Local Chinese restaurants

We have been to 3 of our local Chinese restaurants whilst we were over, mainly due to the very dissapointing french ones.
The french restaurants were all pretty good last year but in the case of 3 of those new owners have taken over and completely ruined the places in under 6 months. Some are staff of the old restaurant so they knew how they ran and booking was necessary, now almost empty and food was awful. Why are these so incompetent? As I said before the Italians are far better with food than the french and I have never eaten in an Italian or Chinese where they just open a tin of mixed veg!

Apart from in a few places the non-French restaurants serve what they think the French want from a national cuisine. So bears no relation to chinese food! Italien generally a better bet for us and less meaty.

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Yes The Chinese provide such a range to suit all its quite and eye full not to mention belly full. Why less meaty? Less carby would be far healthier.

Chinese restaurants in France aren’t usually Chinese, they are other SE Asian (Viet or Laotian usually) it’s lazy shorthand by Fr people calling them chinois. In the provinces and rurally where people are more suspicious of ‘weird foreign food’ that cuisine is often heavily adapted and limited to a few stereotypical versions of dishes rather than authentic and lively. It’s a great pity. I was in Vietnam in February and was delighted to eat all the deliciousness I ate with my great granny as a small child, which bears very little resemblance to French restaurant Viet food.
That said there are some fabulous Viet restaurants in Paris.

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Yes, most are not ‘Chinese’ restaurants. Most here are Vietnamese. We do have a very good Cantonese restaurant nearby, whose owners are from Hong Kong and their cuisine is identical to a UK Cantonese restaurant. They have a very extensive menu, very much not in the French way of having a handful of dishes.

There was a fabulous Vietnamese restaurant in Carcassonne until a few years ago. I was very sad to see it go. It was run by two sisters, the eldest, the cook was probably in her 70’ s and they closed because the owner of the building wanted to sell it. They didn’t have it in them to start again from scratch so retired. We had a table booked for their last night which I missed because my Ryanair flight from the UK to Toulouse was 3 hours late :rage:

Did you claim your EU261 compensation for that? You have 6 years from the flight date.

It was actually just a few minutes less than 3 hours, which is the cutoff point so I couldn’t claim.

A few weeks ago I was delayed again by over 2 hours because of the ATC strike. We were put on the aircraft on time, we pulled back from the gate on time and spent the more than two hours on the plane at a hardstanding nearby. It was very hot and the cabin crew were selling bottles of water to those onboard (€3.50 a shot) I tried to argue that as the expected delay was 2 hours or more (the pilot told us this after we stopped at the hard standing) refreshments should be provided free of charge but they said that they couldn’t as we’d pulled away from the gate :rage:. I had a large bottle of water so was OK but many people paid.

Weird. I thought it was 2 hours on a short flight. Article 6 1(a) of EC261/2004 says 2 hrs if flight under 1500km (250 euros). 3 hours if flight over 1500km and under 3500km (400 euros).

There are some exemptions but not as many as airlines like to claim.

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Technically push-back = departure. Sleazy but they got away with the duty of care on that one.

Technically landing = not when the wheels touch but when the door (typically front left) is open AND the first passenger is able to go out ie steps or ramp are connected and useable and no longer blocked by staff

No, if it’s 2 hours or more they should provide or you should be able to claim reasonable expenses for some things. For compensation it’s 3 hours or more if < 1500 km.

Indeed. The reason giving for pulling back from the gate was the possibility of getting a last minute slot which would need to be taken quickly. Needless to say we didn’t.

Mmm was it Ryanair or Easyjet?

Looked again. I think the 3 hours must have come from a court case - I don’t have access to those

Where is this?

Carcassonne.

Strangely, most of our local restaurants are pizza joints, though we have a good couscous place (owned by the Tunisian family who run the French restaurant nearby).

We do have a good French restaurant a little out of town, where today I tried Mahi-Mahi, cru, for the first time.