Building the Fork: Le 1544, Bordeaux

on a meal so good it made me angry

Building the Fork is an occasional series on upsettingly good meals that I have eaten. This is not a restaurant review; it is the work of someone who will cry over a dish of food given the right circumstances.

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If you asked me if I liked French food, I would probably tell you no. I like French pastries, yes. I like their many ways with cream. I like the fact they’ll have a glass of wine at lunch. But honestly? My experience with French food has not been great thus far in life.

This is largely my fault: I was vegan for twelve years, and still don’t eat meat, and the French don’t hold such things in any regard. Julie & Julia taught me that most classic French dishes (at least, through the Julia Child lens) are some combination of meat cooked a needless amount of different ways, booze, salt and cheese. In a word: heavy. I don’t have the patience to cook these things, and I also haven’t necessarily looked for good food when I’ve previously been in France, because I was a) broke and then b) lazy. Let the record show that 2024 was the year it all changed.

I am a big believer that the context of a meal is at least half the experience (which is why a cold beer after putting up a tent is sublime), so here is the context: it was my first time in Bordeaux. The first half of the week I was there with my best mate of twenty years, who I live many hours away from; she has two children under four. This was her first time away from her one-year-old for more than a night, our first overseas trip together for a long time. We had no budgetary limitations beyond what felt reasonable: the main concern was quality and enjoyment. I was so excited I barely slept the night before travelling. She, wanting to make the most out of her 50+ hours sans child, had made a meticulous plan of the places we would drink and eat: from cafes to bars to restaurants to food markets. Everything thus far had been phenomenal, including the first night where all we consumed was wine (including a 4 Euro glass of the best cremant I’ve ever had) and four large hunks of cheese. This was her final meal of the trip: Le 1544.

Now: I am suspicious of restaurants that would be described as fine dining. In my experience, most of these places just cater to people who spend money on food because its some sort of status symbol. They’ll happily throw away 50 quid on a poorly cooked steak because that’s what you do. They spend hundreds of pounds on a wine but they do not enjoy it. The service is arsey, the plates overdone. No one is actually showing any signs of savouring what they’re eating. Like many things, good food is often wasted on the rich.

However, I do trust both the Michelin guide (never done me wrong) and Elly, whose taste is almost identical to mine. So off to Le 1544 we went.

the venue / the view

More context: we’d spent the morning meandering and visiting Darwin Eco-système, the right-bank reclaimed former military space that now houses chocolatiers, start ups, a skate park, a bookshop, an organic cafe and all manner of cool things, including an international community hub where kids seemed to be having a wonderful time. The existence of such a place felt revelatory. Rather than legging it around the bridge again we decided to take the very short trip across the Garonne on the ferry, which like all modes of public transport in Bordeaux costs just €1.80 and actually goes on time. Arriving to a restaurant by boat is now my favourite method of Doing an Entrance.

Le 1544 is on the first floor of the central building on the Place de la Bourse, quite literally smack bang in the middle of the city. Upstairs in the 18th century building is Le Gabriel, the Michelin-starred restaurant where the nine-course tasting menu will cost you almost €400. Relative to this, Le 1544 is the pleb bistro downstairs where the great unwashed (us) can get two courses of the ‘market menu’ (no options, just the dishes chosen for you) for €27 or three from the week’s ‘local menu’ (three choices per course) for €49. For some of you this will sound a lot and for some of you this will sound like nothing. The measure I use is this: this is what you’d spend buying two large Dominos pizzas, or probably just a bit more than you’d spend getting an Indian takeaway on Deliveroo, factoring in peshwari naan, side rice and delivery. Either way, I’m fine paying it.

The servers were immediately hospitable and we were sat in an archway overlooking the river and the city’s massive ‘water mirror’, where teams of high-vis infants regularly go and play, a delightful thing to see. The decor was classic, clean, modern. We were grinning ear to ear: a lunch. In an archway. By a window. Overlooking the river! This is the sort of experience normal people can have when you country had a revolution.

