Our Blog - Les Prés d'Eugénie - Maison Guérard

Our birthday's are very close to each other and so it makes sense to celebrate them together. Some years, we do nothing ... and other years, we do something special. This year is in the latter category! We headed west to a very small village that has a Michelin-starred restaurant and a luxury hotel. We took Lucy with us, which limited our room to an 18th century house in the gardens (instead of the main hotel building), but that was okay. The hotel and restaurant have an interesting story.

The village is called Eugénie-les-Bains, named for Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III. The village was created in 1861 when Empress Eugénie granted her sponsorship to a small thermal station/spa here. A few years before, she had stayed at the thermal spa for a stopover on her way to her summer quarters in Biarritz. From then until 1966, nothing really happened and the town was just a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere. In 1961, the father of the one of the current owners fell in love with the century-old trees of the park and decided to buy the thermal spa and the hotels next to it.

In 1966, Christine Barthélémy (one of the current owners) renovated the hotel and opened it again. A few years later, she met and married Michel Guérard, who was one of the initial chefs in the Nouvelle Cuisine movement in France. He was already a Michelin-starred chef when he left that restaurant and joined his wife at Les Prés d'Eugénie. As it was a spa with many of the clients on a diet, he invented "cuisine minceur" (slimming cuisine). The restaurant was awarded the first Michelin star in 1975, the second in 1976, and a 3rd in 1977. The property has the hotel (with multiple buildings), a thermal spa, as well as a cooking school and several restaurants.

This is the main hotel building with the restaurant and reception desk.

Then our 18th century country house ... our room was upstairs on the left.

We had reservations for dinner the first night at the gastronomic restaurant, and they requested that we arrive 30 minutes early to start with cocktails. While this is the gastronomic restaurant, the room itself was quite homey, with built-in china cabinets, fireplaces, and exposed wooden beams.

The courses were fairly small and actually timed fairly quickly compared to some gastronomic restaurants. The first course was a hot brioche with herbs just-out-of-the-oven with a thin slice of foie gras next to it, and then a onion soup (just the broth).

The next was interesting ... it was a chicken egg that was used pretty much only as the serving vessel ... no egg in it! It was filled with a green banana, onion, and vodka cream, topped with black caviar.

This next course had a little bit of theater to it ... there is a bowl with a forest-floor lid, that when opened, reveals a cream with black truffles that contain (although you can't see them) a couple little dim-sum dumplings with mushrooms.

There were a couple dessert courses, including a little millefeuille square with a chocolate sorbet and caramelized endive, a birthday tart, and then this cute little "tree" with candied baby oranges.

Dinner the 2nd night was at the more rustic restaurant, which was also very good. Here you can see the suckling pig roasting on the spit in the fireplace.

And then the old building with the thermal spa and a bit in the gardens. They have a pool, tennis courts, and a fitness room, but in the middle of the winter, most of those are really not that great. They seem to have lots of events that you can do as part of the spa (some free, some with an additional cost), like various different types of yoga.