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Restaurant Review
In France, across the Swiss border and half hour south of Geneva, we visit the city that hosted the Winter Olympics in 1992. Its fifty-five thousand permanent residents explode every tourist season. It was a quarter of a million in 2007, the tourist bureau advises us. No wonder, the weather resembles Portland, Oregon, Cezanne once came to Talloires, a few kilometers up the road, and that very town is mentioned in A Thousand Places to Visit Before You Die. And there are two four-star restaurants, neither Chinese. The tourist office, though, does tout seven Asian restaurants, five are Chinese, they have a hand-out of them, and we find three in a two-block radius. You guessed it, we are in Annency. One on that list is Le Mandarin at 11 Rue de la Gare (phone: 04 5051-5446). It is closed the day we are there, and anyway we would not eat there becasue it is a take-away place mostly serving young folk, we are told; and they weigh everything customers select, and charge accordingly. At Le Pekin at 12 Avenue de Chambery in Annecy (phone 04 5051-3360), he come upon a real find. This place hosts quite a few tour groups, one from Indonesia is eating there when we do. Here, the menu is in French and English, and a waitress just two days on the job speaks to us in English telling us her name is O'Brien. Turns out she married an Irish chap, an English language teacher. She is from Inner Mongolia, and was just great! This eatery has the cleanest fish tank ever, and lots of lovely calligraphy and Chinese art gracing its walls. It has great Chinese food, too, and four of us indulge in twice as much as we should because it is so good.
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