La Grenouillère

On the marshes of northern France, a hutte is a hunter's hide, a low shelter by the water where wildfowlers spend the night out of sight, watching for ducks. At La Grenouillère, an old farm between fields and marsh below the ramparts of Montreuil-sur-Mer, the chef Alexandre Gauthier has built eight of them for his guests. They are the key to the place, which is a restaurant first: its rooms exist so that no evening has to end behind the wheel. Yet it is also a hide from the world, in the most comfortable sense.

Gauthier grew up here and took over his father's inn in 2003. Long before every restaurant began promising an experience, he understood that a dinner is also a story, and he has built a world to tell it in. With Patrick Bouchain as his architect, he has turned the farm into an intricate, slightly eccentric bubble, where almost every detail has been thought through and many are playful.

The huts set the tone. Each is sunk slightly into the ground, so the view through its glass wall is at grass level. In a hut built for hiding, even the furnishings join in: the bathtub hides beneath a wooden cover, the television stays out of sight, and the warmth comes from a wood stove. For a grander occasion, the three suites of the Maison de la Source have private gardens and baths beside an open fire or under the sky.

The stay is best begun on foot. Paths lead along the Canche and into the marshes, and the ramparts of Montreuil, two kilometres up the hill, make a fine loop before dinner. Back at the farm, the evening opens with a drink by the vegetable garden along the river, or in the low salons of the old inn, with their blackened fireplaces and frogs painted on the walls.

Then the guest turns watcher again. Bouchain's dining room, a glass-roofed hall resembling a giant kitchen hood set down on a garden of wild herbs, has no wall between cooks and diners, and the brigade works in near silence around a central flame. Around eleven courses follow over some four hours, listed on crumpled bible paper. Frogs' legs, which a name meaning frog pond all but demands, are eaten with the fingers, and a small bite may arrive that tastes exactly of roast chicken and contains none.

The cooking divides opinion. It is precise and often built around vegetables, so diners who measure a great dinner in butter and big portions may find it more spectacle than feast. The huts sit close together and are rustic by design. There is a sauna but no pool, and children are accepted rather than encouraged. Gauthier has said he had lovers in mind rather than businessmen, and couples are the obvious guests, along with diners curious about where French cooking is heading, on a night away from Paris, two hours off, or from London via the Channel Tunnel. In winter the stove carries the stay, in summer the garden, with Le Touquet's beaches twenty minutes away.

Wildfowlers leave their huttes at dawn, cold and often empty-handed. Guests at La Grenouillère leave theirs late and warm, with eleven courses and a good story behind them.