Well fed and exercised occasional #1: Chamonix, les Vielles Luges

Chamonix is a funny place--a bit like the girl with the curl, when it's mediocre or bad, then it's very very very bad: expensive and hassle-filled and difficult and just not a holiday.  But when it's good, it's the best in the world bar none (in my admittedly non-comprehensive experience) and the hassle and expense either dissipates or seems sooo worth it.  That's as true of the skiing as anything else, including restaurants.  And one of the things that make the difference seems to be insider or local knowledge... the other seems to be luck.

So for what it's worth to those gastroramblers who also ski, it's worth mentioning les Vielles Luges ("the old sleds"), a shack on the side of the mountain over les Houches, just down the valley.  I went there as part of a ski group, and it's worth saying the meal was stellar.  It wasn't complex, and it wasn't subtle, but for a hard-pounding exercise day on the hill, it was exactly the right thing.

There were no shortage of good options, but the ski guides recommended the diots and farçon and then proceeded to order same themselves, which is always a good sign.

Diots were smoked sausages--but the texture and taste were extraordinary: normal sausage runs the gamut from the fine-grind of the sort Café Anglais serves as a pike boudin through the coarse meatiness of a good kielbasa, to the density of a heavy savoyard salami...this sausage was extraordinary in that it hit the texture of a very tender long-cooked pork steak, as a consistent texture from one end of the sausage to the other, without gristle or chunk...just smooth smoky meaty wonderful.  The smokiness of the flavour matched the smokiness of a woodfire... I never did find out if there was a woodfire in the restaurant, though it does seem the sort of place that would have one, but the flavour came through wonderfully.  The Hungry Skier gives them a plug, and I have no idea whether the sort that VL does are available at market.

Farçon was a sort of potato-bacon cake with prunes, cooked, gelled and refried in butter to brown it.  Nuff said: you can't serve something like diots with a salad on the side, can you?

Of course, I did this while skiing: while that is exercise--and hard exercise when done right--it's not something Mrs enjoys, so she had to make do with photos of the meal via blackberry, or so I thought at the time.  But while researching this short post, I now realise that one branch of the famous GR5 hiking trail marches right through the VL's patio...

We're now booked for a version of Offa's lunch (which we've been talking about for months) and will march off in a few weeks on a 5½day version.  We've already had fate intervene when our first night's dinner and first night's bunk, the Crown at Whitebrook, closed suddenly.  But I have great faith we'll make a go of this hike in Wales... there's a number of other excellent restaurants all in a row with 15-20 miles between them.  But if thinking about a 2014 or 2015 longer distance multi-day hike, well, we'll see... and maybe Mrs will see the diots first-hand after all.

http://www.lesvieillesluges.com/restaurant-de-charme.html

White Oak (Cookham) via Thames Path

Restaurant: White Oak
Trail: Thames Path National Trail  map printed from web

• Eating: good, and stunning value-- you can see why they got their bib.  We had celebrated our 10th anniversary together the night before at Launceston Place (one of the best in London) which was spectacular; White Oak isn't in that bracket, but there's a lot of places where the lunch after a dinner like that would leave you with whiplash of the palate... White Oak managed to stand up.
• Hiking: 10.43mi, 4hr00mins exactly on the march, very flat and would have been difficult to lose the trail since it follows the river so closely
• Wildlife spotted: thin, really-- not much at all until getting very close to Cookham, with one exception (more on that later)
• Nature's bounty: thin on this particular path, and although it was December, it wouldn't have been better any other time of the year.
• Muddy boots factor: bit of mud, but not very much considering it's soggy wintertime.
• Muddy boots tolerance: very laid back place-- although we did change into clean shoes just outside (bench helpfully placed by the door), I can't help feeling they wouldn't have been that worried if we had shown up straight from trail.

This blog is dedicated to the rural idyll and the beasts that live there, whether on the wing or on the hoof or on the plate.  So, gentle reader, it is with heavy heart that I must report a planning error on our part-- on this particular walk, the first 5/6ths of the walk were seriously lacking in rural idyll.  Mrs. grew up in rural and remote parts, and I grew up in a ex-urb of a medium-sized city, and where we now live is full urban central: we both agree that it makes sense to go full urban or full rural, but that some sort of halfway compromise is a muddle that doesn't have the benefit of either yet has the annoyances of both.  And that is precisely what we found ourselves walking through for the most part.  Unusually, we're doing this one twice: once with Mr. and Mrs., then a second time with friends--while we did get a good lunch the first time, we certainly didn't get the best of the hike.

Our first shot at it had started pretty well-- our train was at a civilised hour of 9:21 (change at Slough) and rolled into Windsor central at 9:53, along with a lot of people who looked like tourists: bumbags around their waists, guidebooks in multiple languages.  And they're thick on the ground--we follow them to the front of the train station, which is set up as a shopping arcade... they seem to be heading for the castle, and we're a bit disoriented even though we saw the path itself from the train as we rolled in, but being a riverside path, our innate sense of direction kicks in ("river is likely to be downhill") and we find our way onto a pedestrian stone bridge with lots of people on it taking each other's pictures.  Turn left off the bridge, find river and start hiking into the countryside... simple? 

