No reading better prepares for a lunch at La Grenouillère than Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette. The incipit of this novel by Georges Bernanos has the power to bring the reader straight into the very special atmosphere of Alexandre Gauthier’s cuisine. A kitchen suspended between heaven and earth, made of both iodine and peat, gold and limestone pebbles.
“But already the great black wind coming from the west – the wind from the sea, as Antoine says – is scattering the voices in the night. He plays with it for a while, then picks them up all together and throws them somewhere, snoring angrily. »
Located in La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil, the family restaurant at the head of which Alexandre succeeded his parents Roland and Claudine in 2003 is less than thirty kilometers from Fressin, the small village of Artois in which Bernanos spent every summer. of his childhood and where he set the action of most of his novels, Sous le soleil de Satan, Diary of a country priest, Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, Monsieur Ouine.
As Georges Bernanos was a Christian, a writer of the incarnation, Alexandre Gauthier is a cook of the incarnation. Son of the owners of the hotel-restaurant Le Dauphin in Caen, Rodolphe Pugnat, his 25-year-old sommelier, is in tune when it comes to offering wines that bear witness to a history and a name, to a horizon and a place.
The Alsace Riesling Grand Cru Schlossberg 2017 from Domaine Christian Binner and the cuvée Un Instant sur Terre, a maceration wine from Mathieu Deiss at the Vignoble du Rêveur, went wonderfully with the raw butternut squash and brown crab, sea bass and black radish, cockles and langoustine, milk-fed veal, lamb’s lettuce and marsh gnocchi.
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In La Madeleine-sous-Montreuil, as in Bernanos’ novels, there is water everywhere. The murderous water of the Flood capable of becoming the living water of baptism, that of saving grace. In the low-ceilinged lounge of La Grenouillère where I tasted a liqueur of wild quince by Laurent Cazottes, the chef told me that Maurice Pialat and Gérard Depardieu regularly dined at the restaurant during the filming of Sous le soleil de Satan, crowned with the Palme d’Or at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. The cook was 7 years old.
Gérard Depardieu also retains fond memories of these nocturnal meals. Roland and Claudine even played the role of extras in the film which had the gift of moving the spectators “with friendship or anger” on the Croisette. With Alexandre, we evoke the church and the houses, the taverns and the old castle, the paths, the streams, the great woods, the ruts, the pastures, the shadows and the lights of Fressin and its surroundings. “A mystical landscape”, breathes the cook. The adjective designates not so much the mystery itself as the power to experience this mystery.
It is like this and not otherwise that it applies to wine, of which a successful lunch requires neither the idea nor the desire, but the practical knowledge of the depths.
Find this article in La Revue du vin de France in May, on newsstands April 26. If you are not a subscriber, subscribe to consult the magazine and our files online.
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