Of all the restaurants on rue Porte de Laure, this one seemed the most homely, with the least gimmicks. We were planning to go to Le Criquet, but unfortunately, it was closed for the weekend we were there. So we were lulled into Restaurant L'Escaladous by its country-style seating and down-to-earth living room-like interior. I was interested in trying a restaurant with distinctly Provencal foods, which is actually hard to find, since it seems to me like France is modernizing their cuisine faster and more than I would've liked.
The menu is only in French. We had the 24 euro 3-course prix fixe. For starters, we got the fish soup (which comes with croutons that you scrape garlic onto, garlic/saffron mayo, and cheese, all to be dunked into the soup), the mussel and spinach gratin, and the "tete de veau sauce ravigotte" (which neither my friend nor I knew was calf's head/brain until weeks after our vacation; I called her with the news, and she was petrified, and said it was no wonder it was so fatty). For the entree, we got the "loup grillé," which I thought was grilled wolf (per my dictionary), but is actually sea bass (I think it should be "loup de mer;") we also got the "daube de Taureau avec son riz de Camargue," a stewed beef that came with some rather dry rice. The food was good for say, a mother's homey kitchen, but not top-notch cuisine. The presentation was lacking (although I didn't expect much), and we were whacking flies left-and-right (I'm pretty whatever about flies, but this was pretty annoying). Overall, it was an OK bare-bones intro to the foods of Provence. read more