03-06-19 Birthday Lunch for Janeen

The last two years, Janeen has spent her birthday in Macomb Illinois – first for her dad’s 100^th birthday and the following year for his 101^st. When asked where she wanted to be in 2019, she chose the Violet Festival in the south of France. Early spring seemed a nice remembrance of Dad Harold. As reported in prior posts, we are in the village of Vence about 14 miles from Nice. So to celebrate her birthday I found a lovely 2-star Michelin restaurant in Nice called Flaveur.

Flaveur is really a story of passion and family. Gaël and Mickaël Tourteaux, two brothers, share the kitchen and create wonderful foods.

They are both different and yet complementary bringing different approaches to the kitchen. We left Vence with lots of time to find the restaurant and find parking. After we spotted the location, and got ourselves parked, we found the street of the restaurant to be filled with construction equipment.

Across the street from the restaurant is a major construction project but access was still possible to the restaurant. Arriving for at 12:45 for our 1:00 reservation, we found a small room decorated with figurative wooden sculptures, reminiscent of fish shapes, chic table art with beautiful glasses and a relatively camouflaged bar area behind which we surmise is the micro kitchen.

The menu had two options – the first was a menu that included starter and main or main and dessert or a tasting menu that covered a 6 or 7 different dishes. We opted for the all inclusive lunch menu.

The pictures tell the story of the meal – so I won’t speak too much about them expect to say it was wonderful. I would say, however, that the number of amuse bouche was amazing. There must have been 6 or 7 different little bites that were where served before the first course.   Very nice.

 

We were in the restaurant for almost 4 hours! Certainly not rushed and the pace of presentation of the various things was relaxed and quite enjoyable.

Our waiter guided us on what we had and suggested an approach to eating them when there where multiple items at the same time.

At the end of the meal we asked to have a picture taken with the Chefs’ who joined our gallery of gourmand. All in all Janeen had a wonderful birthday in Nice.