Château de Courban

21520 COURBAN

14/20
Chef's Restaurant

14 PHOTOS

Chef Maxime Lesobre

Cooking Healthy cooking | Signature cuisine

Services Children's Menu | Disabled access | Pets allowed | Private Parking | Valet parking

Price Indicative price per person (excl. drinks)

69€ à 129€

Gault&Millau's review

14/20

Chef's Restaurant In the middle of nowhere (i.e. on the borders of Haute-Marne, Aube and Côte d'Or), this vast manor house also benefits from an exclusive location, the only one within a stone's throw. What's more, it's just twenty minutes from the A5 freeway, known as the "autoroute des Anglais" (freeway of the English), which bypasses Paris on its way south, attracting a massive influx of Anglo-Saxon clientele. In the space of a quarter of a century, Pierre and Christine Vandendriessche have turned the place into a comfortable, cosy oasis, while retaining, in their welcome and service, that provincial family dimension that evokes those Scottish countryside stops. At the table, one good chef follows another (we knew Takashi Kinoshita, then briefly Nicolas Thomas): Maxime Lesobre, who has worked at Banctel and Passard, has a reassuring background and executes the expected dishes correctly: The mullet carpaccio lait baratté aux herbes is fresh and pleasant, the asparagus very crisp and a bit all over the place with a lemony hollandaise, the monkfish is abundantly worked, artichoke in declinaison, matelote sauce and barigoule on top, the supreme sauce well executed on impeccable poultry despite an overly salty poultry jus, and the good pastry chef secures the two toques on a well-balanced rhubarb dessert. All in all, while there's still a touch of heaviness and superfluous manners in this typically old-school cuisine, it's clear that this young chef, who has been in place for three months, undoubtedly has the ability to move the lines, to lighten and modernize - everything we'd like for this haven of Burgundian sweetness. The young service staff, who have come from all over the place, make up for any minor clumsiness with their diligence, and the wine cellar is classic, rather large and expensive, with an offer by the glass that deserves to be expanded.