Lunch for One at Le Vieux Logis

Trémolat, the Dordogne. Early May, 2012.

The Dordogne is one of my favorite areas of France. This hotel Le Vieux Logis is a beautiful setting for a date for one or two or even for a wedding. It is located in the center of this village and is a most beautiful building with fantastic gardens. It is early May and I am enjoying the outside as one of only two tables dining at this moment. I sit imagining myself planning my wedding here tasting each dish as if it were being presented for consideration on my menu. Looking around for each setting, the rehearsal dinner, the wedding ceremony, the reception and the photo session. Numerous nooks and expansive gardens fit all of the profiles with perfection. I ordered the Degustation menu of the season. The restaurant offers several menu options all looked equally delicious.

There was no fiancé. There was no date. There was no wedding.

There was me in a garden in the Dordogne, enjoying a glorious a six course lunch and casting a venue for an event that might never happen, and, having an absolutely wonderful time.

What arrived

Lobster with a delicate gelée. The kind of dish that tells you immediately how the rest of the meal is going to go.

Salmon.

Lamb.

A savoury cheese crème brûlée. This was the one I did not see coming. Cheese, in the form of a dessert, arriving where a dessert should be but doing something else entirely.

Grapefruit and gelée, to clear everything away and start again.

Strawberries and ice cream. Sumptuous. Early May in southwest France is exactly the right week to be handed a bowl of strawberries.

Fifteen years later

I have thought about that lunch more than I have thought about most of the meals I have eaten with other people.

Some of that is the food, which was very good. Most of it is the fact that I gave myself two and a half hours in a garden to imagine a life in detail and did not feel one bit sorry about it. I was not waiting for the wedding. I was not sad that it wasn't happening. I was using the venue for what a beautiful venue is actually for, which is imagining things.

I have since learned that this is the whole argument for eating alone in restaurants. You are not there to be seen having dinner. You are there because the room, the garden, the pacing of six courses over an afternoon, all of it gives you somewhere to put your attention that is not your phone and not your work and not the running list.

I still have not been married at Le Vieux Logis.

I would still cast it.

Le Vieux Logis, Trémolat, Dordogne, France. Visited May 2012.