L'Oustau de Baumanière

13520 LES BAUX-DE-PROVENCE

19/20
Exceptional Restaurant

BOOK

12 PHOTOS

Chef Glenn Viel

Cooking Gastronomic

Services Accomodation | Children's menu | For people with disabilities | Pets allowed | Private parking

Price Indicative price per person (excl. drinks)

195€ à 340€

Gault&Millau's review

19/20

Exceptional Restaurant As you approach this exceptional place, in the hollow of the Val d'Enfer, you pass under an arbour perfumed with jasmine, like a word of welcome. This year, Glenn Viel, even more than in the past, presents a cuisine that is unusual, gourmet, poetic and jubilant. In front of a postcard of "fishing on foot", the memory of the high tides of his childhood, with an oyster magnetized on a small rock, to be eaten on the spot as if one had just caught it. It's accompanied by a little caviar and cucumber jelly. In a cuisine that can change from day to day, salt is replaced by reductions and concentrated flavor, and each plate is paired with a different bread. A small cardboard box is slid in front of you with the dish's description, in the chef's style. There's the "universal sardine", served whole, with a crispy head, buttered on toast. "Les couteaux les pieds dans l'eau" (knives with their feet in the water) is presented as a bouquet of knives, with the shell cut in half. With the help of tongs, they are removed one by one to be dipped in a concentrated juice, with basil drop worked like a pesto and a small tapioca tile, creamed with pine nuts as a wink to the sand. "Des grenouilles, un biotope" (Frogs, a biotope) features sections of frog on a powerful black garlic and shallot jus, and a soft Camargue rice like risotto topped with crunchy puffed rice. Because carrots have such a reputation, "un periwinkle (rendu) très très aimable" is in a carrot roll stuffed with a bite of monkfish, angel hair carrot, reduced periwinkle juice and sweet carrot juice. A side dish of dehydrated, reworked bread from the previous day. Then comes the aesthetic red mullet divinely cooked between two stones, the skin roasted into scales with bread "already sauced". As the menu evolves according to the garden's produce and the chef's mood, there's no signature dish other than a tribute to the emblematic Baumani lamb en croute revisited, the cannon in an aumônière, stuffed with mushroom duxelles, sun-dried tomatoes and topped with a grated pistachio. Pastry chef Brandon Dehan follows suit with oven-poached rhubarb with vergeoise, crispy arlette and beet sorbet. The attentive staff are irreproachable, and Antoine Cazin is a talented commentator on one of the largest and most beautiful wine cellars in France. The fifth toque, long coveted by the chef, arrives this year.

Plan