Tenth Anniversary

Wednesday was our tenth anniversary. We went out for a fancy lunch in Aix at the restaurant of chef Pierre Reboul. We had been once before. We don't remember exactly when, but it was 2008 or before. We both had good memories of our first meal there, although we can remember few specifics. I remember just one dish: frog legs with garlic and parsley which I remember as being both pleasing to the eye and the taste buds. This time, we had an extraordinary meal that we are sure to remember for quite a while. Our meal was the "Les Experts" set menu except the truffle dish was replaced by a Wagyu beef dish as it is the very end of the truffle season and the restaurant was out. We both love truffles, but it was also fun to get to try this very fancy Australian beef that goes for more than 100 euros if you order it à la carte. It was very tender with a subtle flavor. Throughout our meal, we were presented with a variety of "fun" culinary inventions including popcorn "cocaine" to suck up with a straw, green apple- and lettuce-flavored foams that vanished the minute they touched your tongue, a "tea bag" of dried seaweed that completely dissolved in our soup, and a chocolate-covered mint leaf frozen in liquid nitrogen. Everything was excellent, but we both agreed on a trio of "favorites": The sole cooked in butter served with rich mashed potatoes topped with little caviar-like balls of olive oil and lemon:

The chorizo (a spicy sausage like pepperoni), calf sweetbread, morel mushroom and asparagus. In my experience, it's unusual to have such a super spicy dish as a restaurant gastronomique. This dish was incredibly flavorful:

Finally, the Savon de Marseille dessert which had an iced hazelnut and olive oil cookie to accompany a scoop of to-die-for honey ice cream:

Interestingly, Sylvain usually likes neither fish nor honey, but he absolutely raved about them in these dishes. I'll share one more dish photo because the presentation is so unique. This is the second dessert:

The tree trunk was almond, chocolate and passion fruit, the flowers were edible lemon verbena flowers, the grass was a grainy sugar dough, the ladybug was white chocolate (we brought both of them home for Maëva), and the ice cream was chocolate-almond and passion fruit (a surprising, but tasty, combination).

On the French anniversary calendar, number ten is tin. Looking for gifts, I discovered there are very few exciting gift possibilities in this metal. I finally found a copper and tin bracelet for Sylvain that you can see him wearing on his right wrist in this photo taken at the end of our meal:

It was a great anniversary celebration, worth staying married ten years for! We will definitely go back to this restaurant and we definitely won't wait six years to do it.