Les Marchés d’Aix-en-Provence: Place Richelme and Places des Comtales

If I’m going to make a trip to a fresh air market and back in the mornings before class at 9 am, I better figure out their locations and the quickest route to each.

The Place Richelme market is a food market that is open every day from 8 am to 1 pm.  It is 750 meters or about half a mile from the Aparthotel Adagio.  You take Rue des Chartreux north to Rue Celony, turn right and continue to Rue Van Loo where you turn right.  You continue on Rue Van Loo, crossing Cr. Sextius, where Van Loo becomes Rue des Cordeliers.  You continue on that, passing Le Fournil des Cordeliers bakery until Rue Maréchal Foch where you make another right before the Halles aux Graines, at the far corner of which is the Virgin Mary, watching over the tourists in the Place Richelme, although this is just a food market so there might not be many.  We might have to make a pit stop at the Amorino gelato shop back on the corner of Rue des Cordeliers and Rue Maréchal Foch.  Won’t the boys be happy!

The Route from Aparthotel Adagio to Place Richelme

At the south side of Place Richelme is the Fontaine Sanglier, one of the many fountains in Aix.  The sanglier is the local wild pig and if you want to return to Aix, remember that you need to rub its tusks!  There are several bakeries around here:  Boulangerie Paul, Le Pain Quotidien, Maison Saint-Honoré; also several others that concentrate on patisserie.  After the market hours, cafés set up tables and chairs in the Place Richelme.  I should also mention that there is a flower market just north of Place Richelme in the Place de l’Hotel de Ville on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

A larger food market takes place in Places des Comtales on the Aix market days of Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.  It is the combined markets of Place des Prêcheurs and Place de Verdun near the Palais de Justice.  These markets are just a few blocks further on from the Place Richelme.  Exit the southeast corner of Place Richelme and take Rue Mejanes south to Rue Chaudronniers, make a left then a slight right onto Rue Monclar.  Follow Rue Monclar around the Palais de Justice to the market on Place de Verdun.

Route from Place Richelme to Place de Verdun

And that is where the food markets are.  On Cours Mirabeau they have a flea and crafts market on the Market Days (Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.  They also have an Arts & Crafts Market at the top of Avenue Victor Hugo and Rue Thiers by the Palais de Justice.

Getting Around Aix by Bus

 It’s been a while since I mentioned the bus system in Aix and I’ve been meaning to scope out the best routes to the most important places.  Like to Carrefour.

The Aix en Bus website is very good and I hope the bus system itself lives up to it.  The regular fare is 1.20€ plus 0.10€ de support (does that mean tax?) so 1.30€.  There doesn’t seem to be a discount for kids.  A round trip or 2-ticket fare is 2.30€ + 0.10€ and you can buy 10 tickets for 9€ + 0.10€.  You can buy them on the bus.

We get a bus pass from Road Scholar so we shouldn’t have to worry about it.  Camila and the boys should just pay by the trip since we’ll walk to most places within the city center.  There is a 7-day pass for 55€ but I’m not sure what regions it covers since a 30 day pass only costs 28€.

The AixenBus website has plans of all the routes and a tool, as in Google Maps, that you can use to plan your tailor-made itinerary (Votre itinéraire sur mesure), for instance, the route to Carrefour.  But I think it is easier to use Google Maps, except that now Google Maps is showing me the current departure time for Pittsburgh, although the results show the current time in Aix.  It’s also not as easy to see the previous stops of the bus route in Google Maps, as I swear it was before.  Hopefully everything will straighten out once we are there.  In any case, it looks like the #05 bus is the one to take from the Niollon stop on Rue de la République, getting off at C. Cial des Milles, taking 33 minutes.  Coming back though, we’d have to walk from La Rotonde back to the hotel since #05 takes a slightly different route in the other direction.

#05 bus route from Aparthotel Adagio to Carrefour 

Rick Steves doesn’t mention the local bus system because he assumes everything worth seeing in 3 days is within the historic center and you can walk to it or, if not, you can take a taxi.  He does mention that the longer distance buses to towns like Marseille, Arles and Avignon are faster than the trains.  I’ll study those and post my findings later.

Aix Restaurants to Check Out & Why

Yes, I know we have about 40 days to fill up with eating out but I want to make sure we don’t miss any of the typical Provençal dishes and not all the restaurants in Aix offer them.  

Having said that, my first restaurant, Le Saint Jean, isn’t particularly Provençal and is rather heavy on the meats, but we usually don’t do steaks at home and who wants to grill in an aparthotel?  Their steaks look cooked just right  and they come with French fries.  It’s a relatively new restaurant (2 years?) and offers an extensive menu of beef cuts and several choices for lamb, pork, veal, and poultry (magret de canard for instance).  There is also pasta and a good selection of fish dishes for those who cringe at the thought of eating red meat (yum!).  The mixed charcuterie and cheese board looks great but for two people it wouldn’t leave much room for the plat, much less the dessert. 

