Just after we emerged from the Japanese Garden I called ahead to check there wouldn't be an issue with getting a table for two around midday at a restaurant I expected would be doing significant business on a Friday lunchtime. Perhaps I should have twigged when the voice on the other end announced this would be no problem whatsoever, but I didn't, did I?
Still, lack of breakfast had me concerned that a late arrival on the doorstep might cause problems, and as we made our way through the Oak and Eucalypt Woodlands, thoughts about minor issues like parking increasingly came to the fore.
Back in the car, however, there wasn't much that could go wrong in the navigation department, and for once nothing did. We sailed along the last bit of the Domain Highway, on to the Brooker, looped around onto Davey Street and hit the right turn to take us back onto Macquarie. Miraculously, there was even a parking spot about three doors up from our destination, and it was a remarkably easy one when it came to inserting The Blue Bug in a temporary resting place.
I was, however, absolutely flabbergasted when we were ushered into the dining room. We were the only guests in the area, and it remained that way for the rest of our stay. Strange.
Remi de Provence also serves as a rather good bottle shop, though bottle shop isn’t quite the right descriptor for something that probably has a special descriptor in French. My High School French is mostly a distant memory, and my vocabulary probably didn’t stretch to a specialist supplier of wine and cheese that doubles as a restaurant. We were, after all, talking the late sixties, where European conceptions of wine and food were, well, foreign.
But take a glance at the wine list (all twenty-seven pages of it) in the PDF at the foot of the page here, the cheese selection and menu and you’ll get a sense of what the place is about.
Remi de Provence, Cascade Brewery and across the river to Orana House