Le Saint Etienne

The dining room was beautiful and the atmosphere very friendly. We were welcomed warmly and the service was very good. The menu sounded tempting, though, and the food on our plates didn’t live up to it. The taste was disappointing.

The dinner was excellent, and we had a wonderful time with you. The welcome was perfect. Our only small reservation is that sound carries a bit too easily in the room. Improving that might be hard without losing some of the charm of this old building.

The village and hotel have beautiful architecture, and the views are spectacular. Get up early and the sun rises behind the hill; later, the west side offers a lovely sunset. The village itself is very pretty, and the abbey and monastery where Gabrielle Chanel grew up are worth seeing. There’s also a special little tea room beside the abbey with wonderful homemade pastries. The price is very affordable for a two-star hotel with very little staff. The waiter was super friendly and did his job well, and breakfast was generous, tasty, and inexpensive. It’s quiet, and I appreciated having a ceiling fan in the room. I didn’t regret the stay, though I found it only moderately enjoyable. The food was awful apart from the frozen walnut soufflé, which seemed clearly homemade. Everything else was oily, greasy, bland, or poorly cooked. The monkfish was watery and flavorless, the vegetables tasted canned, the guinea fowl sauce was slimy and disgusting, and the scallops had no taste. The kids’ breaded chicken strips were oily but tender and quite good. There wasn’t much choice for aperitifs, though there was enough, and they were very inexpensive. The room felt almost untouched by time and was only moderately clean, with traces left by previous guests. There were lots of cobwebs on the wallpaper. The bathroom was cute and functional, but it was hard not to splash water everywhere in the bathtub without a shower curtain. There was no soap apart from hand soap. The shutters and windows seemed almost a century old and didn’t always close properly, though there were blackout curtains.

The products were excellent for the price, and the setting was magnificent. Well done to the team, I’ll definitely be back soon. Don’t miss the monks’ canal, the church, and the village.