Читать книгу One More Croissant for the Road онлайн

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I open the menu and confirm what I already know: that at €34 this omelette is to be the single most expensive dish I will eat on my entire trip, and that includes a Michelin-starred birthday treat a month from now. (The price makes the three-course menu at €48 feel like a bargain, just as it’s designed to, though in fact I probably don’t need a poached egg and samphire salad and a frozen Calvados soufflé to push my egg consumption for the day into the danger zone.)

The American journalist and gourmand Waverley Root, recalling the ‘luscious omelettes’ of 1920s Normandy in his classic work The Food of France, feels confident enough to recommend the Mère Poulard version 30 years later, ‘providing that the passage of time and of a good many thousand tourists has not wrought havoc on it’.

I can confirm that, almost a century later, mass production does not seem to have been to the detriment of quality. I suspect price inflation has been disproportionate, yet given the criminal mark-up, it’s disappointingly delicious. The outer shell is almost leathery, in pleasurable contrast to the moussey interior, and gilded with salty, slightly burnt butter – it’s almost like an American-style half-moon breakfast omelette rather than the classic runny French cigar, but stuffed with an egg-white foam rather than gooey cheese. A dish of potatoes and bacon fried in lard arrives on the side; for a few euros more I could have had scallops or foie gras instead, but, really, there are limits. My advice is, go to Mont-Saint-Michel, watch the spectacle, then go home and make one yourself.