Sadly, our first dinner in Avignon (in October 2014) was one of the worst of the trip. Le Caveau du…read moreTheatre had some requisite promising reviews, and its menu boasted several things that we were in the mood for. And with the Mistral wind going at full blast that evening, we didn't want to walk all over town looking for a place, and this joint was a mere few blocks from our hotel.
We got there early by French standards, around 7:30 PM, and only one other couple was eating in the small, acoustically dead dining area. The place soon filled up, however, with a mix of English-speaking tourists and French-speaking locals.
For the starter, I ordered scrambled eggs with chanterelles and truffle oil. This was actually OK, although it could have been much better had the chanterelles first been sautéed in some parsley and thyme. But things got a bit odd with my wife's starter: strips of duck carpaccio were draped across a bland and under seasoned pile of lentils, which came with a sweet-tasting pink creamy substance and a few sliced pears on the side. You could kind of almost get what the chef was going for if you had a bite with all of the elements at once, but it was still a bit of a stretch.
The bread we were given was similar in texture and consistency to a lava rock.
But the grand insult of the night came in the form of my wife's main dish, which had to be one of the most disgusting, and utterly confused and muddled plates of food to have crossed either of our palettes in a restaurant. It came with two poorly seared, lonely scallops and two under seasoned shrimp, which sat atop a bed of revolting, difficult-to-identify, thick, grey/white gloopy mush. This sad mush was intertwined with strips of soggy leeks, flavorless mushrooms, and what tasted to me like bits of brussel sprouts. The whole thing had balsamic glaze drizzled on top of it, which for my wife was the dead giveaway that this was a young rookie chef who had no idea what he/she was doing in the kitchen.
First of all, the dish was so confused that it was impossible to tell where the chef thought he/she was going with it. Secondly, balsamic glaze is okay on salads and some poultry dishes, but generally not seafood, and it's a clear sign of a chef who is trying to mask his inexperience by attempting to make the plate look fancy. One of the things I love about eating out with my wife is that because she is a chef by profession, you can't fool her. She knows every desperate trick in the book, and she can tell right away when a chef is being lazy or is just plain inexperienced.
The guy in an Australian couple not far from us also ordered this dish, and he was visibly unhappy with it and kept nibbling off the duck that his significant other had ordered.
I got the chorizo-stuffed chicken that came with shellfish sauce and a moulded cake of bland, totally unseasoned potato mush. The chicken was actually cooked pretty nicely and the dish was okay overall, but there was zero wow-factor, and tellingly, it had yet more balsamic glaze drizzled all over it, the taste of which actually clashed with the flavors on the plate.
The menu came with desserts, and these ranged from so-so to comically confused. My chocolate lava cake was alright, even though it arrived room temperature and came swimming in a cloying pistachio sauce with two colossal globs of whipped cream on either side. The dish was laughably amateurish and weirdly symmetrical in presentation.
It was difficult to tell whether my wife's dessert was meant to be a mousse or a cheesecake. A massive glob of tart, lemon-y marscapone arrived on top of a crumbly cheesecake crust, but it was far too runny to be a cheesecake, making it more like a kind of mousse. This also came with two massive, unnecessary globs of whipped cream, as well as a cookie that was as hard as a rock and had clearly *just* been taken out of the fridge, as it was super cold - a nice touch!
Not everything was a complete failure, but the bad dishes here were so appallingly bad that the experience left us totally shocked, hence my one-star rating. At the rate this place is going, that imbecile in the kitchen is going to run them out of business! How can someone get away with cooking such embarrassingly awful food for paying customers in a town like Avignon? We had a few lousy meals on the trip, but this was by far the most bizarrely horrible one yet.
