El Buffet Libre

I read about this place a couple of weeks ago and, as we were passing yesterday, decided to call in. Buffet Libre on the Spanish border in La Jonquera will never get a Michelin star. Not even if every restaurant in the world was wiped out by a mysterious bug. It was not good. It's awful.

Where to start? I'd come across the notion of a huge buffet feeding hundreds of people once before, in the Canaries, and despite my initial reservations I had to admit that it was good. When I read about BL I looked forward to a similar experience.

We were on our way back from Barcelona where we had eaten well so I was looking forward to it. There was no room for the car at the front so we drove to the car park at the back. As you drove down the side of the building you could see that the small frontage of the restaurant was going to open into a huge dining room that could sit, at a guess, between 200 and 300 people. The owners had obviously travelled well (ooh, we are sarcastic - Ed) because they had introduced little trains that would ferry the old, the infirm, the fat, or just the plain bone idle for the two minute walk from the car park to the entrance.

Now I'm not a naturally suspicious person but I wasn't happy to be met by a bank of cash tills ready to take your 15 euros a head whilst being separated from the resto by a full height wall. They must be very confident of their offering I thought to myself. 30 euros lighter we entered into this large dining room surrounded by hotplates and cold counters. It was about half full. Maybe one of the trains had broken down during the day, who knows?

Whilst Jan sat and defended our table from boarders I went for a recce. I found the salads, the fish counter, the meat counter and the pudding and fruit and returned to base to report to my beloved. I had decided that I would have three courses but let Jan go first because I needed another opinion. Now Jan and I don't normally agree on salads, she likes what I will graciously describe as 60's salads, lettuce beetroot, egg and what looks like sick. Sorry I forget the name. Me, I'm half Italian and like things a bit more exotic. Jan got her wish, though during a debrief later said that the beetroot tasted off. How did they manage that? The best thing that I could say about my salad was that it was cold. I love roasted peppers but didn't realise that they were mixed with mussels. Mussels that were hard, chewy and tasteless. The baby artichokes, out of a tin, were OK.

I'm an optimistic person so I still looked forward to my next course. I wandered between the fish and the meat counters trying to decide which way to swing. I visited both counters three times and found the food, of which there was a lot, very unappetising and mostly unrecognisable. Unfortunately so had most other people, because it was all largely untouched. Platter after platter of untouched food that several hundred hungry people had voted unanimously against. I wasn't on my own here. Plastered all around the room, in three languages, were exhortations not to take more that you wanted. It looked like everybody took this message a bit too literally. I was not alone.

If you met me you'd understand that I like food. But maybe that was the problem, where was it? I may like food but I don't take chances and neither does it appear did anybody else. In the end I settled for calamari cooked on the griddle. This dish was helpfully situated a long way from the fish counter alongside the meat. I was glad to see that they had their collective fingers on the pulse!I was about to help myself from the mountain of untouched calamari when someone in whites turned up out of the blue. Bearing in mind that we'd been there about 30 minutes already and this was the first time we'd seen him. He insisted on serving me my portion. What was strange was that they were about to either throw away tons of food (or warm it up for the evening session) but he carefully counted out my four pieces of what turned out to be stone cold calamari. In case you find this amusing can I point out that this was my lunch, I was hungry, but more to the point, I had to eat it. Assuming for a second that they weren't going to reheat this slop, I suddenly felt sorry for the pigs that were going to have to eat it.

For the final course I had fruit. Surely they couldn't do anything to fruit. They hadn't!

At 15 euros I felt ripped off. At 5 euros I would have felt ripped off. What a dump. I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would go there. But they do in their hundreds. Even writing this makes me feel sick.

OK I give in, I have some good news. Despite my earlier misgivings, 18 hours later I am not suffering any after effects. If you get my drift.

Go and take a look for yourself, and bon appetit.