The wine list is, I shit you not, thicker than most novels I’ve read; the bistro shares a cellar with the restaurant upstairs, and it has over one thousand options. Luckily we were buying by the glass (€8-12 average), limited to just one page. How are you supposed to even read a menu of a thousand wines?

A revelation on this trip had been white Bordeaux wines, which I admit I had never really considered before I came to Bordeaux. I don’t even love Bordeaux reds really, being much more of an Italian easy-drinking gal (Sangiovese, you have my heart). And yet. And yet! Bordeaux, I hardly knew ye. I hardly know anything about wine, honestly, but I am determined to learn, and to that end we had spent at entire afternoon at the charmingly high-tech wine museum Cite du Vin, which had taught me about the different regions of Bordeaux and what grows where and why they taste different etc. I had learned a new language: Bordeaux whites were part of my vocabulary. Completely contrary to all this, though, I started with a Sancerre, which is from the Loire valley. Don’t tell me what I want.

Being a reformed vegan there are certain things I will not order. I will never again eat a portobello mushroom, in ““burger”” form or otherwise. I will eat falafel only at gunpoint. I’m not having another cinnamon roll unless I really am in dire straits and "vegetable tart” leaves me highly suspicious, having been subjected to too many instances of wet veg in soggy puff pastry. However. Tomato and tuna tart? In France, where they know butter and its many uses? Reader, I went for it.

tomato and tuna, tart and sorbet

At this point I will admit that we were both just giddy. Elly felt superhuman after two nights of eight hours uninterrupted sleep, which is about six hours more than she’s been getting per night on average for over a year now. I was just ecstatic; being on holiday is one of the things I’m best at. I would put it on my CV if I could.

When the above arrived, I was forced to engage with what I’d actually ordered. A tomato and tuna tart, yes, but but also ‘and its sorbet’. A sorbet of fish? Of veg? A sorbet to me is the dull sister of gelato, the thing people order when they can’t commit to cream. But tomato and tuna sorbet? I tried it: like frozen gazpacho, another thing I would never order, with an undercurrent of tuna water. Good christ. As I said to Elly: this is exactly on the border of being really disgusting. But it was on the right side of the border: it was amazing. The surprise of it was half the joy.

The tart, though. What you have to remember is that the tomatoes we get in the UK are, objectively, fucking awful. In Italy, Spain, France etc they are bombs of liquid sun, so flavourful you could cry, especially when they’re salted and they’ve had all the water leached out of them. And cry I almost did. The pastry? Light as a butter-drenched cloud. The tomatoes? I could have married them. Along with the Sancerre? Genuinely, just kill me now. The Kalamata olives made it. The tuna, the perfect flaky, fishy cherry on top. This is how vegetables should be.

For the main, Elly went for chicken (‘simply the tenderest meat I’ve ever eaten Heather’) and I went for the hake, because now I eat fish I literally cannot stop eating fish. It came with ‘Basque potatoes’ (fondant potatoes if you ask me) and a tomato broth. On top was something that was probably cheese, but honestly that’s only an educated guess.

hake, tomatoes, fondant potatoes

Well, of course, it was unbelievable, especially the crust on top, which was like being slapped in the face by the weathered hands of a Bordelaise fisherman. The potatoes might actually have just been formed out of butter; if this turns out to be the case I’m not mad about it. I’d gone for a more local white for the second glass of wine, though I’ve forgotten what it was because I asked for a recommendation and went with it (Elly had tried to order a tannin-y red and been told no by the waiter, as it would ‘overwhelm the chicken’, and if I’m honest I just love when servers or chefs tell you no. It adds a note of sexual tension that’s missing from most meals). For me this glorious hunk of fish stood in the shadow of the starter tart, but isn’t that sometimes the case? Especially in the type of restaurant where the main course is likely to be protein + veg; I can cook fish and potatoes at home. I can cook fish really well. Tomatoes on a tart so exquisite it brings tears to the eyes? That I can’t do. A fact of life: at some restaurants, the main plate is so often the plotless middle part of a novel that both starts and ends really well. Even when it’s objectively great.

