The Eight Knives

In pursuit of customer service (and for no other reason) I completed some more research on your behalf on Friday last week.

Castillonnes is a small Bastide town about six kilometres from here.  Just outside town there's a place which I think is fantastic, Les 8 Couteaux.

It's fairly new, being set up just before COVID by a co-operative of local farmers.  First and foremost there's a restaurant and cafe... okay, you might say, sounds good but hardly unusual.

Well, that's true and you can go into the restaurant, like I did on Friday, for lunch with some mates and have the fixed menu - I had soup to start, steak and pineapple roti, coffee and wine - all for just over 20 Euros. Very nice it was too.  Richard, me and our friends spent a long lazy lunch simply enjoying the food and chatting about 'things' from the importance of bureacracy to the French to the relative merits of camper vans!

Any lunchtime the restaurant is pretty full - even in February.  In summer it's even busier.  And typical of France, when you have your table it's yours for as long as you want it.  When I lived in Edinburgh and I booked a table for, say, Sunday lunch at 1.00pm quite often I would be told: 'That's fine but we need the table back at 3.00pm!'  Not so in France, if you want to stay there until 6.00pm you can.

But here's the thing.  Attached to the restaurant - literally: the counter is in the restaurant itself there's a Boucherie selling local meat directly from the farms that are round about.  You can select your piece of meat, have taken directly into the kitchen and the chef will cook your selection for you there and then.  It's fabulous, it really is.

However, at Les 8 Couteaux you may not want to stay at your table because there's also a really good Epicerie selling local stuff but...

Wait for it...

There's a chocolate museum, too!

You can go in and browse through the chocolate shop or you can visit the chocolate museum.  You can even have a go at decorating cakes int he Chocolate Workshop.

At Christmas I bought a few presents from the shop - a chocolate Harley Davidson for a motorbike enthusiast in the family.  Really unusual and not stupidly priced either.

So, on one of those rare summer days when the weather isn't playing ball you could easily spend the morning in the Chocolate museum before having lunch in the restaurant and browsing the Epicerie and the furniture workshop that's also on site.