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
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