L'Atelier l'Art des Mets — Restaurant in Apt

We booked our little dinner at L'Atelier l'Art des Mets, a multi-year Michelin bib gourmand restaurant.

The service is lovely, just one waitress very sweet, not too talkative, but knowledgeable on the dishes. The pace of the meal was very good, it took 1.5 hours.

The atmosphere of the restaurant is.....eclectic? It reminds me more of a fine dining restaurant at an all-inclusive in the Caribbean to be honest. Lots of space, knicks-knacks, kind of sparse and lots of grey. It was necessarily a "beautiful" restaurant.

The food was great. Had some Provençal dishes and everything was well seasoned. The choice of flavours on some of the dishes were interesting as this is really all up to the chef - for instance; a recent review revealed only 1 in 10 people truly enjoy the taste of black licorice ( I am one of them, my wife is definitely not) but the sorbet was black licorice. And the côte de boeuf was quite tough as I noticed it was cut with grain. The salad was fantastic, crunchy summer vegetables, and we loved the cream of Tzatziki and apple sorbet.

Glasses of wine ranged from about €4.50 to about €8 which is great as it was all local.

Nice little meal...

I had high expectations going to this restaurant for lunch; regrettably they were not fully met, but that may be due to misapprehension on my part. I was not eased by being handed 3 menus — 2 forms pf ‘du jour’ plus a la carte — too much choice? I saw dishes on one I’d liked to have had with those of another — probably possible but confusing to the customer. Ultimately settled for the lunch ‘du jour’ picking the plat gourmand, and slow cooked lamb casserole with gnocchi, and a pistachio cake/ice cream desert. All were good; none was great. Accompanied by a Luberon rosé. One person for table service inevitably means uncomfortable gaps of time, and so it was. Overall, the meal was pleasant; pleasant means I may return — possibly more for convenience...

Good food, a little odd (that dish with all the beans) at times and perhaps a little simple occasionally (Provençal style?) but nonetheless very good. The wine was excellent, some of the best I’ve got in a while. It was also great to see the chef and have him tell us about what we were eating.

The restaurant is next to a road, so the occasional noise breaks the tranquility of the place but nothing that’d stop me...