La Petite Charlotte
SOME plans were never meant to be realised. Drawing up lists for parties, for example, uses up so much nervous anticipa- tion, boredom ('Who do we know who we don't know?' as the couple, guest list in hand, ask of each other in The History Man) and social zeal that there's none left for actually giving the party. It's not quite a question of to travel hopefully being better than to arrive — though there is that — but that merely thinking of travelling hopefully can make one realise it would be better still never to have set off.
My day trip to France wasn't quite of that order. But it was so long in the plan- ning, I should have known 1 could never have been trusted with the actual event, if event it was to be. The project was born in the early days of last summer. It was to take place in August, and the intervening months were spent in contemplation of the Guide Michelin and the Collins Euro Atlas.
Then, a day before we were to set sail, a telephone call came from the BBC saying that Chris Dunkley had fallen off his motorbike on his way to Broadcasting House and . . . it's a long and improbable story but somehow this accident led to the cancelling of the day trip to France. My organisational skills being of a theoretical rather than practical nature, it was only last week that it managed to find itself reinstat- ed in my calendar. 1992, or rather 1993 as it turned out to mean, having happened in the meantime, I did not take the precaution of sticking my passport in my bag. No more boundaries, I thought. We are all Europeans now, I thought. The lady at the Stena Sealink booth at Dover didn't think so. I needed a passport, so I had, in somewhat undignified a fashion, to race across Dover (heeding AA signs marking 'The White Cliffs Expe- rience') to the post office and get a British Excursion Document, by which time we had missed the 11.30 crossing, and thus the promise of lunch in France. In fact, I'd forgotten about the time difference, so could at least console myself with the fact that we'd have been too late for lunch even if we'd got on the right boat.
The next, or rather earlier but I didn't discover it till later, mistake was to have set off from Dover in the first place, for this tends to mean you end up in Calais. Since we were heading for Le Touquet, the sensi- ble thing would have been to go to Folke- stone and thence to Boulogne. But the drive's not too bad, and we arrived in Le Touquet, once the gamblers' paradise and now the golfers', in time for a long, exhausting even, walk through the place before an early dinner, which only just escaped being high tea, before driving back.
Much depended on dinner: but where to eat? After tortured deliberation, I set myself against temptation in the form of a luscious but FF750 menu at Flavio, near the Westminster hotel, and went, instead, for the FF85 menu at La Petite Charlotte, working on the premise that while we have our great and expensive French restaurants here in England, what we don't have are those small, family-run, respectable restau- rants that line the streets of provincial France. Of course, they are never as good as Francophiles (of which I do not count myself) and other sentimental voyagers like to believe.
First courses of squid in a sweet, garlic- soused, creamy seafood sauce, pink as coral, and, an old favourite of mine, her- ring, salty and glistening, a silvery, rosy tan, on a plate of sliced boiled potatoes chopped with onion, were good enough to make us congratulate ourselves on having found this little place. As the meal pro- gressed our smugness receded. The assiette of fish — cod, squid, hake, prawn steamed and piled on juliennes of cour- gette and carrot and lapped about with its fumet de crabes, was no more than fine. But the seafood gratin, a thin milky soup in which swam minced squid, tiny brown shrimps and unamalgamated lumps of roux, wasn't even that — though it is quite enjoyable to see the French make as much of a hash of things as we do. To end we had cheese (kept and killed in the fridge) and a passion fruit bavarois which came with a far too sugary strawberry coulis.
It was not a dinner we could really have congratulated ourselves on having, but except for the disgrace of the gratin we could not — at FF230 including a carafe of drinkable wine, coffee and service — com- plain either.
La Petite Charlotte; 35 rue St Jean, 62520 Le Touquet, tel.• 21 05 3211.
Nigell a Lawson
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