La Martinière Le Phare des Baleines

Cones and waffles at the lighthouse

The order at this counter is short: a cone, or a waffle with ice cream on it, eaten on the walk back from the Phare des Baleines. La Martinière is an artisan glacier on Île de Ré, family-run since 1970, and this is its lighthouse-side point of sale at the western tip of the island, where visitor traffic is heaviest through the summer. It is a stand rather than a salon de thé, so nothing here pretends to be a meal; the counter exists for people coming out of the lighthouse and the museum, or turning back along the coast.

A small counter attached to a large workshop

What makes the stand more interesting than its size is where the ice cream comes from. Production sits at the family's Manufacture in Sainte-Marie de Ré, which turns out ice creams and pâtisseries glacées alongside biscuits, nougatine, sablés and guimauve. The lighthouse branch is the retail face of that workshop, which is why the range behind a two-item counter is far wider than the counter suggests.

The house keeps more than sixty ice cream flavours, classic through to inventive, plus macarons glacés, verrines glacées, bâtonnets glacés and frozen pastries. The macaron glacé is the signature: the familiar shell format built around ice cream instead of ganache, and the clearest sign of a glacier thinking like a pastry kitchen.

Order a cone, then take the macaron glacé seriously

Start with a scoop in a cone, because at a seaside counter that is what ice cream is for, and the flavour list is long enough that choosing is the whole decision. A waffle is the other immediate order, and the hot-and-cold contrast is the reason to bother with one at a stand this compact.

If the visit is more than a walk-past, the macaron glacé is the item that carries the house style, and the frozen pastries and bâtonnets show how far the workshop takes the same base. The reputation behind it is not merely local: in 2012 Gault et Millau named La Martinière among the five best glaciers in France, unusual recognition for an island house that has stayed with one family for more than five decades. At the lighthouse that record comes down to something plain, a cone or a waffle handed across the counter and eaten outside.