South of france villa “Domaine des Dentelles”

Visit the Domaine des Dentelles by clicking here .

Domaine des Dentelles is a magnificent wine-making domaine tucked away in the heart of Provence. The estate is set in a mountain valley with panoramic views of Mont Ventoux, surrounded by olive groves, apricot orchards and lavender fields, yet only fifteen minutes from the market town of Vaison la Romaine. We believe this to be one of the most prestigious holiday destinations in Provence.

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Top places to eat black truffles in Provence.

Fall arrives quietly in Provence. Chanterelles  (or girolles) and then cèpes (porcini) are the first fungi to appear in the markets, and they fill us with anticipation of  another fungus—tuber melanosporum—the black truffle, still to come in the winter.

The northern part of the Vaucluse region of Provence  sells over 70% of French truffles, also known as « black diamonds. » The « Perigord » truffle is a botanical designation,  and the Perigord region  itself only produces about 15% of French truffles. In fact many of the so-called « Perigord » truffles originate in Provence.  Of course you will often find truffles on many restaurant menus here.

The following restaurants and bistros are among the very best places in France to enjoy this delicacy, and  they serve delicious food through-out the year as well. Please note that the black truffle is rare, and production varies season to season. Accordingly the price  is high, and fluctuates. Prices stated are an approximation.  Truffle season begins in restaurants in early December, and ends in March, though sometimes truffle dishes are available throughout the year. Truffles are best beginning in January.

When calling from outside France, eliminate the (0). When calling from inside France on a French phone, eliminate the « +33 » but include the « 0 ».

Be sure to check the restaurant’s closing days on their website.

La Beaugravière, Mondragon, Northern Vaucluse.

La Beaugravière, with its legendary Rhône wine list and Lucullian truffle menus, is a family run place in Mondragon, a non-descript town on the N7 highway north of Orange. The restaurant is simple and needs updating but the warm welcome, extraordinary Rhône wine list and over-the-top truffle meals more than make up for it. Chef Guy Julien and his wife Tina are charming, and fun.  There is a tree-shaded terrace for good weather dining and a large, welcoming fireplace for the fall and winter. The restaurant is very popular with locals, Americans and others in the wine business, and all wine lovers.

In winter the truffle menus attract clients from all over the world. Well-known American food writer and cooking instructor Patricia Wells brings her truffle cooking classes here so that they can experience the best.  Wine critic Robert Parker writes that this is his favorite restaurant in the south of France; he ate here several times a year when he was working in the Rhône Valley.  I have also run into the U.S. Ambassador to France here; his bulky black-garbed body guards looked so out of place hovering outside the restaurant in this tiny village.

You can have just one dish with truffles, or a four course menu with a starter and main course with truffles, or an entire tasting menu with truffles for only about €180. Truffles are served in very generous portions.

Though the restaurant specializes in Rhône wines and has the best Rhône list in the world, they have a very good selection of white Burgundies since these whites are well beloved by wine connaisseurs, and the Rhône doesn’t have a huge selection of outstanding whites.  Service is a bit old-fashioned and very good. A meal here is comfortable and relaxing. The restaurant has a small hotel with 4 simple rooms, in case you are tempted to over consume.

+33 (0)4 90 40 82 54

RN7 north of Orange

84430 Mondragon

Website

Regular Menus at €32, €52 and €120; surcharge for truffles

Truffle menus approximately €120– €180, plus à la carte truffle dishes

Closed Sunday evening & Monday all day

Menus

L’Oustalet, Center of village, Gigondas

Purchased and re-decorated in 2010 by the well-known Perrin Family of Château Beaucastel, L’Oustalet is a top place to eat in the northern Vaucluse region. It has a romantic setting in a nicely restored historic house in the village center; in good weather you can enjoy lunch or dinner outside under the plane trees; everyone adores the setting in the village square. Refined cuisine, good selection of local wines, and very good, polished service are the hallmarks of L’Oustalet.

