Eating in Brittany

The first thing to know, because every tourist gets it wrong: in Brittany, the galette is savoury and made with buckwheat, the crêpe is sweet and made with wheat flour. Buckwheat is not a cereal but a member of the knotweed family, a cousin of sorrel, which grows on the region’s poor, acid soils, hence its nickname “black wheat”.

Second thing: a galette is eaten with cider, served in a bowl, not a glass. It is not folklore, it is custom, and a crêperie that gives you a glass is not necessarily bad, but it does not do what the others do.

Seafood

Brittany produces most of France’s oysters, and every bay has its own taste: Cancale is briny and fleshy, Riec-sur-Bélon gives the flat oyster, round with a hazelnut flavour, and the Rade de Brest and the Gulf of Morbihan each have their own. Oysters can be eaten all year round, despite the rule of months with an “r”: they are simply milky in summer, when they reproduce.

Blue lobster, brown crab, scallops from the Bay of Saint-Brieuc, fished from November to April: these are the products that make the reputation of Breton restaurants, and you find them at the market as well as at a Michelin starred table.

The restaurants in our guide

Our guide lists two hundred and forty six restaurants, almost all recognised by the MICHELIN Guide: starred, Bib Gourmand or simply selected. It is far from the only good food in Brittany, but it is a selection checked by people whose job it is.

The markets

This is where you eat best for next to nothing: a Breton market has oysters opened on the spot, fish landed that morning, salted butter by the kilo and galettes saucisses in the east of the region. Three hundred and one municipalities hold one, almost always in the morning.

What to taste at least once

• Kouign-amann, born in Douarnenez around 1860 at the hands of baker Yves-René Scordia, who ran out of cakes on a busy day: bread dough, butter and sugar, folded like puff pastry. Its name gives the recipe: “butter cake”.
• Far breton, with or without prunes, depending on which camp you belong to.
• The galette saucisse, in the east: a grilled sausage rolled in a cold galette, eaten standing up at the market or the football ground.
• Salted butter, which goes back to a tax privilege: Brittany, an independent duchy and then a province that negotiated its union in 1532, was exempt from the gabelle, the salt tax. The rest of the kingdom switched to unsalted butter, which had become cheaper; here salt stayed plentiful, and so did salted butter.
• Cider, drunk dry rather than sweet with a galette.