COURCHEVEL, France — Lunch: indisputably one of the top-three meals of the day, but at the Tour de France, not always something the intrepid reporter can afford to prioritize. Most days involve some degree of frantic scurrying between the start and finish, hitting the road early to go stand around the team buses and ask as many people as possible, "What's going to happen today?" (this often works, somehow) before scrambling to beat the peloton to the finish and ask them what happened today. Breakfast is typically one pastry, eaten in the car, and dinner is something to be taken seriously here in France, so it is good. In between, there is not much time.
However! The Amaury Sport Organization (ASO), the Tour's organizing body, provides a press room for journalists to in theory write and in practice annoy each other in like seven different languages, and the press room usually has food. I am not in the press room every day, especially on mountainous days, because it is quite often far from the finish line, which is where the interesting stuff happens. Those days, I eat either the world's driest sandwich from a French gas station or the world's least flavorful salad from a French gas station. Other days, I eat in the press room.
I know there is a strand of old-school journalism that says eating any morsel offered to you by the people you are tasked with aggressively covering compromises your ethics. I would counter that offering a small food review is, in this case, necessarily aggressive coverage, and also the ASO does not provide the lunch foods—the host towns do. As this year's Tour is entirely within France and the theme is well, France, light food criticism seems like the best way to engage.
The quality and quantity of press-room lunch can vary wildly. If they gave us the same thing every day, there wouldn't be much of a point in reviewing it, but there is a rich variety to the lunch offerings, as well as the beverage and snack staples on offer every day. The ASO has gleefully sold our attention in exchange for a bunch of sponsored food, such as:
- Uncomfortably long gummy bears;
- Bananas that offer you a guide to what they will taste like depending on what color they are despite only ever being green;
- Coffee from tea bags for the enjoyment of which you must preheat a coffee maker for what feels like three minutes, which doesn't work half the time because you have to discern whether the faintest, tiniest, shittiest light ever conceived is lit before pressing a button that gives you coffee-tinted liquid the temperature of Venus and ultimately as bitter, after all that, as water you put in your bottle at a coffee shop.
Because it is France, they usually serve wine with the buffet.
I am not just a hater. As I write to you, I have just returned from the top of Col de la Loze. The press room is 10 kilometers from the finish; my comrades and I took two télécabines to get up near the top of the climb so we could watch the riders go by, in person and much closer to the finish. Shivering against the wind and swirling rain, we huddled around a phone to watch the Australian broadcast of a race snaking its way up the final climb at us; they said Florian Lipowitz came into the race "on a smokie for the top 10," which is not the sort of thing you get on Peacock. The best protection from the frigid air was the gondola itself, which meant we'd put ourselves in the absurd position of fighting to get as high as possible into the sweeping vistas of the first day in the Alps, only to look at a phone under the guts of a machine. Then, Ben O'Connor rolled by, followed by the yellow jersey group, and we got to see Tadej Pogacar pedaling effortlessly and Primoz Roglic delighting his fan club, which surrounded us, by pedaling slightly more effortfully. It was as lovely as it was freezing.
Shivering, we returned to the press room, which still had a hot tin of croziflette, a regional Savoyard pasta bake. It's the best thing I've eaten at the Tour, a gratin-like shingle of small squares, woven into a gooey matrix, along with small chunks of ham, by a healthy amount of reblochon cheese. The security guard who works the press room was stopping people, pointing to the dish, and slowly pronouncing cro-zi-flette. Tucking in, I felt as if I were an old-timey alpinist, seeking vital nutriment to restore my essences, and finding myself fulfilled by a regional meat-cheese-bread dish, which is what French cuisine is, broadly speaking, "all about." It is not a complex flavor, merely a simple one done perfectly. That gave me the fuel to write about a bunch of stuff that was, broadly speaking, ass.
Stage 11, Toulouse: The press room is in the Stade Toulousain Basketball. The lunch is buffet-style, composed of the classics, which are: sweating cheese, sliced meats piled in loose sheafs, and small sandwiches of varied dubiousness. I eat four bananas while writing this story. Forgettable and nutrient-poor, other than a splendid apricot tart.
Stage 12, Hautacam: I do not go to the press room. I am on the mountain, where I eat a really bad gas-station salad.
Stage 13, Peyragudes: The primary offerings are small sandwiches filled with what I refer to, to the chagrin of my colleagues, as cat food: a loaf of indeterminate meat composition. They also serve chicken wings, which are a pleasant surprise. At one point, I find myself on the wrong side of a small stream separating the press room and start paddock and I remove my socks and shoes and ford it, an endeavor for which I reward myself with a banana.
Stage 14, Luchon: Every evening, the official ASO WhatsApp group will send out a text blast informing us what is on offer the following day. This is what they send before Stage 14:
🥗🥓🧁 A *catering* will be available today at lunch time from 11am to 3pm
🍖 As always, the food truck "aimez la viande, mangez-en mieux" will be parked next to the press center.
That translates as "Love meat, eat better meat." One of the ASO press officers also sends this text:
Hilariously, this turns out to be the day of the Thymen Arensman press conference incident. I eat lunch in the Shimano car.
Additionally, in the télécabine on the way down from Superbagnères, my colleague Iain Treloar found an errant bottle of cherry juice. This obviously belonged to a rider, as many were taking the gondola down from the summit and every rider in the race is given a bottle of cherry juice after every stage, as it is possessed of some apparent recovery-enhancing properties. Treloar figured out which team it belonged to, and that night at dinner, we tried some.
Stage 15, Carcassonne: The ASO warns us that tray lunches will be served. These are essentially airplane food, with white chicken the texture of clay, a small salad that manages to be simultaneously colorless and pungent, and a pasta dish featuring colors not otherwise seen since the mid-Cretaceous. We cannot eat in the press room itself, which is roughly 115 degrees Fahrenheit; instead we have to sit in an excessively lit and otherwise nondescript room, further simulating the airplane experience.
Stage 16, Mont Ventoux: The press room is somewhere near the foot of the mountain, so we do not go, instead choosing to eat in the wind at the top. They don't even serve lunch that day anyway, though, per an ASO person, "a bakery stand will be available at lunchtime, with a range of special offers." That sounds like a threat.
Stage 17, Valence: The big update today is that the ASO release downgrades the meat truck's availability from "as always" to "as (almost) everyday." I still have not sampled from the meat truck, and am only sort of sure what it is. I ask a colleague what's up with the meat truck, and he does not make it sound like something I should concern myself with. The catering today is a series of basalt-dense sandwiches filled with I can only describe as "stuff," caramelized onions riotously thrown in alongside cornichons and bizarrely shaped bricks of goat cheese, bread that hurts your teeth, and some unidentifiable shredded fibrous vegetable. We leave the press room and there, 500 meters away, is the local penitentiary, an infamous one.
Stage 18, Courchevel: Croziflette. Enough said.
