French, cooked in a traditional register from a short, tempting carta with off-menu suggestions worth asking about. The full carta is on the venue's own site, and the wine list and the garden are the things worth planning around.

Classic French brasserie cooking, organised the French way. From the sea: Legris oysters from Plouguerneau in Brittany, natural or with shallot vinegar (€4.75 to €5.25 each), Bouchot mussels in beurre blanc and a brioche with salmon gravlax. From the farm: Bigorre ham, duck rillettes, pâté de campagne, a house foie gras marbré and the Ménage à Trois plate of all three, plus snails à la bourguignonne. The house star is the onion soup, made creamier than the classic, in two textures, on a chicken and vegetable stock simmered for about three hours and topped with fried shallots and a Parmesan crisp (€18, or a half portion). Mains run from skate meunière and monkfish tempura with Choron sauce to Label Rouge duck magret, a steak tartare dressed at the table and Bresse pigeon cooked two ways (€20 to €38). Desserts include crêpe Suzette, tarte Tatin, baba au rhum and a crème brûlée millefeuille, and there's a board of French cheeses at their best.

Leparoux is a sommelier, and the wine is the other half of the visit. The bottles sit in a glassed-in cellar in the dining room, almost all French with a few Spanish fortified wines, and he buys from independent châteaux and grower producers, often from regions little known in Spain, at what he calls Spanish prices. Past picks named on the house's own site include a vin jaune from Baud, Château de Pibarnon's Bandol and Devaux's Sténopé 2009 Champagne.

The room is warm and a little theatrical, with banquettes, red curtains, high ceilings and grey-painted industrial beams, and French music and jazz in the background. Outside, the terrace is wrapped in greenery, and smoking has never been allowed on it, to protect the taste of the wine. Sundays open with brunch before the carta.