Une Blague pour mon Blog

Our last restaurant excursion was a wonderful dinner and evening at a restaurant called Coté Jardin on the Place de la République in the old city. As before, we paid a fixed price for a fixed menu. My table mates were British, American and Swedish folks. We began the evening talking in French, but by the end of the night most of us had resorted to English. 

Some of the younger students from around the world.

Julienne, our prof, is on the left.

We had a choice of entrées - salade chèvre chaude or salade niçoise. This time I chose the salade chèvre chaude and was not disappointed. 

The plat du jour was either fish or lamb, and I chose the lamb. The portion was huge, but it was cooked perfectly. 

Now on each table, there were carafes of rosé wine and pichets of red. People helped themselves to whatever they wanted throughout the evening and the servers just kept replenishing them. At one point, we ran out of red wine and my colleague, Jane, asked (in French) for another pichet. I believe our server's name was Yves. He looked at her very seriously and said "non". I piped in and said "Monsieur, un autre s'il vous plâit". He returned a few minutes later with a pichet and handed it to Jane. She thanked him profusely and then she offered to fill my glass.  Of course I said yes and she began to pour from the pichet. It was water! The two of us started to laugh and Yves just grinned as he passed us another pichet that he held in his other hand. This time it was filled with our red wine. The joke or la blague was on us. Hence the title of my blog post.