 But maybe we could just order that with a Salade Saint Jean:  Salade du marché, Jarret de Boeuf confit, pomme de terre, tomate, croutons à  l’ail, vinaigrette moutarde.

The second restaurant, La Brocherie, has a wood-burning hearth where they grill their meats and fish.  The ambiance is a little less sophisticated but it looks like a lot of fun.  Their menu offers two typical soups: soupe de poisson and soupe au pistou (roughly a fish soup and a minestrone) and they also offer a bouillabaise at a reasonable price (26€).    They also have classic French dishes like Magret de Canard, lamb chops, veal kidneys and andouillette. 

Camila and the boys might like it since they feature both pasta and fish. Lots of dessert choices and for Silas they have l’Assiette Gourmand with pavé au chocolat, crème brûlée à la lavande, glace verveine, glace calisson, soufflé glacé à l’anis, or variations thereof.

The third restaurant for this post is Les Galinas - La Table Provençale, a little more sophisticated and upscale than La Brocherie with a more limited menu and a more careful presentation of the food, even if they don’t have tablecloths and are trying to recreate grandmother’s provençal cooking.  It is a Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant so we can probably expect smaller portions and because the menu changes, one should probably check the menu before making a reservation, which is pretty much required for all these places.  Les Galinas always seem to have lamb tripe, sardines in oil, and oeufs mimosas on the menu and usually offer a meat dish, a pasta and a fish among their plats.  There are photos of an octopus appetizer, head cheese, and someone mentioned rabbit so it will be interesting to see what they have the day we go.

Until the next episode, Bon Appétit!

Restaurants for Camila and the Boys

 Since we’ll be in Aix-en-Provence for 6 weeks, when Camila and the boys are there, I’ll concentrate on restaurants with dishes they might like to eat rather than Pieds et Paquets, Agneau au Lait, and Magret de Canard.  However, I must admit that not one of the restaurants on my Google Map list was among Rick Steves’ recommendations, and not one of Rick’s recommendations was on my list.  Again however, the one recommendation of his for London that we went to was really horrid and many of his choices in Aix seem to be chosen for their al fresco ambiance.  Has he even been to them?  He says they « are carefully reviewed by my friends at Tastes of Provence food tours ».  Eh bien…  back to my list.

For Camila, there’s a little restaurant near the Adagio called Restaurant l’Envie that has creative and nicely presented dishes with lots of flowers but, surprisingly, no website.  Their desserts look particularly  attractive.  You can see photos of their dishes at The Fork, and make reservations too.

The boys should like Le Four Aixois (and us too) which specializes in wood-fired pizza.  The mushroom pizza looks good to me, even if it doesn’t have slices of truffle on top.  Hopefully the boys will order something besides cheese and pepperoni, maybe a moitié/moitié, which is half cheese and half anchovy.  Anchovies are big in the south of France.  Did you know that tapenade is traditionally made with anchovies and capers, not just olives?

And yes, I think we’ll be eating pizza more than once.  Some of the pizzerias serve their pizzas Italian style with part of the ingredients added après cuisson or after cooking.  Pizzeria Delices de Capoue is one of those and we should try this après cuisson style at least once, since they have some rather interesting compositions.  If we go to Marseilles, we might visit one of La Bonne Mère locations for pizza where they name them after Marcel Pagnol characters.  In Marseille the influence of Neapolitan immigrants is quite strong.

One of Rick Steves’ recommendations that I would like to try is La Fromagerie du Passage which I had saved in my food shop list but evidently they have a restaurant on the second floor and the roof where you can order a platter of 5 cheeses for 22€.  Rick says you get bread and a salad with that.  They also have a platter for 4 people with 25 different cheeses for 95€.  Do you think the boys would be interested?  I know Papi would be.  They also serve a hamburger.  Or boeuf tartare.

Les 25 Fromages Differents

There are also a couple of restaurants with the Michelin Bib Gourmand.  I don’t think we’d be able to afford a Michelin starred restaurant but these are supposed to be gourmet level and not too expensive.  One is Licandro le Bistro which has a formule for lunch that isn’t too expensive (34€).  Another is Vintrépide which also has a formule for lunch (complet 34€, entrée/plat or plat/dessert 28€).  Its inpiration of the week for lunch is lamb ravioli, cod with artichoke and cherry clafouti for dessert, which sounds pretty good to me.  A third Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurant is Coté Cour but their prices are a bit higher.

Because Aix is a university town, there are a lot of international options including Moroccan, Thai, Japanese, and Korean.  There’s an upscale Thai restaurant, Phatsara, that has a large menu and nicely presented dishes.  There’s also a Breton creperie: Le P’tit Breton and an upscale Ethiopian restaurant, Chez Ama.  Upscale as opposed to a hole in the wall.  Mary Vallejo ate there and said it was very good.

And of course, we can always cook in the apartment, can’t we?  And the markets also have takeout food, especially Middle Eastern.  I even found a rotisserie chicken takeout not too far away from the hotel.  I don’t think we’ll starve.  What would you like?

 

Cabillaud / artichaut

 

Clafoutis cerise