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Le Clos Occitan – In Carcassonne’s functional Ville Basse well below the touristed towers and gates, we have a leisurely lunch in this elegantly decorated restaurant. Emphasis on “leisurely”…service is stilted and painfully slow.

Our food is mostly boring. Salmon in a pedestrian cream sauce, no doubt straight out of a dusty and understood-by-rote copy of Escoffier, is followed by a pretty decent cassoulet. And that’s really all that’s worth saying. There’s no life to the food, just correctness. The restaurant is packed, and I’m at a loss to understand this, because it’s just not very interesting.

From a similarly boring wine tome, I select a Minervois La Livinière. They bring a Minervois Les Capitelles, but it takes them so long to bring the bottle that I don’t even care to go through the rigmarole of making them correct the error. The wine’s not very good anyway, so I can’t imagine the Livinière would have been all that much better. (10/06)