"Passion, émotion, authenticité." If you see any of these words in the blurb describing a restaurant, wine, perfume or any other French luxury product, run the other way or you'll be conned. We didn't and we were. Thus the dinner we had at the Auberge du Moulin de Léré was the worst suffered by my wife and me in our combined memory of more than a century. For a start, you can't choose what you want to eat. It is imposed upon you. You can either have four courses at an outrageous price, or a horrendous eight courses. Since you do not know what you will be served it's pointless choosing a wine. You are therefore obllged to choose the expensive wine pairing option. To put you in an expensive mood, a fist sized black object that looks as if it as been dropped by a passing rhinceros is presented on a bed of moss under a glass bell. A giant truffle! You are invited to lift the bell and sniff. It might as well have been made of plastic. Truffle option: €10 extra. Then comes a refeshing kind of cold tea in a small cup — an African recipe to clear the palate, wrongly described as "kefir". This is followed by a series of amuses-bouche, the most edible being a cheese croquette, the size of a quail's egg presented on a bed of moss, the most offensive, an egg-cup full of foam flavoured by small pieces of smoked potato skin. The wierdest was a small fried perch stuck head-first into a blob of humus and the most puzzling, a small seed biscuit smeared with a tapenade disguised like a moth on a piece of bark. All this was being photographed by an English-speaking table nearby. We should have realised: it was for social media, not supposed to be eaten. Then the first course: pumpkin purée topped with a foam of Abondance cheese (expensive chefs love foam). Rich, filling and reminiscent of baby food, it was an effective appetite cutter. Next a potato, a few leaves of spinach with a spoonful of ordinary mushroom sauce in a small bowl. It's beginning to dawn on me. We're being conned. The next dish was all red. Red cabbage leaves, beetroot purée and roast venison. The venison swelled into to stringly mush in our mouths that we couldn't swallow or decently spit out. The beetroot purée concentrated the mustiness of the root vegetable to a disagreeable extent. It was inedible. We left it, half expecting an outraged chef to emerge from the kitchen brandishing a cleaver. The dessert — pumpkin again — wasn't memorable so it must have been quite good. Likewise the wines — two whites, a red and a late harvest. The waitresses were charming and solicitous, but seem traumatised as they stumbled through the spiel accompanying each dish. The cadre was contrived rustic chalet with log fire, plain wood tables, no fine linen or fancy cutlery. The ethos is that all the products are sourced locally ("we work with the local hunters" — mon oeil) In the Haute-Savoie alps in mid January that leaves you with pumpkin, potatoes, cabbage and a huge profit margin. Perhaps it's better in spring or summer. We subsequenly discovered from chatting to locals that this was a good restaurant a year or two ago offering two or three menus. Then someone from the Michelin food guide came around and gave it a star. This gave the restaurant the opportunity to change its formula and triple its prices. After all it's the experience that counts, not the food. What offended me most about this travesty is that I love and admire traditional French cooking.…
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