Bordeaux
Bordeaux is, of course, the home of claret, and good feeding goes with good liquor, the combination being essential. The result is that here you can procure a good dinner with the best of wines, which being consumed, so to say, on the spot where they have matured, are in perfection both as to flavour and condition.
The Hôtel Restaurant du Chapon Fin, under the management of MM. Dubois and Mendionde, is perhaps the best in the town. Here an excellent dinner à la carte is to be had and the service is très soignée. The cellar comprises the finest wines of the Gironde, Lafite, Haut Brion, Latour, Margaux Leoville, etc., with Pommery, Mumm, Cliquot as champagnes. But to my idea, any one asking for champagne at Bordeaux would order a pork pie at Strasbourg. The Chapon Fin is fairly expensive, but good food and good Lafite are not given away. The appointments of the hotel are excellent.
The Café de Bordeaux is a more popular establishment with brilliant decorations, and if you do not wish for an à la carte dinner, you are provided with a very good "set" déjeuner for 4 francs. Dinner can be had for 5 francs, with a concert thrown in.
Another good hotel and restaurant with fairly moderate terms is the Bayonne, also boasting of a fine cellar of wine and service à la carte. In fact many people aver that at the Bayonne one can get as good if not a better dinner than at any other restaurant in Bordeaux.
The Hôtel des Princes et de la Paix has the Restaurant Sansot attached to it, which is quite good.
The Restaurant de Paris, situated on the lovely Promenade des Allées de Tourny, is a first-class establishment with very moderate prices, where a capital déjeuner can be obtained for 2 francs 50 centimes, or a dinner for 3 francs. The proprietor, Mons. Debreuil, was chef at some of the best cafés in Paris, and he has a clientèle of many well-known epicures in Bordeaux.
All these restaurants have saloons for private parties in case you require them.
The principal spécialité of Bordeaux, besides claret, is lampreys, which, when cooked à la Bordelaise, are about as rich and luscious a dish as a most ardent candidate for a bilious attack can desire. If you are there in the autumn, don't forget to order Cèpes à la Bordelaise.
To the above of my worthy confrère, I would only add that the Chapon Fin is a winter garden, somewhat resembling the Champeaux Restaurant in Paris; there are rockeries and ferns, and a great tree-trunk runs up to the roof, the foliage and branches being no doubt outside. A speciality is the Potage Chapon Fin, a vegetable soup which is excellent. The restaurant of the Bayonne is in a great conservatory. Judging from the few meals I have eaten at each, I should class the Chapon Fin and the Bayonne as being equal in cookery. The first floor of the Café de Bordeaux is now decorated with mirrors and white walls, after the manner of the chic Parisian restaurants, but the Englishman who wishes to drink whisky and soda there—an unholy taste in a wine country—and who demands a special brand and Schweppe's soda, should ask how much he is going to be charged for it before he commits himself.