A friend of ours (working as a chef on a yacht here in Nice) named Justin, told us about this crazy restaurant north of San Remo, Italy that serves you a crazy amount of food, it's an old barn, etc.... he said everyone around here knows it as the fungi restaurant. We thought, okay this might be cool, so we googled fungi restaurant, mushroom restaurant, San Remo restaurants, and no luck! Finally after a few weeks of searching, we finally found it!! YAY us!
Reservations booked for 8pm we headed to San Remo to do some looking around. By 6pm, we were done looking and wondering what to do next. A drive up and up and up the mountain finally landed us at Ca'Mea, an old oil mill now operating as a restaurant- it was only 6:30m. So we got out, took some pictures, and thanks to Seabass' great Italian, got our reservations bumped up to 7pm.
There is no menu at all, you just kinda sit down and then they stuff your face for the next three hours. Already located at the table is a basket of bread, along with bread sticks (the little ones in the bags), a pitcher of sparkling water, and a bottle of their house wine. This is essentially bottomless depending how much bread and how much water/wine you'd like.
Then they start bringing the food.. This restaurant is known as the mushroom restaurant, so practically every dish has mushrooms (did I mention Julie doesn't like mushrooms?? She went for the ambiance rather than the food). The menu of the evening was as follows:
1. Steak tartar - essentially raw ground beef covered in olive oil, garlic, and basil (I tried a bit of it, but Julie chickened out). It didn't taste like much if you had a lot of bread with it.
2. A pile of cheese that they kind of just threw on your plate - it looked like cottage cheese but tasted like potato salad minus the potatoes. Julie tried it, but SURPRISE, she hated it. (Julie: "The taste lingered forever so I had to drink a whole glass of wine to cover it up - blegh!")
3. Mushroom omelette - no description necessary - Julie tried it, I ended up eating it for her
4. Cheese quiche - AMAZING! It was like mac and cheese without the noodles. Julie ATE it.
5. Scalloped potatoes covered in mushrooms - pretty decent - Julie ate the potatoes, I ate her mushrooms. Are we seeing a pattern here?
6. Then there was this crazy thing... raw vegetables (beets, tomatoes, celery, fennel, carrots, red peppers) and an anchovy-based mushroomy olive oil dip. The idea was to take the vegetable, dip it in the sauce, and then take a piece of bread under the veggie in case you spill! Pretty much a fondue, since it had a little candle underneath it to keep it toasty.
7. Next came a mushroom pasta dish - a mushroom cream sauce on tagliatella noodles. Nothing special.
8. With the pasta, some mushroom risotto, which was yummy! Again Julie actually ate this one.
This is where we took a good 20 minute break to let our stomachs settle. We had also gone through a bottle of wine, two pitchers of sparkling water, and a basket and a bit of bread. WHOA!
9. The main dish was to come next - we had a choice of 4 dishes (leg of lamb, lamb chops, breaded and fried mushrooms, and a t-bone steak). Since there were four of us, we got one of each and shared. SO MUCH FOOD! The leg of lamb was an actual entire leg of a lamb, the t-bone was 1kg (2.2 pounds), there were like 20 fried mushrooms (HUGE ONES), and 4 little lamb chops. Needless to say, we couldn't finish it all. The lamb chops tasted like dirty pork chops (blegh), the leg of lamb tasted like roast beef, the fried mushrooms were salty and yummy (not for Ju), and the t-bone was amazing (even though it was quite pink/red) - Julie ate a good portion of the steak! YEA YEA!
10. DESSERT!!!!! Tiramisu that came in a huge pot (resembled a toilet bowl, so they brought us a roll of toilet paper with it - funny!), and then berries with amazingly rich and creamy ice cream - so gooooood!
11. Don't forget, since we were in Italy, we got lemoncello and an Italian grappa - very strong indeed! They are designed to help digest your food and prevent flatulence (didn't so much work in that sense or so Julie, Seabass and Katie tell me hahaha! I was the only one without stomach issues at the end of this meal.) Anyways, they were both VERY strong and the old Italian ladies sitting next to us laughed every time I took a sip because of the faces I made, but when in Italy....
12. After our delightful desserts, we were served espresso to wake us up for the long drive home.
It was a flat price of 40 euros for the experience, and we were there for a good 3 hours. The restaurant was packed and it was splendid time!
Definitely a restaurant to go to! Even if you don't like Mushrooms, you'll enjoy the ambiance (or so the French would say)!
So it's raining here AGAIN! I don't think they've ever experienced weather like they have since we got here. It's been rainy and cold and just plain gross. In fact, the town next to us (Antibes) with all the boats and stuff (see picture album of Antibes on flickr) got 15 cm of snow on Tuesday. THIS IS PRACTICALLY UNHEARD OF! No one had snow shovels to get rid of it and tonnes of boats were damaged. It was kinda funny cause we were 
on our way to Cannes (on the other side of Antibes from us in Nice) by train and we pulled up to the train station and Julie was like "Hey, Snow!" totally joking and thinking that it was just the rock-type dust stuff that we saw in Paris; but nope, the second you hit the train station it was 15 cm of snow. Then we got to the other side of Antibes and into Cannes and it was gone again, almost like it never happened.
So needless to say, because we are too cheap to buy an umbrella, we've been spending a lot of time indoors. Julie is attempting the most annoying 1000 piece puzzle of a beach, and I'm reading Merde Happens. If I knew how to knit, I would be at this point. Then maybe I could sell the finished products and make some money. That being said....
We still don't have jobs, but not because of a lack of trying. We've searched and posted and bothered lots of people, but because the economy is garbage, travelers that would normally be moving on and freeing up jobs, are staying put, and 3 million other people are competing for jobs on angloinfo- just about the only website that advertises for English speaking jobs in the area. We've even offered to babysit people's dogs, but every time we think we're going to have a visitor we get an email saying that they've decided to leave the dog for free with friends. So ya, still unemployed. If you happen to know of anyone in the area that could hook us up with jobs, please drop us a line!
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