It was early evening on a Sunday. The wife and I were feeling seafood for dinner, so we checked…read morethe Yelp app for restaurants. Le Rince-Doigts - Guinguette à Fruits de Mer was nearby and, more importantly, had received very positive reviews from locals. Sold! I'm not sure what a seafood shack at a French beach looks like, but I got the impression that Le Rince-Doigts - Guinguette à Fruits de Mer did its best to successfully capture the feel with its sand floor, boardwalk, picket fence wood interior, and beach umbrellas and like décor. Our meal started off with a humorous exchange with our friendly server. She greeted us in French and the recited the list of the day's specials in rapid-fire fashion. She immediately realized from our puzzled expressions that we weren't native speakers and we all had a laugh. Although, her English was only a little better than our French, we managed to successfully communicate with each other and place our order. We started of with a bottle of the house white wine that was very drinkable and a bargain at 13€. For our food, we had the Fruits de Mer special, which included a bowl of fish soup, salmon tartar, another fish (I don't recall the type) tartar, whelks, peel & eat shrimp, raw oysters on the half shell, and langoustines. We received a very generous portion of seafood. For the most part, it was a big success. The soup was delicious. The two fish tartars were fresh and had good flavor. The wife didn't care for the whelks, an acquired taste to be sure, but I loved them! The oysters were smaller than what I've normally seen back in the States, but they had a nice briny flavor and were good. The only miss was the langoustines, which were overcooked, dry, and mealy and, frankly, didn't taste that good. As if we needed more food, I ordered the fried smelt (or at least I think it was smelt), another item on the list of day's specials. It was fried perfectly, hot, crispy but still leaving the fish moist and flavorful. It was a delicious ending to our meal! For me, Le Rince-Doigts - Guinguette à Fruits de Mer was exactly what I was looking for...good food and good service in a casual setting for a very reasonable price. I can see why the locals love it!

Gregg M was really in the mood for seafood (and I was in search of escargot) so we found this place…read morewhile walking earlier in the day and decided to go here for dinner. They had an all you can eat seafood dish and Gregg and i decided to give that a try. We started off with a bottle of wine (I know a surprise, but hey we got white instead of red for a change). It was a very nice dry white at an incredibly reasonable price. For dinner, we started out with soup de Mer which I have to say was excellent. Secondly we got a very large platter of oysters, shrimp, whelks and langoustine. I am not a fan of whelks - though I will always try them. Its more of a texture issue with me, not taste. The shrimp however was cooked wonderfully. It had that slightly sweet taste you get from the smaller shrimp, but these were a very good size. The oysters had a great briny flavor. The one downside to them was that there was a lot of grit in them with very little oyster juice. Unfortunately the langoustines were not that tasty. I'm not sure what it was that I didn't like, except to say that the flavor just didn't taste right. To round out the meal, we (and I really mean the hubby here) got an order of fried smelts. For me they tasted fine, were not overly salty and were not greasy. All in all it was a good meal. I would go back again, but next time I would probably order the fish. Except for the langoustines, this was definitely a solid 4.