered out of control because of the setting: with swing doors flying around my ears, and a certain bumptious ‘energy’ from the kitchen – were they all football supporters in there, communicating at high volume? Or was a fight about to break out over the celery? The Auberge on the other hand is far too elegant to be funny, and this time the irony is all internal. The people around me have absolutely no idea of the torture I am enduring. I may look like a normal man having a drink on a terrace, but my imaginary octopus is sending me bonkers…
I want to leap up and slap myself, touch my toes like a maniac…. or do weird-looking stretches, lots of them, at speed… but I can’t possibly do that here. These people really haven’t come to enjoy a summer’s evening on a sublime riverfront to be confronted by a man doing physical jerks. So I stretch my aberrant muscles as subtly as I can, straining my arms beneath the table one moment and unobtrusively rolling my shoulders the next, or leaning forward, supposedly reading my book intently but surreptitiously relieving my lower back... And then my legs kick off. What the hell am I supposed to do? Star jumps in the rose arbour?
So it’s a relief to be called through, with the prospect of a gastronomic excursion to take my mind off the wandering octopus… Naturally I perform a Ministry of Silly Walks on my way, as subtly as I can – and hey, which of the elegant diners around me ever realised I am clenching like a good ‘un…?
And I arrive in the dining room which, as it turns out, set under a glass roof, is almost not a room at all – its glass doors are folded back, so we are almost in the garden, the late evening sunlight bouncing golden off the stone walls, leaves and the flowers around us.
In just a few minutes an amuse bouche arrives: in my case on a super-heated stone which itself sits on a bed of seashells, a tiny filet of fish with a garnish so delicate – miniature flowers in a network of gossamer greenery – that a single breath might blow it away.
There is no octopus on the menu as it turns out (my small plan for vengeance), but given that the sea is just a few miles away there are plenty of other marine options. So I choose another fish dish as a starter: two more extremely neat filet-lets – one from the river (I didn’t catch the name) and a sardine from the sea, cured in a lime escabèche. They are beautifully laid out, and complex on inter-connecting scales of taste and texture – a tangy lime sauce plays off the saltiness of the sardine, and the luxurious slickness of the freshwater fish juxta-poses the crunch of tiny sections of radish and carrot. There’s a whole party going on there, and all in miniature - tiny cucumbers, neatly sliced broad beans and small sections of samphire. And finally, some wild fennel and a filigree of dill.
As I pause between courses, I find myself slipping back into that delicious post-exercise daze, slack jawed and staring obliviously. Into the garden, where the golden light is so rich it appears almost molten, ready to drip. I recall what I have been told about the Auberge. The owner is fourth generation in the area – and his father, a chef, reclaimed a number of riverfront buildings in 1982, turning them into the Auberge. There he cooked traditional French cuisine for nearly thirty years. He died in his kitchen apparently. The current owner, after working in computer science, took over in 2011.
My reverie is interrupted. Weirdly, a man dressed in black sprints across the garden. What’s up? Is he about to slake a volcanic mouthful of chilli by diving headlong into the river? Or is he being attacked by the hirondelles? Perhaps he’s a chef: am I witnessing a fennel emergency…?
My main course is duck. A heartier affair, but still delicate. It’s clear that imaginative miniaturism is one of the chef’s leading themes. The sliced breast comes with a small bath of red wine sauce laced with cayenne pepper, canelle (cinnamon) and microscopic shreds of hot pepper that tingle on the tongue. All this is accompanied by an array of tiny carrots, cooked in maple syrup and more cayenne, interspersed with raspberries and laid on a bed of carrot puree. It’s a culinary swatch of red and orange.
It occurs to me that all this concentration, my close study of itsy-bitsy gastronomy, might just have released me from the octopus… But no sooner is it remembered than it returns, tentacles insinuating their way across my shoulders. I shudder, and shrug as subtly as I can.
To accompany my last course I am recommended a glass of local cider. It is a golden colour, like the sunlight just departed from the garden, and very fruity.
The tarte tatin is counter-intuitive, or perhaps make that revolutionary … This is apple country, of course, but it has been turned over. That’s not to say it’s a turnover, but it’s been deconstructed and presented the other way up… its fan of apple slices lying beneath with its pastry on top. The regular tastes, however, prevail, reliably tart and sweet – of apple, glazed, and pastry part crisp and part steeped in sugar. And there is a honey and apple sorbet, in a miniature cone. Yes, cider was the right order.
And with that I slide down into my chair, like the watch-faces in Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory, physically exhausted but pleasantly replete. And I realise that I no longer have the urge to get up and leap about, to perform inappropriate gymnastics in the dining room – no cartwheels between the tables, nor a flick-flack over my chair back. The octopus has been banished and the serenity of the dining room is assured.
