From the verdant hills of northern Italy to the bucolic farmlands of Normandy, top cooks are decamping to the countryside. Over the past few years, big names and cool up-and-comers have taken on head chef roles at rural “restaurants with rooms”, where ingredients are seasonal and ethical, and the accommodation is romantically rustic. Now, a new school of food-obsessed travelers is following them, chasing culinary thrills, eco-friendly cooking, and proper relaxation.
Take France, where a crowd of chefs associated with Paris’s “bistronomy” trend—that is, shirking the capital’s stuffy metrics of quality for simpler, ingredient-led food—are drawing the Le Marais set out of the city. Of note: Thomas Benady of Orties. His farmhouse restaurant Auberge Sauvage, in Normandy, won a Michelin Green Star in 2022—and breakfast here is just as enticing as dinner, especially if you stay in the Passiflore room, where you’ll be brought homemade crepes to a private terrace overlooking the orchard. Aussie expats James Henry and Shaun Kelly have also created a flourishing French countryside retreat. The pair’s kitchen garden at Essonne’s Le Doyenné—a contemporary, light-filled dining room and guesthouse, opened last year at the Château de Saint-Vrain—is so fertile that it now supplies top bistros back in Paris.
Across the border, Villa Lena, a sublime 1,200-acre agriturismo in the craggy Tuscan hills, has gained fresh fans thanks to a new restaurant concept created by Paris’s Marco Baldeschi and Michael Sager, of London’s Sager Wilde. Osteria San Michele dishes up produce from Lena’s sun-dappled organic ortos, while the villa is a pastel-colored vision of neo-Renaissance architecture. There are similarly sylvan resorts in Spain (Andalusia’s swooning organic finca La Donaira), Sweden (the modern cabins and regenerative farm of Stedsans in the Woods, near Gothenburg), and Slovenia (at Hiša Franko, the meat-and-dairy-centric brainchild of chef Ana Roš, northwest of Ljubljana). And, of course, you’ll find a handful of exciting spots in the English countryside too.
Brendan Eades—once on the pass at London’s zero-waste pioneer Silo—became head chef at Tillingham, an achingly hip vineyard near Rye in East Sussex, last November. His garden menu is luring a sustainably minded crowd to the rolling estate for plates of Jerusalem artichoke with Dorstone cheese or venison with pumpkin. And, of course, there’s Osip, in the artsy Somerset town of Bruton, which has established itself as the UK’s leading light when it comes to rural restaurant stays. Chef Merlin Labron-Johnson conjures meticulous nine-course tasting menus sourced from the surrounding landscape. An attached hotel, No1 Bruton, just happens to be one of the county’s sweetest: a swooning warren set across a Georgian townhouse, medieval forge and row of workshop cottages.
Variety abounds, then... but as a collective movement, this farm-to-fork explosion is sustainable, stylish, and, most importantly, utterly delicious. No wonder so many are rushing to be a part of it.