Meals are beautifully served and the tables are lovely. Wine service is excellent and a menu paired with delicious wines is available. As is often the case in Provence, there are often only two selections for each course on menu, but you can order à la carte.  The truffle dishes are exquisite but not over-the-top. The restaurant bought the wine cellar of a bankrupt restaurant with a great “cave” in Châteauneuf-du-Pape so the wine selection is stellar.

Food and wines can be pricey. This place gets excellent press, partly because it belongs to the Perrins, though the restaurant is a favorite of many locals.

+33 (0)4 90 65 85 30

Place du Village, 84190 Gigondas

Website

Truffle menu 2017: menus are €78 to €136, plus à la carte; other menus without truffles are €42 and €46.

The family has elegant rooms in the village, please see here.  They also have a small wine bar, Nez! Bar à vins!  just behind L’Oustalet, which also serves bistro food at lunch. (€19.5 starter, main, dessert.) Evenings feature wine and tapas, occasionally some special truffle treats.

Open Monday-Friday. +33 (0)4 90 28 99 59

Chez Serge, Carpentras, northern Vaucluse.

Chez Serge, well-known for truffle meals, is a very good bistro in the historic part of Carpentras. Serge (Serge Ghoukassian, the owner) offers Provencal and Italian food, and is well known for his savory pizzas and truffles in season. Serge has an excellent wine list; he was given France’s highest wine related honor–the title Sommelier of the Year in 2008 –for his in-depth knowledge of French wines.  Chez Serge is known for its friendly and relaxed service and is also a great gathering place for local winemakers. There is a €17/€19 lunch offered every day, and it is always quite delicious.

On Thursday evenings during the winter months Chez Serge offers a “Wine and Truffle” event at  €97 (including wine); the evening includes an “apèro” in the courtyard, starting at 7:30 with the featured winemaker/owner who may come from all over the Rhône Valley, followed by an excellent multi-course dinner. I have personally enjoyed many of the wine and truffle evenings, including meeting winemakers from Condrieu, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and the Northern Rhône.

Check the website for these special dinners throughout the year. You can also get a great truffle omelette or truffle pasta meal at lunch or dinner for about €25; there is a €59 3-course truffle menu available at dinner. Of course Serge has a remarkable selection of wines at very reasonable prices. The food is always a very good value.

2017 Truffle Dinners

90, rue Cottier,  behind  “LA Poste”–the Post Office—in Carpentras. it can be difficult to find.

Park  at the Allée des Platanes, the big parking lot under the  plane trees; then look for the Poste

How to find

Website

+33 (0)4 90 63 21 24

Open daily, 7 days a week for lunch and dinner.

Locals’ Secret : Truffle Omelette at the Richerenches Truffle Market, Vaucluse, Northern Provence

Richerenches, in northern Provence, hosts the biggest truffle market in France; it is held on Saturday mornings, starting the third Saturday in November until the end of March. On many  of these Saturdays school associations in Richerenches  hold a « Truffle Omelette » lunch, for the amazing price of only €21 per person. It is held in a very nice, modern village meeting hall, with seating on long, communal tables, and provides a warm and welcoming atmosphere to meet the locals and enjoy the regional specialty. You can combine a visit to the market  with lunch afterwards.

Your meal will include an aperitif, 3 egg omelette with a generous 10 grams of truffle, salad, cheese, dessert, and all the Côtes du Rhône wine you can drink. Best to reserve in advance if you don’t want to be dissappointed.

I took well-known author Marjorie Williams,  of « Markets of Provence »,  to the market. She greatly enjoyed her visit here, topped off with the truffle lunch and serenaded by an oompah band. Read about her visit to the market and lunch.

Salles des Fêtes (located on the main street, next to L’Escapade cafe.)

84600  Richerenches

Reservations taken at Tourist Office :  +33 (0)4 90 28 05 34

Check the schedule for meals, and reserve early!

