The wood-fired omelette at La Mère Poulard has been the culinary highlight of Mont-Saint-Michel, the picturesque island in Normandy, since the restaurant opened in 1888.
But now it may have some competition. Valérie Le Guern Gilbert, president of cookware brand Mauviel, has opened her first restaurant, Le Logis Sainte Catherine. And food lovers far beyond this culinary corner of France are already talking about it.
“Normandy is my terroir, and Le Mont-Saint-Michel has been a permanent part of my imagination ever since I first saw it as a little girl,” says Gilbert, wearing John Lennon–esque sunglasses and a cowl-necked Bottega Veneta tunic dress. She was enjoying a glass of champagne before lunch at Le Logis Sainte Catherine on a recent Saturday morning.
Mauviel was founded in 1810 in the nearby Norman village of Villedieu-les-Poêles, and Gilbert is a member of its seventh generation. When she became the company’s president, in 2006, she proved her extraordinary talent for creating objects of desire.
Among her coups: diversifying the family firm away from its main market of professional chefs and courting home cooks, who collect Mauviel’s pieces almost like works of art. (Chef Yannick Alleno once described Mauviel to me as “the Hermès of cookware.”)
“A restaurant where the kitchen cooks with our pots, pans, and casseroles and also uses our serving pieces struck me as the perfect showcase,” says Gilbert. She asked the globe-trotting chef Jean Imbert, best known for his restaurants at Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, to collaborate on the menu. It’s focused on seasonal produce, meat from animals that graze in the region’s salt marshes and meadows, and “lots and lots” of salted butter from the milk of Froment du Léon cows, an ancient breed of cattle. “This butter is the first thing I eat when I get home after a trip abroad,” says Gilbert.
Imbert placed the talented young chef Thibault Schach in the kitchen, and his cooking is homey and refined, an ideal register for this seaside setting. Standout dishes include sea crab on a bed of buttery mashed potatoes and succulent pork ribs in a tangy mustard sauce.
“We wanted the experience of dining at the Logis Sainte Catherine to be comme à la maison [like eating at home],” says Gilbert.
The décor was done by Bachmann Associés, in Dinard, but Gilbert, an avid antiquer, couldn’t resist adding a few touches of her own, including an oil painting of St. Florian, the patron saint of firefighters. She found the canvas at a dealer in Villedieu-les-Poêles, near the Catholic school where, she recalls, she was “tortured by the nuns.” “They wanted me to keep my ankles crossed and learn embroidery, and I rebelled, which changed everything,” she says with a chuckle.
During our lunch, both a politician and a worker at Mauviel’s atélier stopped by to compliment the food. Gilbert was especially pleased to see her employee. When he left, she patted her heart. “We work very hard at Mauviel, but we’re family,” she says. “When my brother left the company and I became the sole proprietor, I opened the doors to the factory at 4:30 every morning. Metalworking is a hard, macho world, so I knew my staff needed to see that I could do the job, in the same way that I needed to learn their skills.”
She glanced at her watch and grimaced—she was late for a meeting at the atélier with a group of Japanese cookware buyers. “To be honest, I’m also dying to know if the bid I made late last night for an antique Celine bag was accepted,” she confides, climbing into her black Range Rover. In the end, it all worked out. When Gilbert knows what she wants, she’s not afraid to go for it.
Alexander Lobrano is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. His latest book is the gastronomic coming-of-age story My Place at the Table: A Recipe for a Delicious Life in Paris
