Our first night in Gordes, we wanted to go to the Manger based on the reviews on Yelp. When we discovered that the restaurant only opens for dinner on certain nights, we went walked through town, deciding on a restaurant the old fashioned way....wander up to a place, look at the atmosphere, the patrons, and the menu. We approached the terrace at La Renaissance, which looked lovely. It is tucked up against ancient walls, behind a fountain, under soaring sycamore trees. There were very few diners, however. Making it worse, the staff was pumping techno music out of the restaurant. We decided to go elsewhere.
Our second night in Gordes was Bastille Day. Once again, Manger was closed, as was virtually everything else in town. Our dinner choices were the place we ate at the night before, the nasty looking tourist cafe on the square, or La Renaissance. Since my wife and I have a rule about not eating in the same place twice while on vacation, we walked into La Renaissance. Once again there were virtually no patrons in the restaurant but the menu scrawled on the chalk board looked good and this time there was no techno music.
We were informed that everything on the menu is organic, even the house wine. The menu is based on whatever the chef thinks is good that day in the market. The day's features are scrawled on a chalk board. No menus. We ordered the Mozzarella salad off the chalk board to share. Our waitress smiled and said, "It zounds like you can get zis anywar, but iz good." My wife ordered the fillet with truffles and I ordered the duck confit.
I guess I didn't understand what the chef was trying to do until the salad arrived but I am a big fan of the farm to table movement. Suddenly, this meal is looking up. The Mozzarella salad looks like a beautiful still life painting. The vegetables come whole, tomato, pepper, carrot. They are perfectly ripe and crisp. The carrot is not over cooked, which can be the prevailing style in France. The mozzarella is so fresh you can feel it. It was so tasty that I did not put any balsamic on it, which came on the side.
The private label house wine is also good. Our waitress didn't know much about it but it tasted like a Grenache Syrah blend with an emphasis on the Syrah. Maybe it was a local winery that didn't adhere to the Cotes du Rhone AOC standards so they private label it because they can't call it a Cotes du Rhone. Who knows? It simply had La Renaissance on the label. It was good.
The duck was very well executed. Again, fresh vegetables came with it and tasted like they were plucked from the ground that morning. My wife didn't like her steak as much as I liked my duck. She thought it could use just a little bit of a wine reduction sauce. This was a very minor point, however. I am being nitpicky.
The restaurant is one of the more expensive places to eat in town and a lot of the tourists and families will stay away because of that. It was well worth it though. read more
