I agreed to it for a laugh, really. “The world’s biggest buffet”? Well that surely had to be a barn-door target for some snarky reviewing.

At first we couldn’t get to the place to even mock it from the outside. Instead we sped with increasing impatience up and down the fast two-lane on the industrial outskirts of Narbonne, trying to find a way in. Massive signs advertised furniture stores,car exhaust fitters and flooring warehouses, but the only way to access the area seemed to be to drive the wrong way around a roundabout and then floor it down a one-way street against oncoming Renault Twingos.

So we did that and made our way on foot across an airfield’s worth of tarmac to an enormous building that also seemed to house an ice-rink or a roller-rink. It was hard to tell: it was closed and dark, just like every other “grand surface” in the area.

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