The pressure was on, then, for the dessert. Two glasses of wine is enough to be lunch tipsy, which is the absolute best type of drunk, because you’re thrilled to be alive yet you’ll be fine after a coffee and you’ll certainly be sober by the time you go to bed. Elly, mother of two, was going for a Sauterne, the white Bordeaux sweet wine that’s made from botrytis-infected grapes, because she was on holiday, god dammit! I, famously slow drinker, was still working my way through whatever the hell it was I’d ordered, smugly saying things like what a life, eh? and beaming beatifically over the increasingly sunny view across the Place de la Bourse, where the French seemed, to me, to have things sorted: they could take their kids to Darwin Eco-système, and use the skate park for 30 Euros a year, and then frolic in the water features in the middle of the city with their toddlers, and they could cycle everywhere, and the city was clean, and it was sunny and nice, and the food everywhere was good. This, I thought, is what life could be like if the British learned to set things on fire every time the pension age was reconsidered. (Encroaching thoughts: the far right almost got in just a week ago. The country forbids women from wearing face veils, and has just banned its Olympians from wearing the hijab too. Palestinian solidarity is being punished, racism is on the rise; neoliberalism has prospered, and panders to the far right to steal their votes. You’ve just had two glasses of wine, Heather.)

armagnac baba / chocolate timbale with noisette / baba detail

Here’s an opinion: chocolate and strawberry are two of the worst flavours of things. Chocolate and strawberries, both wonderful. Chocolate flavoured something? Almost always shit. Strawberry dessert? I’m unconvinced. Never bother with chocolate or strawberry ice cream, unless they’re Mini Milks. For this reason, I eschewed both the chocolate timbale with noisette, which Elly ordered (and which was, to be honest, brilliant) and ‘all around the strawberry’. which sounds like a nursery rhyme gone wrong.

I wouldn’t normally order a baba. I’m sliding out of my cake years, truth be told, instead finding myself much more inclined to pastries and things generally more delicate. But I will eat anything that’s been steeped in syrup (gulab jamun, I’m talking about you) and this had promise: armagnac baba, prunes and almond ice cream. It came in a puddle of clear liquid (presumably its syrup) with an arty drizzle of armagnac inside; the ice cream was balanced atop what I think was whipped Chantilly. I sunk the spoon in: it was more air than cake. Simply exquisite.

It’s at this point of the meal I became genuinely quite angry. It’s the lightest thing I’ve ever eaten, Elly. How is this? What the fuck? Too many sensations. Laughter rolled across the table. My face hurt from smiling. Encroaching, the threat of hysterical tears: god dammit I’m drinking a really nice wine! In the centre of Bordeaux! And here’s a two-tier cream situation and a REALLY LIGHT ARMAGNAC BABA! We take holidays in these moments, I realise, and when you get too close to the edge—when things are too good, or you’re almost at the end of things—the real world encroaches, and you panic. I’ll get up from this table and I’ll stroll through the city and I’ll have a wonderful time, but this was the peak: we’re on a slow slide back to reality, where the bills still have to be paid, and the interpersonal relationships will have to be navigated, and the work is always precarious, and the politics is still fucked, and bombs still rain down on Palestine, and the you can go to prison, now, for just organising a protest, and the work goes on. The relentless work of surviving, of building. But now in this moment, here I am, tears swimming around my eyes, the last mouthful of a feather-light, syrup-steeped, alcoholly baba, and a last taste of a secret wine, an enduring and uncomplicated friendship, a sunny day and a bill that I absolutely can pay, against all odds, against how difficult the world is and how hard life has become.

It was too much to take, and like an overwhelmed toddler I needed to be taken outside into the fresh air, except that toddlers aren’t also usually a tiny bit drunk and haven’t just paid seventy quid for a three course lunch including drinks.

Before we left, through our painfully idyllic archway window, we watched a black dog completely run away from its owner and launch itself into the fountain, incandescent with glee. Another fleet of high-vis toddlers convened on the water mirror, screaming with delight in the soft fog of spray. Sometimes, life is like that, before it gets too much and everyone has to go home.