Ski food: downhill all the way

Just back from a wonderful week's skiing in Meribel, in the French Alps. The one sour note: the food. Many of the bars and restaurants have been taken over and staffed by Brits and other English speakers and the food has suffered as a result.

Take one of the bars nearest to the slopes, the Cactus. It serves baked potatoes and beans. I don't go to France for that. And though it keeps some French dishes on the menu, they have been anglicised. A chevre chaud salad came with the cheapest goat's cheese on a slice of bullet hard bread. I asked for more dressing. It came in little tubs. Worse, a salade nicoise came without anchovies, with a very few fine slices of one of those tasteless stoned black olives I associate with British pizzas, a huge pile of dry tinned tuna, and green beans that burst to fill the mouth with cold liquid. They don't offer bread, either. And everything comes with sliced raw onion. The staff are charming and helpful, but that's little consolation.

We stayed in nearby Brides-les-Bains, where the food was pretty bad, too. At least they have some sort of excuse: most of the year they play host to people trying to lose weight, so food isn't a priority. A Logis de France meal had something wrong with every course, apart from the cheese, which tells you something. The blueberries on the fromage frais dessert were still frozen. I still don't know where the strand of tinsel I found in my mouth came from. An honourable exception in Brides-les-Bains was La Petite Auberge. I hope they can keep it up.