Well, sort of.  The meadow where we started had bona fide mud and bona fide ducks, but you could hear the A332 and the A309 in the distance, a constant hum that reminds you how close you are to Windsor which is--despite the twee and tourists--a good-sized city.  We marched and marched: even though it was now midmorning, the early December sun never got very high in the sky.  After a few miles, the path walked us past Boveney Church, which was firmly shut, but interesting from the outside, a fascinating bit of history and an excuse to take a little sit-down.  It broke up the walk a bit, and was a helpful reminder that this is countryside rather than suburb, particularly as the noise of the A308 was just starting to be drowned out by the noise from the M4 freeway.  Just past the church, we rounded Eton Dorney, a man-made pseudo-lake where the rowing events at the Olympics were held.  From the path, you could just about see the paddlers pounding up and down the water, but you had a rather better view of the construction machines that were reshaping the lake, or of the large-ish homes on the far side of the river.  Yet despite being pleasant, the scrub woods on our side of the river and the well-kept houses on the other side, the hum of the roads meant you never ~felt~ like you were out in the countryside... it was always suburb with freeway.  That's not to say that suburban life is entirely ugly: the path ran underneath the M4 (surprisingly, directly under the bridge is one of the quieter bits of the path) and the view of the bones of the bridge is wonderfully modernist and has a certain beauty.  The water was high as well after a fair bit of rain, and some of the docks along the river were under water.

As we passed under the highway bridge, we were watching closely to see where the river crossings were-- the far bank of the river is Bray, famed in song and story among gluttons.  Given that we've got a reservation elsewhere, we weren't planning to eat in Bray, but with so many really really good restaurants in town, even popping in for a pint coffee as mid-journey rest seems sure to be worthwhile: you can't serve bad food with neighbours like that, after all.  The horror of it was, though, that our printed Google maps weren't at a resolution to show any footbridges, and we weren't going to use the M4 bridge (you'd have to run across pretty fast).  I had a poke around at the lock-keeper's islet at Pigeonfall Eyot hoping for a better crossing, but none to be had there (and as the lock-keeper spotted me, I had to pretend I was looking at his flood-highwater-mark thing).  As it turned out, the only way across would have been to ford it.  I had brought newly-purchased knee-high wellies (after the H&F mudbath, that was £26 well spent) but the river looked deeper than that and it was flowing too fast for a swim.  Which is a shame as Mrs. kept telling me there wasn't another pub before lunch (unusually: normally she's trying to drag me out of the pub) but any side-trip would have been miles out of the way for lack of any foot-bridge.  Surely some enterprising local kid with a canoe will spot the revenue opportunity?

We marched on, through undifferentiated scrub on our side of the river, and suburban homes (what in Canada would be called backsplit ranch-style, but I'm sure whatever is the English English term sounds better) on the far bank.  Mrs is now properly awake, and bemoaning the fact that so far, nothing much has happened-- and she's right, it's been a bit of a dull walk so far, with the annoying buzz of traffic (by now the M4 is fading into the distance but the A4 is becoming louder) there to remind us that there's been no compensating amusements.  And we are just coming up on the apparently famous rail bridge (an I.K.Brunel engineering marvel) through Maidenhead, we heard what sounded like the whistle of a steam train... and sure enough, one chugged overhead just as we were saying to each other "that sounds like..." when we were near enough to see the steam-train enthusiasts in the carriages (with sandwiches).  We took this as a good omen that our luck would change.  At some point.

Maidenhead town was not going to be that point, though.  We crossed on the A4 bridge, on the lookout for a pub since it was well time for a sitdown, but none to be.  As we didn't get near the centre of Maidenhead, I can't say whether it's pleasant or not: it doesn't get the same butt-of-jokes treatment that Slough does, but we were quite ready to stop in a bogus-Tudor bar and couldn't find one (Betjeman didn't include any directions or reviews in the poem, and in fairness probably didn't write the poem as a travelogue).  The bit we marched past had its interesting points (one house looked like it had been built as a Victorian astrological observatory) but really, it was a suburban road with the river constrained by a concrete jetty, for a couple of miles.  There was even CCTV, and if you need a hint that your rural ramble has taken a decidedly non-rural turn, then CCTV is a pretty big clue.  But just North of Glen Island, the road drifts left and the river leans right, and as you walk away from the road, the far bank of the river rises as bluffs that block out the A4 noise.... and wonders, you can just about hear the countryside exhale.  We've crossed the watershed, and found real rural at last.  

