The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
Chickening Out at the Market

Sunday is the big market day in L'Isle sur-la-Sorgue and oh my, was it! Easily 4-5 times the number of vendors and probably ten times the number of people as on Thursday. These were the sort of crowds we usually saw in warmer weather. Some of this may have been due to the holiday season but it was nice to see so many people come out to be with each other. As I have mentioned before, I think Europe's street markets are as much a social gathering as a commercial event.

We certainly don't need -- or want -- to accumulate more "stuff," so our primary goal today was to score some rotisserie chicken and roasted potatoes They roast the potatoes in the bottom of the rotisserie where the juices off the spit baste them while they cook. Incredible taste! There was only one chicken vendor on Thursday but three of them today, so we had to scope it all out first, not an easy thing to do. The Sunday market stretched from one end of town to the other and up and down most of the major commercial streets. It was another total immersion experience.

To make it worse for the waistline, most of the food vendors offered samples of their wares. It was rather like Costco on steroids! But we are not crowd people and eventually enough was enough. We fought our way through the mob for as long as we could take it, then picked our favorite vendor, bought our chicken and headed home to make lunch of it. This was when we really appreciated that we only "lived" two blocks away!

The Sunday market is as much an experience as an event. There's no real way to capture what it's like in photos, there are just too many people and too many vendors up and down the narrow streets. What was it like? Imagine your local shopping mall filled with holiday shoppers, except that there are no enclosed stores. All the goods are offered for sale only along the walkways. Then narrow those walkways by half and you'd be pretty close!

I did get a couple of pictures to tell the tale. The booth on the corner of the first shot is our chicken vendor of choice. You can see the rotisserie trailer under the canopy. It may be winter by the calendar, but the temperatures were quite mild. No leaves on the trees, of course, which did make it seem a bit stark, but the flower and produce vendors displays were eye-catching splashes of color. Imagine the same scene with the plane trees bathing everything in dappled sunlight. Magical!


We did venture out again in the early afternoon after all the vendors had packed up and the crowds dispersed. There were chestnuts roasting on an open fire (really!) in the Christmas market. (I may have to try some before they're gone, but I confess I have no idea how I'm supposed to eat them!) We watched the ducks for a bit, discovered a new favorite glacerie for the now-almost-compulsory afternoon gelato/hot chocolate break and generally wandered, checking out the few die-hard vendors who were still offering pretty things to us pretty people after the market had shut down.

The antique dealers we dropped in on yesterday were in warehouse mode, but another complex in town (among many) -- also with about 30 dealers -- had its high-end showrooms set around a central courtyard. The view from the street was enticing and it was great place to poke around in, although I did feel a little guilty about it since we were certainly not buying prospects. (I got over it, though.)


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