Sunday lunch at Le Verdoyant, Lac Montriond

Having lucked out at Le Bout du Lac last Sunday and discovered where the population of the valley had been hiding out during inter-season, we figured this Sunday, we’d book in advance and try out Le Verdoyant at the other end of Lac Montriond.

With a table booked for 1 pm and a back-pack fully laden with iPad, Fire tablets* (just in case) and warm coats (just in case), we scrubbed up, shooed the kids out of the door and set off for Lac Montriond. We were blessed with another lovely day (which was lucky as our table was out on the terrace) and we found a nice parking spot right outside the front of the building.

Le Verdoyant is another dream location and has obviously been recently refurbished. It’s a good venue for the kids, especially when they get itchy feet. Ours went and played, well within sight, on the banks of the lake with Iz making daisy chains and T scraping out tracks for his cars in the gravel.

The menu once again is traditional Savoyard and similar to Le Bout du Lac at the other end of the Lake. Apparently, English kids are notoriously fussy (I won’t mention who said that but, “how very dare you?!”) and on the more traditional menus there are usually only one or two dishes for kids, one of which is roast ham and chips which, true to the stereotype, our fussy son doesn’t like. He eats the chips and I eat the rest. No wonder I’m piling on the pounds!

I opted for steak and mushrooms again which came on a board with fries in a fryer basket and a selection of veg, salad and my mushrooms in separate little bowls on the board. The steak was a nice piece of meat and well cooked, the veg didn’t have quite the pazzaz delivered at Le Bout du Lac but I enjoyed it all very much and polished off the lot.

Nina went for the tartiflette and having sampled quite a few since arriving here, she felt that it wasn’t one of the best and lacked flavour. All the ingredients of potato, sauce, cheese and bacon were there, but hadn’t had chance to amalgamate together enough into that lovely comforting stodgy mix synonymous with the region.

If we hadn’t had the kids with us, we could happily have sat on the terrace all afternoon, in the sunshine, drinking in the magnificent views… And the beers and the house sangria (‘myrtille’ or blueberry sangria no less. It was delicious!), but we did so we didn’t.

There’s always a lap of the lake for a nice post-lunch stroll but you can also walk beyond the lake and up through the small hamlet of Les Albertans and on towards Ardent. There is a category 3 listed waterfall just before Ardent where you turn can turn back and retrace your steps. We’d tried to reach this before but when we hadn’t arrived after two hours of slow progress and kid complaints we had to abort and turn back early. To be fair to him, T is only little and I do drag them a long way. Anyway, we all still wanted to see the waterfall and luckily you can drive to Ardent, park up and walk a short distance for a look.

As you drive out towards Ardent, you pass through one of those concrete canopies above the roadway (I never know what those are for actually. Is is to stop rock falls, avalanches or water taking out the road? Or all of the above?). You can pull over in the small lay-by on the right hand side of the road and walk down to the footbridge. Alternatively, you can park before the first chalet in the village of Ardent, cross the river, turn right and walk a couple of hundred metres to the falls.

They didn’t disappoint. Thanks to the recent rainfall, the river was full and the falls were incredible!

We need to go back in Winter and check these bad boys out when they’re frozen.