Sublime

But

I’ve heard the Villa Gallici is a nice place.” And so it proved to be—small, charming, and a two-minute walk from the cafés and other delights of the Cours Mirabeau.

It would be no hardship to spend most of the day café hopping, but as our trips to Aix are infrequent we feel a pleasant obligation to squeeze in as much as possible during the morning—to pick up a bottle of eau-de-vie from the man in the rue d’Italie and some cheeses from Monsieur Paul in the rue des Marseillais, to see what new nonsense is in the

essential part of a day out is lunch, and before going anywhere new we always studied the Gault-Millau guide as well as the map. We discovered that Maussane was perilously close to the Baumanière at Les Baux, where the bills are as memorable as the cooking, but we were saved from temptation by Madame Soliva. “Go to Le Paradou,” she told us, “and ha

Probably the most fashionable Provençal oils are those from the valley of Les Baux, and if you happen to be near Maussane-les-Alpilles just after the olives are gathered toward the end of the year, you can find those oils in the tiny Maussane cooperative.

MADAME SOLIVA, the eighty-year-old chef whose nom de cuisine was Tante Yvonne, had first told us about an olive oil that she said was the finest in Provence. She had better credentials than anyone we knew. Apart from being a magnificent cook, she was olive oil’s answer to a Master of Wine. She had tried them all, from Alziari in Nice to the United

L’Auberge de La Môle, we agreed, was the kind of restaurant the French do better than anyone else: highly professional, and yet it felt like the extension of a friend’s kitchen, casual, easy, and comfortable. The restaurants with a row of stars, as good as they are, tend to have a similar veneer, polished, perfect, and international. The Auberge co

In Cavaillon, there are seventeen bakers listed in the Pages Jaunes, but we had been told that one establishment was ahead of all the rest in terms of choice and excellence, a veritable palais de pain. At Chez Auzet, so they said, the baking and eating of breads and pastries had been elevated to the status of a minor religion.