Everyone has a favorite "best" restaurant in France: 3-star Michelin fine dining to that special little food cart that no one knows about but you.
But what I -really- want to know is what is the absolute worst place you've eaten in France?
I have something of a writing project in mind...
-- Mike Beebe
It even LOOKS like a dive!
the food court outside the underground entrance to the Louvre - it ties with the cafeteria at the Vatican for worst combination of food, atmosphere and value in all of Europe.
The cafeteria at Chenonceau ( in 2013) Our family still talks about how bad the food was! It was so surprising, every other meal had been so delicious
We have had consistently good food in France. In other countries, we occasionally will get a less than awesome meal. We have eaten at a few Michelin stared restaurants, but typically we stick to midrange restaurants.
But, I didn't even have to think for a second. The absolute worst meal we have ever had in France was a restaurant on the road that goes to Mont Saint Michel. Horrific. And, you can't escape the terrible food. All the restaurants are managed by the same company.
In the zillion times we hve been to the Louvre we have never tried that food court -- now I am not feeling i missed anything.
The Louvre restaurant that open under the pyramid is adequate re food but had comically slow service. -- a dozen people in black and white bustling about but not taking orders or delivering food. It was laughable -- we had nowhere we had to be, but several people near us walked out after ordering. (French people not American tourists)
Our worst meal in Europe was the airport Hilton at CDG. We expected expensive (which it was) but also expected edible - which it barely was. It was long ago -- but an indelible memory.
There's this "pizza" place in Nantes.
My wife calls it "ketchup on a cracker."
I'll play, sounds fun. I'll say my most disappointing meal was at a Best Western Hotel in Rungis, close to Orly airport where we were to fly out the next day. It was the closest to an American truck stop diner that I have ever seen outside of America, except they served wine!
Fortunately, I can mostly recall wonderful meals, but as for the worst, it is a toss up between two restaurants: the first, a little place below our Airbnb in Bayeux where, after a chilly morning touring the D-Day Beaches, we were so looking forward to our first "real" French onion soup only to find it couldn't hold a candle to the one I make at home (not bragging, as I was certainly expecting mine to pale in comparison!); and the second, an awful place on a lovely square in the incredible old centre of Le Mans. That time, we had "hangry" kids and teens with us who needed to eat NOW, so we had to grab whatever was closest. It was pretty terrible. I am realizing that any bad restaurant experiences we have had in France have generally come at lunchtime - my preference is to grab a baguette sandwich on the go, which rarely disappoints, or eat cheese, sausage and bread (washed down with great, inexpensive wine, of course) back at our lodging, which never disappoints, but sometimes, when travelling "en famille", you've got to please the kids to keep the peace! I am over the top about researching my dinner restaurants ahead of time, which almost always works out well. Some people think I am crazy, but with the internet, there is no excuse to have a bad meal (which often costs the same as a good one!). Several years ago, on a month long trip to France and Italy, out of 30 dinners, only 1 (in Italy) was bad, so that certainly motivated me to stay the course on subsequent trips.
What a long answer to a simple question.....sorry for hijacking!
Thanks for the fun thread!
Early in Trip Advisor's existence, before it was highly commercialized, I fell for a fake review at what turned out to be the first of our two worst meals in France over a 50 year period: frozen fish with a tomato paste for a sauce, dry grated carrots, and the rest has been blocked from my memory. I could see by the shocked faces as food was served that others in the dining room had fallen for the same review. I assumed the owners had let their untrained teens alone in the kitchen to improvise at this northern Provence hotel/restaurant.
The other was Fawlty Towers, where a young couple with help from their friends and dogs had just taken over a hotel-restaurant near Limoges from a talented, experienced retiring couple. Reviews were based on the previous owners' reputation, unfortunately. My gazpacho was whatever vegies they could put in a blender, broken glass in the dessert, inedible main course and breakfast was just as bad. The dogs helped by eating, sometimes right off our plates when we turned our heads, anything we couldn't stomach to eat.
Broken glass in the dessert !! Dogs eating off the table !!
Mine was some restaurant we went to in town after Lascaux II. I don't remember anything about the meal. But I do remember going to the restroom and when I washed my hands, being rather disgusted by the rather wet (communal) towel I needed to use to "dry" my hands.
A couple of days later, I started feeling sick. Then sicker and sicker until finally I ended up in the hospital for a few days. The doctors and nurses were never able to figure out what maladie I had contracted. They thought some type of hepatitis, but all the tests came back negative. Same for anything else they tested for. My favorite was when they asked me if I had traveled recently. I said yes, and their faces lit up as if they were thinking, aha, now we're getting somewhere.
Only for them to be very disappointed when I told them it was the Périgord.
Damn that was nqsty.
A small observation: So far, I've noticed that many of the "restaurants" mentioned above, while they are places where you can eat, aren't really restaurants in the traditional sense.
Quite a few are technically closer to the fast-food chain category, like those in the Louvre Museum that serve pre-cooked, industrially produced food delivered to various locations such as airports and museums. One of the basic rules: always avoid "restaurants" in museums or other tourist attractions.
They fall into the same category as highway rest stop restaurants. Similarly, pizzerias are not considered French restaurants either.
The one mentioned by davebarnes is a hotel-bar-PMU-tabac, one of those places frequented mainly by locals who stay for hours, come to have a drink, buy cigarettes, and bet on horse races, 99 times out of 100, it's a red flag.
B wary of restaurants that offer onion soup. The French haven't cooked onion soup at home for a long time (it was a dish for poor people made with inexpensive ingredients ). It can be good and well-prepared in more modern versions, but it's primarily a dish for foreign tourists.
That being said, even when following a few basic rules, it's very common to end up in a terrible place. I know loads of them.
