L'Auberge Bretonne by Gemma Pitcher

L’Auberge Bretonne is a two-star Michelin restaurant in an old creperie, restored and converted by top chef Jacques Thorel and his wife Solange. The owners acquired a house in the neighbourhood and restored it to incorporate a few simple, light-filled rooms in which tired and happy gourmands can rest after a meal at the restaurant, described as ‘one of the grandes tables of Brittany’. They also added a wine cellar, replete with 40,000 wines - champagne is a speciality - to ensure that Jacques’ cuisine received the complement it deserved.

The exterior of L’Auberge is done in rustic stone. The eight rooms have simple white bedspreads, antique rustic furniture, and a view onto the square or onto the patio at the back of the Auberge.

The main event, however, is the dining room, which looks out through French windows onto M.Thorel’s vegetable garden, allowing diners to see the source of the produce they’re eating, transformed into sublime léger bouillon d’asperges or accompanying bouille d’avoine avec crème raffinee. There’s a fireplace on one side, a flower garden on the other. Everything is classically decorated – gleaming white table linen, blue and white eighteenth-century style crockery, and, in season, huge vases of roses from the garden.