There’s a series of books devoted to what you should eat instead of something else. There’s the original version, one for kids, for eating at restaurants, for supermarket shopping, for 350-calorie meals, for drinks…. The idea is that when you’re faced with a food choice there’s usually a high calorie, high fat option and a much healthier selection. On one of Carcassonne’s main shopping streets is a gourmet grocery store where those choices are amazing.

Their website says (with my translation) that the owners have selected, for the delight of your taste buds, more than 6000 gourmet products of tradition among the best ambassadors of the regions of France and the world. That’s our kind of talk! It’s not a huge place so with that many items, some displays almost reach the ceiling and we have to be careful that our backpacks don’t wipe out an entire shelf as we turn a corner.

As you might expect, a shop labeled “gourmet” can have correspondingly high prices and that is true sometimes at this store. It’s fun to look at their gorgeous windows dressed with 1000 euro champagne collections, a 100 euro cheese knife, or the 329 euro automatic tea maker you see here. In contrast, when we’ve been unable to find what for us has been a household staple like a particular brand of gin or real Parmigiano-Reggiano (Parmesan) cheese, guess who had it in-stock at a reasonable price?

So, no, we don’t have an automatic tea maker since the electric kettle works just fine. In the fridge you’ll find some bottles of champagne but they don’t bear 1000 euro price tags. You’ll also see some cheese from Parma, gin from the UK, and a few other “buy this, not that” choices from the 6000 options we have.