SATURDAY
Starting out on foot from the hotel after breakfast,
we strolled through the heart of bourgeois 19th-century
Nantes, where the city’s rich merchants left their imposing
mark. We passed through the Place Graslin, stopping to
admire its grand, neoclassical opera house. Across the
square stands the historic brasserie La Cigale (entrées
`1,000– `2,300; lacigale.com), where artists André Breton
and Jacques Prévert used to talk surrealism in the 1920s.
It’s a great place to drink a café au lait and check out the
fabulous art nouveau tiles.
From there, it was a short downhill trot to the newer
part of the city. Here, what was once a waterfront was
filled in the early 20th century, after the river channels silted
up. The resulting concrete landfills remained
unused and deserted until the early aughts, when they
were finally transformed into broad swathes of green—
lined with trees, dotted with public parks, and criss-crossed
by modern tramlines and bike lanes. (Nantes is bike-mad,
we soon discovered.) We walked by an open fruit and
vegetable garden where any passerby is free to pluck an
apple or pull up a carrot and eat it at a nearby picnic table—
one of nine community potagers in the city.
At that point, our formerly Parisian friends Gregory
and Delphine joined us for a walk along the quay. They
had only just gotten settled and were still reeling from the
culture shock. “In Paris, crossing the street is a test of wills.
Here, cars slow down before you even leave the curb,”
Gregory marvelled. We reached a section of the esplanade
embedded with 2,000 glass plaques, each bearing the name
of a slave ship that had once made Nantes its home port.
(The city was responsible for around 5 per cent of the
Atlantic slave trade until it abolished the practice in 1830.)FRIDAY EVENING
We checked in to the reliable Radisson
Blu (doubles from 10,000; radissonblu. com), which has occupied Nantes’ colonnaded former courthouse since that institution moved to Jean Nouvel’s austere black Palais de Justice, on the site of the abandoned shipyards, in 2000. For dinner, we headed to a tiny restaurant called Pickles (tasting menu, ^3 ,800; pickles-restaurant.com)—a
place, our friends had told us, that
embodies the new spirit of Nantes.
“This city has access to wonderful
ingredients, but no local tradition of
cuisine,” said Dominic Quirke, the
English proprietor. “Now, a bunch of
young chefs are changing that.”
Quirke and his French wife opened
Pickles four years ago, after he bailed
out of an IT job in Paris to start
cooking seriously. He served us the
first local chanterelles of the season—
he’d put them through a dehydrator
to add an exquisite crispiness—with
lard and a smoked egg. Next came
superb, obscenely plump mussels
from Groix, an island up the coast,
that Quirke had gotten his hands on
after months of struggling. (“I know
a guy who knows a guy,” he said.)
From top: Nantes’
storied Passage
Pommeraye, an 1893
arcade that remains
one of the city’s
favourite shopping
destinations; the
brasserie La Cigale,
a lively hangout
long favoured by
local artists.WEEKEND
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