Our decently long sojourn in Italy last year (2017) took us on a pursuit of food markets from Sicily in the south as far as Genova on the northern coast of the Mediterranean. As we followed the sun starting in early April and gradually moved northward, we starting to see a diminishing overall quality of said markets. They weren’t as big or well assorted. They weren’t held more than once a week or so. Of course, this was in no way scientific and it’s possible we’re completely wrong. There seemed something irrefutable about our concerns that the food markets in Italy are yielding to the convenience of supermarkets much like mom-and-pop boutiques see their business eroded by endless mega-malls in the suburbs. Fast forward to 2018 and we find ourselves in Tours, France. Tours is situated fairly centrally in the magnificently large Loire valley. Val de Loire is reasonably well known for its enthusiastic wine-growing in addition to well-maintained bike paths for tourists and locals alike. More about that later in future posts. Tours itself will forever in my mind be remembered for its markets. During the growing season, you can find open-air markets pretty much all days of the week. These are in addition to the seven days a week market with reasonable hours; Les Halles. An indoor market that doesn’t aim to impress with its splendour, but rather with selection, quality and efficiency. During the peak opening hours, and these are honestly not always trivial to decipher as Les Halles may be open but many stalls may be closed during these off hours, Les Halles in Tours is a delight to behold. The commerce is intense and raucous as money and goods change hands at a dizzying pace.  

It was clear that Les Halles as well as its open-air compatriots did not exist to provide some veneer to trick tourists into thinking Tours is some kind of quaint backwater with the sole purpose to give them the warm-and-fuzzies about. The markets are there because they are expected to be by the local populace and these merchants are rewarded with the commerce on which they depend as a result. To drive this home beyond the point of necessity, we did go to a supermarket on occasion. The contrast between the single cashier monotonously scanning items from the basket of one of three patrons to the tune of mundane muzak and the din of literally hundreds of transactions being made a minute over dozens of counters in a sea of people at Les Halles said it all. At least in Tours, the markets live and are alive and well.

My experience with Les Halles even became oddly personal. Thankfully Meredith in Tours had finally had enough. No more supermarket cheese! We’d had such a great deli cheese-buying experience in Brussels that we felt we should continue to ride this wave of dairy-high. Using some odd combination of neanderthal-grade French and gestures that would have netted us last place in a game of charades, we managed to buy cheese and butter so good my eyes nearly teared up. When in France, our consumption of these two goods were sufficiently high that we ended up going back to the same counter with the same women smiling as they saw one of us making our way towards them to stock up again. It should be said that very little English was spoken, but we nonetheless managed to understand when they wanted to make sure we were OK with a particular type of butter that a slightly different percentage of salt because it was different from what we had had before. How about that for customer service for people like us who shopped there less than a week. I suspect we could shop at Carrefour a good long while before anyone showed that kind of concern.

Even if markets only rank in the lower percentile of your overall objectives, Tours is nonetheless well worth a visit when in France proper. A short few hours from Paris and away from the high-roller riviera, Tours has a life and pulse that will have a tremendous appeal for all of those who don’t demand a full-on metropolis but want to experience a piece of something genuinely French.