It’s a problem if you’re gluten-intolerant – what do you eat with oysters? It is a difficult issue. You could just eat oysters, without carbohydrate, but that would be a bit on the decadent side, and anyway with my difficult stomach not entirely advisable. You could do what I’ve done up to now – just eaten the rye bread and suffered for it later – but that’s really not very sensible.
Today, however, I think I found the answer – oyster and chips. I can hear all of the aficionados tutting now, but nice large chips with mayonnaise, interspersed with oysters and sips of white wine, is not an altogether ridiculous combination – quite balanced in texture and flavour in fact. (If a little short on some vital food groups.)
And this was in an entirely unpretentious little local cafe in the Place Garibaldi (at the top of the old town), where oysters are half the price they are down on the Place de Fleurs, and the waitress not at all sniffy about my order.
The oysters were from the Med – so obeying the “eat local” rule, and not half bad, although I believe Atlantic are supposed to be better on average.
Nice old town really remains remarkably unspoiled. Sure there are some pretty tacky tourist joints, but it remains pretty real – almost too real for some delicate stomachs. I love the “dried” food shop, which has every sort of dried food, from spices to pastas, to dried, fiercely skeletal stockfish. I predict lots of mushroom omelettes in my future after I couldn’t resist the “melange of dried forest mushrooms”. One hundred grams of dried mushroom for 5 euros turned out to be rather a lot.
I also stocked up in the wonderful coffee and tea shop with “vanilla tea”, one of the small weaknesses I always cater to in France.
And I visited the rather spectacular gallery of the artist Kuky de Zubeis, who’s also on the web. Not usually the sort of thing I go for, but there’s something about some of his female characters that I found very attractive. Should I suddenly be feeling a bit flusher than usual, I could be seriously tempted…
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