Sue Style, Food, Wine and Travel Writer

Eating out, November 2001

REGIS MARCON, THE MUSHROOM KING
[First published FT Weekend, 13th October 2001]

IF you’re fond of fungi at all, you should head for St Bonnet-le-Froid during these late autumn weeks. St Bonnet-le-Where? Get out your geometry set and locate your set square. Take also a map of France and find Lyon. Now go south a bit and place the set square on the map so that Vienne is at the top of the long side and Valence at the bottom. Out to the left (west), at the vertex of your geometrical instrument (well, close) will be St Bonnet-le-Froid. And it’s up here on the borders between the Haute Loire and the Ardèche that chef Régis Marcon is doing all sorts of magic things with mushrooms.

He’s been doing them for close on 22 years now. For a while, nobody much noticed. Then the Michelin man began to get wind of him and awarded the first star in 1989. The second followed in 1996, and in 2001 Marcon was voted Cuisinier de l’Année by GaultMillau. Since then people have been beating a path to his door, keen to sample his mushroom cuisine and to soak up some of the special atmosphere of St Bonnet.

For special it certainly is, with a character all of its own. The road winds up from Annonay, the last part alongside an alluring stream named St Bonnette. Resist the temptation to dive down and picnic beside it, and push on up to the top. Here, at over a thousand metres, is a modest, undistinguished little village of 200 inhabitants. Walkers with red stockings and stout sticks stride the streets, shops sell local honey, Puy lentils, garlic, baskets, postcards and IGN (Ordinance Survey) maps - the area is a walker’s paradise. You know you’re getting warm when you land up in the main square, the Place des Champignons. Be careful not to blink as you drive down the main street, because you may miss the Auberge et Clos des Cimes. It’s hidden behind a discreet green wooden frontage. Once again, the sign outside showing two stumpy little ceps is the giveaway.

The hotel-restaurant, like the village, puts on no airs (‘peu protocolaire’ is how Marcon describes it). It’s one of those rare places that in spite of star status, and considerable media fuss, and membership of Relais-et-Châteaux, has not forgotten that it started out life as the village café run by Marcon’s mother. The Auberge des Cimes, in short, is not for you if you are likely to be outraged by the patter of tiny feet in the dining room as Marcon’s youngest smilingly wishes you ‘bon appétit’ before he scampers off to bed, or if you would prefer stiff little crysanths on the tables to posies of scabious and cornflowers, or if you are offended by the sight and sound of working tractors outside in the fields (all of which toffee-nosed townies have been known to object to).

The chef-patron seems somewhat bemused, not to say underwhelmed, by his sudden notoriety. Both he and his wife Michèle come from the area, where they started out married life as ski instructors. He grew up in St Bonnet up on its high plateau. He knows its fields and its forests intimately, and on days off he still escapes gratefully to them in search of bilberries, wild garlic, fresh sorrel – and, of course, mushrooms.

In the spring there are morels which go into an unashamedly kitsch dish named la brochette Margaridou, featuring the classic combination of morels and sweetbreads threaded onto a skewer, rolled in a thick mushroom panade, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. Then come the mousserons (fairy-ring mushrooms), which are marinated in hazelnut oil and served on feathery salad burnet leaves with wild chives. Early summer brings the first egg yolk-yellow chanterelles served with milk-fed veal, or in a fricot with mangetout peas, baby carrots and broad beans, or simply stewed in their own marvellous juice.

pieds
Hedgehog fungi/Pieds de mouton (Hydnum repandum)

The best time to visit is the autumn. Then dishes like the pizza-style galette topped with a rich tomato coulis and a whole heap of mixed mushrooms from the collectors’ baskets comes into its own. Marcon has about 40 people gathering fungi for him in the season, and their finds could include anything from Sparassis crispa, the delectable spongiform cauliflower fungus, to hedgehog fungi, horns of plenty, and red lactarius.

a fine sample of Sparassis crispa (cauliflower fungus)

Best of all is the cep, that meaty, weighty king of mushrooms (the house logo) slices of which come framed in the middle of a succulent slab of veal pâté in flaky pastry.

One of the chef's most intriguing dishes is a consommé of wild mushrooms infused with tansy leaves. The recipe calls for 1 kilo of mixed ceps, fairy-ring mushrooms and chanterelles. These must be gently sweated in olive oil with a sliced bulb of fennel and a leek. Meanwhile a good handful of dried ceps have been put to soak. The mushrooms are barely covered with water, which is reduced to a shadow of its former self. Finally the re-constituted ceps and their soaking liquid are added to the pan, plus more water, and the whole is allowed to bubble gently for an hour. The consommé is then strained, carefully filtered and poured into a teapot containing some tansy leaves. This intriguing, bitter herb, claims the chef, imparts a little touch of liquorice and mint (though it is not indicated for pregnant women).

I wasn’t too fussed about the tansy (my reproductive days being behind me), but I was definitely fretting about the mushrooms. ‘What happens to them?’ I asked, thinking wistfully of what I couldn’t do with one whole kilo of mixed ceps and chanterelles. ‘Well you could use them in a stuffing, I suppose,’ answered Marcon doubtfully, ‘but we throw them out – all the flavour has gone into the consommé’.

I suppose if you live in St Bonnet-le-Froid, you can afford such largesse de champignons.

Auberge et Clos des Cimes
43290 St Bonnet-Le-Froid
France
Tel. +33 4 71 59 93 72
Fax +33 4 71 59 93 40
e-mail: contact@regismarcon.fr

Horns of Plenty (Craterellus cornucopioides)