Le Relais Bernard Loiseau

For half a century, the road from Paris to the south ran straight through Saulieu. The old Nationale 6 carried families to the Riviera and lorries to Italy, and halfway down it stood an inn called La Côte d'Or, where Alexandre Dumaine made lunch worth the detour. Then the motorway swept the traffic away. Nobody passes through Saulieu by accident any more. Those who come now come on purpose, and quite a few carry the same book in their luggage.

The book is The Perfectionist, Rudolph Chelminski's portrait of the man who made this house. In 1975 a young cook from the Auvergne took over the faded inn and poured into it everything he had, and a good deal that he did not. Bernard Loiseau built his sauces on water instead of cream and chased perfection to an ending that was not gentle: in 2003, at fifty-two, he took his own life. His wife, Dominique, and his team refused to let the house go dark. Today their daughters Bérangère and Blanche keep it, and Louis-Philippe Vigilant leads the kitchen.

Anyone braced for a shrine finds a country inn instead. The thirty-four rooms are all different, with oak beams overhead and Burgundian terracotta underfoot, and many have their own small terrace or balcony above the garden. The newest suites are called cocoons, although for a house named Loiseau, nest might have been the better word: the beds sit in frames of pale wicker. Breakfast is served in a room listed as a historic monument, which makes even a croissant feel faintly ceremonial.

At dinner, with the garden beyond the windows, many pilgrims begin with the same dish. Loiseau's frogs' legs, with a purée of garlic and a vivid green jus of parsley, still arrive much as he made them. It is a strange, moving thing to taste a dish known for years only from the page. The first mouthful is like shaking hands with someone who left the room a long time ago. After that, the meal belongs to the present, and the cellar has plenty to say about it.

Between meals, the pilgrimage turns gentle. A path through the botanical garden leads to the spa, a building of glass and wood with a long pool and treatments based on Burgundy blackcurrants, a line Dominique Loiseau created herself. In front of the inn, the bistro Loiseau du Morvan serves oeufs en meurette for Burgundy in its slippers. Back at the inn, the billiard room is named after Charles X, and on wet days the fire in the lounge wins every argument.

Saulieu lies forty kilometres from the nearest station, on a road the world has largely left behind. The grand dining room rests a couple of nights a week, which is worth knowing before booking. The place also carries a great deal of memory, deeply moving for some guests and a little heavy for others. This is a house for gourmands who have read that book twice, and for anyone who thinks one dinner can justify a long drive.

Every pilgrimage needs a relic, and here it arrives on wheels. On the cheese trolley, a fourme d'Ambert from Bernard's Auvergne sits next to a Munster from Dominique's Alsace. One for him, one for her, side by side, exactly where they belong.