Practically the first thing we came upon was an older couple with binos and wrapped up against the cold, watching the rather large congregation of grebes on the line of posts by the weir at Glen Island on the far side of the river.  We like twitchers (though I myself don't know a hawk from a henshaw) and Mrs. is often shameless about rocking up to them and asking what they're gawping at.  In this case, the couple were counting the grebes on the posts, something the often do and sometimes wager on.  We chatted a bit, they were also heading off to a pub lunch... though we never found out what was riding on the bet, nor what the large number of grebes had won for the grebe-counters (dessert? a better pub?).  As we pushed off, a henshaw (or something) was circling over in an odd way-- Mrs. snapped it, and since her camera is better than either of our eyesight, it was only once home that we noticed a mouse-sized-and-shaped blur in the bird's claws.  The annoying bit is that Mrs. had only just adjusted the setting of the camera to take less detailed photos so it didn't fill up the memory card so quickly... or it would have been a remarkable sighting.

The bluffs on the far side now start giving us glimpses of Cliveden, though the sort of entertainments that were on offer in 1963 (and slightly primly alluded to by their own site, using a bit of Andrew Marr-narrated history) were either not on offer or we need to reset the camera to taking sharper pix for more than just wildlife photography.  After all too short a countryside ramble, we turn inland and walk across into Cookham village and lunch.

We returned a few weeks later with countryside friends who had driven in from the hinterland of Oxford for another lunch later-- we did try to do some hiking with them, but this was during the wet times between Christmas and New Year, when the Thames was over it's banks and flooded some of the riverside towns-- fortunately not Cookham, but the Thames Path, which we were hoping to explore on the far (West) side of the village, was a matter for hip-waders rather than wellies.  We did a circuit around town instead, and got back to the restaurant as it was starting to rain again.

And the food?  They deserve their bib--dishes were consistently interesting, clearly they're having fun playing around with things.  And the set menu is value of the sort that doesn't exist many places any more-- it tends not to be their most spectacular items on the menu (if going back, we'd both order from the main list) but it was certainly good quality and interesting.  From the evidence of our two meals there, the White Oak also seem to be on a crusade to reclaim ragù bolognese for the dining classes from the open-the-can school of cuisine that association with Spag Bol has been relegated it to.  There was an interesting crab and greens starter for Mrs. off the main menu and a chorizo salad on the £15 set which was tasty but the crab was a clear winner.  The wine list proclaims that it's all sourced from Corney's and that's the truth of it, but not badly chosen from their fairly large list and lots by the glass so we went through and had a glass of this and a glass of that (to follow the glass of fizz which Mrs. is working hard to turn into an obligatory part of the arrival ceremony at gastrorambling destinations).  For mains, the menu that day had a duck breast plate which was good, but this was where the bolognese came into its own: on one visit it was with game, on another with more domestic meats, in each case over pasta and very, well, toothsome in a way that the standard from-the-can that gets poured over supermarket hamburger and called bologese is not.  After a pause, Mrs. was uncharacteristically eyeing the dessert off the set, a rice pudding, which thoughtfully came with two spoons...I've never been that much of a fan, but it was smooth and sweet and gently spiced and we had done a lot of hiking and was a very pleasant end.  While there wasn't anything that blew our socks off the way that some of the dishes we've described in these pages have done, everything, even the £15 menu items, were done with thought and attention to making it something worth thinking about while you're eating it.  I do hope they're managing to make money on those £15's, as it's not just a loss leader to get people through the door... though I imagine there's some who would see it as a place too fancy if they didn't have that option.

From the restaurant, it was a short walk to the train station (one small train an hour) which had the one of the simplest route maps I've ever seen-- no real way to jump the wrong train here.  With dusk just gathering, we snoozed comfortably back to London.




Next month: winter warming with a Jancis-approved wine list at The Harrow, Bedwyn...we hope, since I've been a bit disorganised with the reservation.

Other people's reviews (historical): 
http://www.fine-dining-guide.com/the-white-oak-restaurant-review-cookham-june-2012
http://www.maidenhead-advertiser.co.uk/News/Areas/Cookhams/REVIEW-The-White-Oak-in-Cookham-25012012.htm


The info:

• Train: £7.15 each, day return, from zone 2 boundry to Cookham, even though our jump-off point was Eton&Windsor Central.  We mentioned "Thames Path" and they did exactly as previous, return from Cookham.  I think we saved a quid or two as Mrs was also on a pass for Central London so also paid only for the zone 2 boundry rather than London terminals
• Map: off the web, printed--easy to follow
• Second Brek: Caffe Nero Paddington, £7.90
• Carbohydrate Energy Drink on trail: nuffink, at all.  Not best pleased about it either.
• Meal: trailhead aperitifs (pint of Abbot at £3.30 and prosecco at £5.50) and then a three-course "Auberge" prix fixé at £15 (yes, that's all three courses) and from the carte, crab starter at £9 and a bolognaise at £16, with three 250ml carafes of wine at 9 and 6 and 8.40 made a total of £72.20 and tip of £8.66 makes £80.86

All in cost: £103.06, which is more like it, really-- as much as we like going large at Launceston Place or Hand&Flower, you can't do that every day (despite someone lobbying in favour of...) and this meal hit the Gastrorambling sweet spot exactly.

[I've finally gotten the GPS thing to be able to download a full hike into Google Earth and produce an image... but the hike was so very suburban I'm not sure I have the heart to download it for display]