La Suite de l'Elixir

In the lavishly restored Château des Tesnières, near Torcé, South African chef Chantel Dartnall has installed an ambitious project combining fine dining and charming hospitality – there are a handful of luxurious guestrooms upstairs. The decor combines Art Nouveau woodwork with pieces from South Africa to create a richly eclectic atmosphere. Featuring top-notch ingredients, the "Tabula Rasa" set menu, which revolves around vegetables and flowers, wins diners over with its visual poetry and the quality of its ingredients: finely crafted amuse-bouches (vegetable tartlets, a light root-vegetable

The sprawling estate never fails to make an impression: a Classical 18C castle, a 19C water tower, works of art, a hotel made up of futuristic pods fixed to a central metal mast and, finally, the circular restaurant with a living roof that is reminiscent of a flying saucer that has landed in the middle of the vegetable garden. Chef Jérôme Jouadé draws on his true affinity with nature and plants to practise his art here. He also makes the most of a greenhouse, a snail pen and an orchard, and does his own wild picking. Pollack, red meat radish and wild garlic; skate wing, white asparagus from La