THE AUVERGNE ISN’T known for culinary attractions, but on our last trip to France, we went to the Auvergne to eat. It was the end of September in 2019, a time of year when the French consider summer to be well and truly over — les vacances have given way to la rentrée, and the air is cold even if the sun is warm. The region is part of “the empty diagonal,” a depopulated area of France stretching roughly from Basque country in the southwest to the Ardennes in the northeast. The diagonal is not a tidy stripe across the map as the name suggests. It bulges sharply in the south-center, and that bulge is the Auvergne.