See DÉGUSTATION OMELETTES AUX TRUFFES 

O’Rabasse, Richerenches, Vaucluse (Northern Provence)

O’Rabasse (« rabasse » is the Provencal term for « truffle ») is a small, classy bistro located right in the epicenter of the truffle producing region—the  ancient Knights Templar village of Richerenches—which has the largest truffle market in France, and probably the largest in the world.  The young Belgian owners, installed in the village a few years ago, are full of smiles, passion and talent. This bistro is their dream, and it shows. The food is creative and very well prepared, fresh from the market, some of the best bistro food in the region. Service can be a bit casual at times but it doesn’t take away from the overall experience.

The wine list is local and well priced, with  Côtes-du-Rhône wines ranging from €20-€60 per bottle. A lunch menu with no choice  is 25 euros (3 courses) or 31 euros (3 courses plus dessert.) Evening meals, with choices, are 31 and 37 euros.

Truffle meals: a two course meal starts at €55 (week-day lunch)  and goes up to €65 and €80 for dinner. Check out the menus.

You can eat on the terrace in good weather,  or in front of the fireplace during colder months. O’Rabasse is  located inside the tiny, walled  medieval village. Park outside  the medieval village and walk in though the arched stone gate.

The restaurant received a Michelin « Bib Gourmand » in 2015, 2016 and 2017, indicating a great value–excellent food at a good price.

Website

Place de la  pompe

84600  Richerenches

+33(0)9 52  97 34 93

Closed Tuesday, Wednesday, and also Mondays in winter.

Written by Sharon Derham

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Thanksgiving is the favorite U.S. holiday of many Americans.

It was first celebrated in 1621 by Native Americans and Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts to give thanks for the harvest from the preceding year. It is a secular holiday, celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November by all Americans, each adding their special dishes depending on their state and their cultural origin. It is the busiest travel time of the year, since everything gets packed into just the Wednesday prior to the Thursday feast plus the week-end as families and friends travel to get together for the celebration.

Americans in Provence go to great lengths to celebrate the holiday here. Popular blogger Julie Mautner of ProvencePost.com writes about Francophile Stephanie Fray’s annual Thanksgiving feast in Provence.

Preparing a large Thanksgiving feast is strenuous enough for any home cook, but cooking for 35 serious foodies in an unfamiliar kitchen in a foreign country requires supersized savoir faire.

Then again, Stephanie Fray is hardly your typical home cook. As the head of Sophie + Faulkner in Paris and Conundrum in the US, she handles strategy and communications for a wide range of clients including the annual New York Culinary Experience, a two-day event sponsored by New York magazine featuring hands-on cooking classes with 30 top chefs.

Growing up in Brooklyn and Westchester County, New York, Fray came from a family “that thought nothing of driving two hours for the perfect pizza.” Today she’s a passionate cook and the kind of food lover who, if she finds herself with a few hours to kill in Paris or elsewhere in France, thinks nothing of dropping into a Michelin three-star restaurant and grabbing a last-minute table. Chefs often come out of the kitchen to see who the long-haired American walk-in is…the one enjoying the eight-course dégustation with wines, happily alone at a two-top, texting away on her phone.

A long-time Francophile, Fray keeps an apartment in Paris and pops down to Provence any chance she gets. For the last seven years, she has rented a house at holiday time and decided to host Thanksgiving for small group of friends, both French and expat. In 2015, she chose a gorgeous mas in the village of Eygalières, loaded it up with friends for the weekend, and set out to prepare a Franco/American feast for pretty much anyone who wanted to come. Even after the first bottle of Champagne was opened around 7:30 p.m., Fray was fielding phone calls and texts, telling friends, “Of course, bring anyone you want!”

The menu? Five different hot hors d’oeuvres, two huge turkeys and two types of stuffing, homemade cranberry sauce and gravy, three veg dishes (Brussels sprouts with pistachios, speck, shallots, and lemon; sautéed cauliflower with currants; and roasted purple, fingerling, and sweet potatoes with pepper and onion), Gruyère popovers, a cheese course of six varieties and, finally, three desserts.

The first order of business was the turkey, which Fray had ordered in Provence back in September. Since turkeys in France aren’t fattened until Christmas, Fray had to find a farmer who was willing to have two big ones ready, freshly killed and plucked in time. She picked them up a few days in advance, whacked off the heads, and popped them into their brine. On that same trip, Fray had also begun sourcing wines, visiting her favorite domaines in Provence and storing bottles with friends.

