Clearly I need a do-over today…not doing so well so far!!
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The place in Bourges sounds just my style. Plus it looks like it’s straight out of a Jacques Demy movie from the outside.
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Seems to be a typo on BB.
https://restaurant.michelin.fr/s5edw9g/le-bouche-oreille-boutervilliers
They are both masculine.
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maybe it’s a chain? - if so, i won’t be going to either one
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It’s LA bouche when you talk about the mouth, and LE bouche à oreille when you talk about word of mouth. Don’t ask me why, we’re french and we do as we like
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That’s OK. I need a do-over of my past five years.
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I think the Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie would disagree with you!! 
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Well read it again, then. Sheesh.
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I would love to hear the kid calling his dad and explaining the boom in business. The family will have laughs for years over the gaffe and good for them. If I’m ever in the area I’m sure gonna eat there.
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What, has it been five years since your last do-over? 
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That got a proper LOL out of me. Thank you,
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I have eaten very well in cheap French restaurants. The good ones are easy to identify because you won’t get a table for lunch after 12:05. Getting my family to understand this and getting them into the car in time was an uphill struggle on holiday. The best one of these we ever ate in was somewhere in the Midi and the prix fixé for lunch was €5, wine included for a table of 4. The locals know about these places because, being French, you score nul points for paying more for good food than you need.
You can of course eat very badly and expensively in Paris because they see you coming rents and wages are so high these days. But I’ve never been to one of those places because I’ve either been warned by the concierge or taken by locals.
The difference between a Michelin star and no Michelin star may be, I think, no more than location, the name over the door and the amount of service.
edit - also, French Vietnamese restaurants.
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It’s still deeply confuses me that it’s the same Michelin.
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Not at all odd; as I understand it the tyre company had the idea of promoting guides to France to entice the new generation of car owners to travel around thus using more of their product. In the UK, it was the Shell petrol (gasoline) company that did the same thing.
It may be because the word “mot” has been omitted, as in “le mot bouche à oreille”. There’s a lot of expressions in many languages where the key word has been dropped with time, but in inflected language the inflexion still refers to the missing word. It seems odd but it is a thing that happens (which is how in English we have “a video” where the important word “recording” has been lost leaving just the adjective.)
As I have posted elsewhere, languages are much more descriptive than prescriptive and were not designed for easy use by computers.
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Ah, so that’s why it’s “bouche à oreille” and not “bouche à l’oreille” – I seem to remember that French doesn’t like having a word ending with a vowel right next to a word starting with a vowel without an article in between.
Three cheers for the diner's chef, Penelope Salmon: “I put my heart into my cooking.”Interesting choice of seasonings.
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Even if this had been awarded the star, it still wouldn’t be the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant in the world. That’s Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle, a stall in a market in Singapore where a plate of soya sauce chicken with rice costs 2 Singaporean dollars, or less than €1.40.
On the other hand, you often have to queue for a couple of hours…
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Défense d’anthropomorphiser la langue français, ça fait pleurer Marianne.
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Sounds like you might enjoy this:
It’s an entire book on the difference between regular and irregular verbs, and what this might imply for the neuroscience of language. Pinker makes it interesting, though.
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You would probably hate this book, then. Au moins son titre. 
(Edit) That makes me think of my freshman college French teacher, Madame Goeury-Richardson. Indeterminate middle age, doughy face, 5’ tall if that, with pitch black hair and half-moon glasses with green lenses. Attitude both cynical and weary of dealing with students. If I was to anthropomorphize French, she might be it.
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Perhaps it’s fitting that I first misread part of the headline as “customers underwhelmed”.
