Les Voyageurs - Banon

Excellent service, the personal was so good. we arrived early, had a different guest and everything was sorted very quickly. our eating was excellent, timings were excellent and all enjoyed the experience.

The service was slow when the staff was busy and had forgotten us. Eating was okay. it's on a beautiful location.

For this years Father's day we decided to go for lunch in the small but beautiful village of Banon. We have been there many times since wandering around the hills of the Haute Provence is a rare delight. So used to be lunch in the...local restaurant The Voyageur.. I had reserved a table outside so all started out well there was sun, a bit of wind and a cycle tour that was going to pass for our entertainment. So we ordered a beer and a glass of white wine and studied the menu. The beer appeared after about a minute and the wine never appeared. We asked twice, the waiter nodded and disappeared. My wife had the warm goat cheese salad and I took the lamb, with a glass of red wine. We waited over 40 minutes, the white wine was still invisible and cycle tour had passed. The restaurant started to empty and we were still waiting, and waiting. Finally the food arrived with two glasses of red wine. Apparently white wine is inhibited here. We almost send the food back burt were afraid for another hour wait and we were hungry. We should have send it back. The salad was just that no dressing, no vinegar, no oil, no salt, no pepper, no nothing beside a small piece of luke warm goat cheese and a part of an old tomato. May be it was the outside temperature that kept the cheese warm? The lamb must have been in its older years a mutton steak at best but hard to cut and even harder to digest. We drank our wine and decided to order a local Banon cheese for dessert. It never came but we were presented the bill instead which included the glass of white wine.. We felt very disappointed and decided that was it no more Voyageur for us, certainly not in summer when service is non existant.

On a beautiful sunny day we enjoyed a memorable lunch outside at the town square at Restaurant les Voyageurs. I had pieds et paquets d’agneau, a local lamb-based specialty which included lamb feet “pieds) and a ground-up lamb patty “paquets” – bundles of ground lamb...tripe, salt pork, garlic, parsley) in a delicious sauce. Finally had a tripe dish I enjoyed – probably because the tripe was pretty well disguised by so many other flavors. Also, maybe there’s a difference in lamb tripe vs the beef I had before. A marvelous lunch with our host's little dog under the table enjoying the lamb bones I was happy to share. Very attentive and sprightly waitress was a plus.

We were attracted to this cafe by it's numerous recommendations - La Petite Futé and it's Marmite d'Or, so expectations were high. We were super hungry after cycling 80km under the blazing Provencal sun and ordered a salade and pasta with roquefort.Surprisingly the pasta was tasteless (hard to achieve with blue cheese) and the salade OK, but no where near as good as other local salads we've eaten. When the waiter asked about the food we told him there was no taste to the pasta, he promised to speak to the chef but we never heard from him again.Would recommend trying a different place next time - one that isn't resting on it's laurels.