Le Baril de Sel - Bordeaux

A remarkable place to eat when visiting Bordeaux. Classy and excellent French food, with great local specialties (pigeons) and a great wine selection!

Tucked away in a small street only a couple hundred meters from the busy streets of Bordeaux is this fantastic small restaurant. Good tasting meals. We had the pigeon and risotto. This homey restaurant is definitely worth a stop for lunch or dinner!

Just around the corner from our holiday apartment, we popped in here for lunch. The set lunchtime menu provided plenty of choice. 3 courses for 14.95 all prepared with f!are and great personal service. We would never have found this if we had not stumbled across it and would have missed a real treat.

This isn't discount eating but neither is it pretentious. We're Aussies who enjoy a little bit of French food every now and then and this wonderful little restaurant didn't disappoint. Indeed, the whole evening ticked all the boxes. Fresh, seasonal food, cooked with care, attentive but not obtrusive service, a competent wine menu and appropriate lighting and ambience. And seriously, the food on the limited menu was divine. Wow. Support this place - they deserve to thrive.

Le baril de sel has been open just for 2 months and we found it by chance just turning into the wrong street. We came for the dinner around 7.30 pm and we were the only customers until 9:30 when another couple turned up for their reservation. The restaurant belongs to a couple: husband Thomas who is the chef and his wife Leslie who is in front of the house. They both are very friendly people, spoke good English and explained the dishes and wine selection. The food is very good with the fresh ingredients but needs some refinement. For starter we had mackerel on a musseline of artichoke and some kind of emulsion. It was fine, cooked well. Than for main course i took the baebue fish filet and it was again served with some kind of puree and emulsion. The fish was cooked perfectly, it is just sides could be a bit more different. Another main dish we had was the lamb shoulder from Pyrenees cooked for a long time, than shredded and molded into the circle served with the pot of white beans. The meat was good and tasty but unfortunately 1/3 of it was skin and fat from the shoulder blade which was uneatable. The dessert was disappointing, we took the ganache cacao 76% and what we got was two pieces of bread soaked in yuzu, i think, and a small round slice of chocolate ganache which was rolled in the bread crumbs. Too much bread and not enough chocolate for the promised 76% chocolate dessert. We will definitely come back and try the new menu which is changing every 2 weeks and we really hope this restaurant will survive the tough restaurant scene of Bordeaux.