As with London, Paris has recently seen a migration of culinary talent move to the country’s verdant corners. In many ways, it’s a logical next-step to the city’s influential bistronomy movement. From the early 2000s, a wave of young chefs began upending Paris’s traditionally starchy and star-focussed dining scene, serving simply-prepared ingredients in more casual environments, ignoring Michelin’s fussy, outdated metrics of quality.
Now, a host of cooks associated with this casual revolution have moved out of the culinary capital completely. Swayed by a wholehearted embrace of seasonality, sustainability and the rich provisions of France’s regional larders, they’re fleeing the city outright to set down roots in the countryside. At the center of this shift is the auberge – traditionally a rural inn and hub for affordable country cuisine, now reconfigured by some of the finest Gallic chefs (and a few Brits) as contemporary farm-to-table classics. From the languid Marche coastline to lofty Alpine outposts and heartland farmsteads, these are the most delicious backcountry bookings in France.
Le Doyenné
5 Rue Saint-Antoine, Saint-Vrain, Île-de-France
Set in light-soaked former stables on the grounds of the Château de Saint Vrain, about 30 miles south of Paris – Le Doyenne is the brainchild of Australian chefs James Henry and Shaun Kelly, two champions of the bistronomy boom. Henry cooked at Daniel Rose’s trailblazing Spring, before making his name at beloved 11th arrondissement neo-bistro Au Passage, and then opening the gutsy Bones nearby. Kelly, meanwhile, moved to Paris after time at London’s St John, grabbing the mantle from Henry at Au Passage and then opening Yard, a lively natural wine bar gem in the 11th.
In 2017, they turned their sights to Saint-Vrain with the intention of launching what would become Le Doyenné. They created an orchard and potager garden – the yields of which were so abundant that they started selling back to seasonally-minded restaurants in the capital – then took to overhauling the Château’s former stables into a 40-seat restaurant. The years of effort paid off, and then some. The conservation-driven architecture is meticulous – the vertiginous, glass-walled cathedral of a dining room, with gnarled original beams and sandstone-slabbed floor, was reimagined by the architecture firms Ciguë and 1224, while the interiors were restored by local craftsmen. More impressive is their focus on regenerative agriculture and zero-tilling – a low-impact approach where mulching, rather than aggressively turning over soil, provides microbial life and richer flavors.
This green mindset continues to the kitchen’s sustainably-sourced dairy, poultry, seafood, wild game, mushrooms, and wines (and so on), but the potager is the hub of the operation: brimming with fruit trees, heirloom vegetables, shrubs and herbs, which are toured each morning to create inspired dishes like a root vegetable salad with homemade ricotta, Kriaxera duck roasted over coals, and a ‘brioche surprise’, stuffed with homemade black pudding.
L' Auberge de la Roche Valdeblore
La Roche, Valdeblore, France
A couple of hours north of Nice, perched below the crags of the Alpes-Maritimes district in the commune of Valdeblore, L’Auberge de la Roche Valdeblore is the provenance-driven project of chefs Alexis Bijaoui (of the inventive, seasonal restaurant Garance) and Louis-Phillippe Riel (who added a Gallic twist to his Montreal roots cooking at Le 6 Paul Bert). “I always wanted to do cooking that takes place somewhere and makes sense in a specific area,” explains Bijaoui. “More about expressing a terroir or landscape.” It’s a philosophy they passionately follow by serving ingredients – lettuces, lamb, amberjack, chanterelles, rhubarb, etc – grown or raised strictly within an hour of the auberge. (They aren’t as strict with the wine list, which is very French, a bit Italian, and heavy on low-intervention varietals.) For all the rustic brouhaha, the dishes are still decidedly refined: roasted ceps with grilled vegetable reduction, hay condiment and smoked walnut shell emulsion, say; or leg of lamb, with roast trout jus, sweet potato, and grilled almond and fermented mandarin.