Before heading back to France in mid-November, Fray packed and shipped supplies from New York: her brine mix, her favorite knife, a hand mixer, popopver pans, disposable quart containers, foil catering pans, and other disposables hard to find in Provence.

Upon arriving in Paris, she borrowed a membership card and made a beeline for Metro, a large wholesale grocery chain. There she bought extra plates, glasses, cutlery, and staples, to be driven down to Provence with friends. She also tasted her way through a large number of small batch, mostly organic labels at Table à Côté, the wine shop owned by Bruno Verjus, who also has the restaurant Table. “This was just after the Paris attacks,” Stephanie says, “and the stores were really hurting. I wanted to do as much of my shopping there as possible.”

Once she was settled in Provence (the TGV train from Paris to Avignon takes less than three hours), Fray set out to finish her shopping, a four-day treasure hunt. From markets and shops in Avignon, Cavaillon, St. Rémy, and Arles, she plucked sausages, cheeses, chocolates, Bordier butter, fresh cream, cèpes, girolles, chanterelles, fleur de sel, estate-bottled olive oils, vinegar, eggs, vegetables, fruit, spices, golden raisins, and much more. Then it was off to the boulangeries to sample breads, while fresh herbs were cut from a friend’s garden. Cranberries were ordered four days ahead from the épicerie in the town of Eygalières. She bought six types of mushrooms, five types of apples, three different potatoes, and seven different breads, just to be sure.

“When you don’t actually live somewhere,” she explains, “you don’t know what things taste like at that time of year. I wanted to sample all the fresh ingredients first.”

Fray’s old friend Gillian Duffy, a food writer for New York and Departures magazines, who lives 90 minutes away in the Var, signed on to make the desserts: deep dish apple pie, sweet potato cake topped with caramelized apples, and ginger pumpkin pie, all served with crème fraîche.

“Of course, I ran into a few problems,” Duffy reports. “First, it’s impossible to find American-style pie pans with a lip; there are lots of tart pans around, but they’re too big in diameter. I meant to bring foil pans with me from New York, but with the hurricane, it all became too much! Secondly, it’s hard to find baking soda and baking powder, at least in shops around our village in the Var. But I did find self-rising flour, which worked brilliantly as it has the leavening agent added.

“Unlike most people who buy prepared pastry in supermarkets,” Duffy continues, “I like to make my own pastry for Thanksgiving pies, combining butter and lard for a flakier crust. I finally found lard at the grocery Le Clerc, but had to ask four people where it was. Obviously lard is not common in Provence!”

For many of the French guests at the table, this was their first Thanksgiving, and certain dishes—like stuffing—were completely new. “This is the first time I eat red fruit jam with turkey,” reports local sculptor Stephane Guiran. “I like it! I liked all the different accents, too, particularly the Scottish accent of David Duffy! It was a great moment: warm atmosphere, full of life, and great food. It reminded me of family Christmas dinner. And because the story of Thanksgiving was read, it was a cultural evening, too!”

Another first-timer was St. Rémy Tourist Office president Philippe Goninet. “After watching so many ‘Merci Donnant’ (i.e. Thanksgiving)  scenes in movies, it was wonderful to be part of one!” he reports. “For the French, it’s unusual to serve all the foods at once, rather than in courses, so that was new, and we loved it. I can’t wait for this year!”

With leftover supplies and new cookware safely stashed in a friend’s Provence garage—and the same mas rented again for a week this month–Fray is already deep into planning for her 2016 feast.  Key to pulling off a traditional meal in a foreign country, she says, is to start early, ship what’s feasible, use what’s at hand, and be very willing to substitute. And most of all, hang loose. “There are always little things forgotten,” she says, “like the Parmesan meant for the roasted potatoes. But what matters is friends around the table. That’s what I care about most. I’d do this every week if I could.”

Julie has suggestions for great ways to spend your Thanksgiving in France this year, click here.

  Article submitted by: Julie Mautner

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