When the French chef Raymond Blanc bought his beautiful 15th-century Oxfordshire manor, Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, 41 years ago, he knew there would be some teething problems.
For starters, its previous owner, Lady Cromwell, had warned him that one of the bedrooms was haunted by her late husband. More pressingly, it needed an immediate revamp — a new roof and work on the foundations, not forgetting dry rot.
“But despite the challenges I had already fallen in love with its extraordinary beauty,” the renowned chef told me earlier this year, “from the moment I saw the rusty gates open, the Oxfordshire yellow stone, the gardens and those tall Tudor chimneys.”
It’s this view of Blanc’s country house, through the iron gates and down the grand lavender-fringed driveway, that thousands of guests have also fallen in love with since Le Manoir opened in 1984. And it’s this bucolic English scene — albeit with the addition of a French flag above the doorway and a sports car with RRB plates parked outside — that will bring hundreds more to the hotel in the village of Great Milton over the next three months.
Last week it was announced that Le Manoir, which has held two Michelin stars for more than four decades and gone on to become one of the best English country house hotels, will close its doors in January for 18 months of refurbishments. Blanc, 75, will take a step back from his role as chef patron at the manor, now part of the luxury Belmond group, hanging up his chef whites and taking on a new title of “lifetime ambassador”.
“Le Manoir has been the canvas of my life’s work, a sanctuary where passion, excellence and beauty have come to life every single day for over four decades,” he said.
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By the hotel’s own admission, the reservation team have had “a very busy few days” following the news. Since Blanc first stood at the helm, Le Manoir has become a bastion of country elegance, classic French cooking and, in his own words, “culinary excellence”. It has been a pioneering petri dish of talent where 43 Michelin-starred chefs, including Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal, Michael Caines, Ollie Dabbous and Robin Gill, have trained.
One night in one of the hotel’s 32 lavish and uniquely decorated rooms and suites inspired by Blanc’s travels starts from £955, including breakfast. The restaurant’s signature seven-course dinner costs £255 per person, not including wine pairings. When I check, there are rooms still available between now and the end of December, but weekend dinner reservations for the rest of the year have all been snapped up. On most days, it’s just the £230 six-course lunch option remaining.
Blanc in the gardens at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons
JOHN ANGERSON FOR THE TIMES
Fans are rushing to experience the magic of Le Manoir and Britain’s most famous French chef while they still can. Something similar happened in 2023 when another Frenchman, Michel Roux, announced that he would be pulling down the shutters on his Le Gavroche restaurant.
I have been lucky enough to visit Le Manoir several times over the past eight years, be it for a lesson at the Raymond Blanc Cookery School or a meal with friends in the softly lit dining room overlooking its pristine lawns. I know the magic of this Oxfordshire belle, from the perfectly manicured gardens and lawns to the kitchen garden of all kitchen gardens, the magnificent fireplaces, right down to the sensational lemon cakes left in each guest’s bedroom when they arrive. (The scarecrow here is modelled on Blanc himself. Why not?)
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I still struggle to find a more picturesque snapshot of a hotel than the view down the lavender-flanked stone pathway that leads from the honey-coloured bricks of Le Manoir to the orchard, where more than 150 ancient varieties of British and French heritage apples grow.
Even before my first visit in 2017, I would hear about its grandeur from my friend’s parents, who had visited once. They’d talk about it in the same way people speak about dining at the Ritz, describing Le Manoir’s famously extensive bread basket, the spectacular cheese trolley and the drawing room with cosy, plush sofas to sink into while enjoying a digestif.
Then there are the 11 gardens. Le Manoir is Britain’s original farm-to-table restaurant, and Blanc an early adopter of the organic movement. Whenever I have asked him about sustainability and the importance of seasonality, it has been like opening a faucet you struggle to turn off. Hour-long scheduled interviews have rolled into two or three-hour diversions down rabbit holes as he animatedly reels off anecdotes about how his “maman” taught him never to waste, Le Manoir’s bee village or the time King Charles visited in 2014 and they planted trees together in the orchard in the pouring rain. “I don’t like to lose but I will tell you his tree was better than mine,” Blanc said of the occasion.
It has become fashionable for chefs and hotels to brandish sustainability credentials but there has never been anything performative about Blanc’s dedication, which is why in 2020 Le Manoir was awarded its third accolade from Michelin, a green star.
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A meeting with Blanc himself is the pièce de résistance of any visit. His warmth, old school French charm and cheeky laugh make him the antithesis of the shouty, sweary TV chef we have come to know. Only Blanc can get away with punctuating sentences with genuine outbursts of “oh là là” without raising eyebrows. I have always been impressed, whenever I’ve interviewed him, that he has managed to maintain his thick French accent despite living in Britain longer than he was in France. “A good chef leads his team with empathy rather than toughness,” he told me earlier this year.
Arguably the highlight of Le Manoir’s superb calendar of carol services, lawn parties and four-hands dinners that take place each year is the Bastille Day bash Blanc throws every July. Never have I seen a Frenchman persuade a bunch of Brits to belt out La Marseillaise with a gusto to rival his own, as when Blanc hosted one such party on a blisteringly hot Sunday in 2019. Not only was it one of the warmest days of the year, it was the day when England met New Zealand in the Cricket World Cup final, and Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer played for almost five hours in the Wimbledon men’s final. Nonetheless Blanc, standing in front of a two-metre tower of macarons, managed to pull the group of at least 100 guests away from the televisions he had kindly rolled into the garden and conduct us in a rapturous chorus.
Le Manoir is a special place to celebrate. You know what, it’s even the place to be when you’re not celebrating. During a visit in my late twenties I remember dining in the restaurant with a soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. Let’s just say the awkwardness at our table couldn’t be ignored, particularly when, to avoid conflict, I decided to steer clear of alcohol and spontaneously ordered the juice pairings. In any other restaurant a waiter would panic and send a search party looking for Tropicana. But not even a flicker passed across the face of our sommelier, who served our flight of fruit and vegetable smoothies with the same expertise as if he were pouring me a glass of Romanée-Conti. (A special thanks to my much nicer, new boyfriend who has taken me back to erase this memory.)
Despite his close brush with mortality during Covid, when he was in intensive care, Blanc’s passion for hospitality has not waned. One of his proudest achievements is his retention of staff, a point he made in an interview last year. “We have a 53 per cent female workforce and everyone gets three days off each week. Do you know how long it took us to achieve that?”
The details of Le Manoir’s refurbishment are under wraps. Who will replace Blanc as chef patron is another question. In 2023 he handed over the title of head chef to Luke Selby, a Le Manoir alumnus, but Blanc was never too far away. I have no doubt that even in his new role, he will still manage to be a force of nature.
Dining and Cooking