Au Fruit Défondu

Fondue in France is so interesting! They have the normal fondue where you dip your food in the cheese/chocolate/oil, but that is not what we did. Oh no. We were the only ones in the restaurant at first, and the owner (who I will speak more of later, because she was great), let us order and then brought out two huge wedges of cheese (the good, rich kind) and put them under a heater. The cheese started melting and a bit later, the owner came back and scraped off the top layer of melted cheese and poured it on my plate with my meat and potatoes. It tasted so heavenly!

Of course we had our wine with the meal:

Jurançon is, so far, my favorite wine that I've come across. It's very thick, and it can be very sweet "doux" but this bottle was dry "sec" and I preferred it to the sweeter, although both are very good.

I ate way too much throughout this meal, but it was just too good not to! And yes, I finished off that block of cheese with the help of one other girl. So much cheese! It took us about 2 hours to eat it all, and then we all split ice cream with hot fudge. 

Alright, now for the owner: first off, she was so friendly to us when we came in, which can sometimes be hit or miss once people hear us speaking broken French and lots of English, she was very bubbly and excited to have us eat her food. At one point, she came into the room and asked us if we smelt something burning; we had figured it was just the cheese and maybe something that was already on the heater. She comes over to one of the heaters and finds that it had been resting on a chair of the opposite table! We had burned one of her chairs! We felt so bad, but she just started laughing and said that it gave the chair more character and that anyone would be happy to sit in it (I should have taken a picture, but I didn't. I'm sorry). Throughout the night she continued to pour more cheese onto our plates even when we told her that our stomachs were bursting. She would just laugh and say that there is always more room for cheese. After dinner, we stepped into the hallway that connects the restaurant and the bar, and we saw the owner gesturing us into the bar. We were a bit confused at first, but then we followed her in, and she went behind the bar and pulled out 4 shot glasses saying, "It's for Carnaval!" So, despite our American-ness and burning one of her chairs, she offered us free drinks and made us feel more than welcome in France. 

It was a really fun night out with my girls. We plan on going back just for dessert because we did not have enough belly room for the full fondue experience this time around.