French Restaurant Review: La Table de Lionel Giraud, Narbonne

Often overlooked by tourists, Narbonne, the hometown of the famous French crooner Charles Trenet, is a charming old town in the Languedoc with one of the best food markets in France and some superb Roman ruins.

It’s also an avidly gastronomic place with some excellent restaurants, including the Michelin two-star La Table de Lionel Giraud. One of Chef Giraud’s dishes – squid from the Golfe du Lion in an extract of fermented carrot juice – recently appeared on a list of the 10 dishes the Michelin Guide inspectors most enjoyed during their 2025 visits. Perhaps not so surprisingly, the inspectors hit the nail on the head with this dish, since the contrast between the chaste appearance of the alabaster-coloured and gently saline squid and the unexpectedly carnal extraction is exhilarating.

This dish also represents Giraud pushing back against France’s increasingly antiquated centralised wholesale food distribution systems. “It just made no sense that all of this beautiful squid landed in Port-la-Nouvelle was sent north to Rungis in suburban Paris to subsequently be dispatched back to restaurants in the region where it was caught,” says Giraud. So he battled to have a button (right to bid) at the wholesale fish market in Port-la-Nouvelle – and won.

“It’s changed everything for me, since my menus are always written according to the catch of the day and the best local seasonal produce. We’re very spoiled in this part of France for the quality of our seafood but also our fruit and vegetables.”

The other thing that completely changed his cooking style was a discovery during a trip to Japan in 2016. Giraud became fascinated by ikejime, the Japanese method of killing fish, which begins by anaesthetising them and then draining them of their blood so that they can age and develop deeper flavour without spoiling.

Dining here the other night with English friends, we admired the beautiful old stone oratory that was once a stop for pilgrims on the route of Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle, and I explained Giraud’s remarkable career. He started out cooking with Christian Constant at Les Ambassadeurs, the now tragically vanished restaurant at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris (after a renovation made it a Rosewood hotel, the new owners converted one of the most beautiful dining rooms in the world into a flashy bar). Then he went on to work at L’Espadon at the Ritz Paris, La Bastide Saint-Antoine in Grasse, Les Prés d’Eugénie with Michel Guérard and Le Cabro d’Or in Les Baux-de-Provence, before becoming head chef, and eventually proprietor, of his eponymous table in Narbonne.

I suddenly realised that I’d set some rather high expectations for the impending meal, but each of our five courses was spectacular, with standouts including the sublime squid dish that seduced the acolytes of Bibendum; an artichoke exalted with caviar; morel mushrooms stuffed with a jus de volaille; and a socarrat (the crunchy rice crust at the bottom of a paella and a much-loved delicacy in Catalonia) with rouille. Few tables better express their terroir in France than this one, and my English friends swooned over every dish.

One thought kept recurring to me during our meal, which is that this restaurant shows off how sophisticated and inventive French cooking has become in provincial France. If there was once a gap between the boldly creative chefs of big cities like Paris, Lyon and Nice and the traditional menus served in rural France and smaller towns, this is no longer true. To the delight of roving gastronomes, avant-garde culinary excellence is now found all over Gaul.

La Table Lionel Giraud, 68 avenue du Général Leclerc, Narbonne, Tel. +33 04 68 41 37 37, maison.saintcrescent.com. Prix-fixe menus €125, €165, €225.