164 Seasons of Le Manoir with Raymond Blanc OBE

How did you start working in food?

“I'm an unusual chef because I'm totally self-taught and I never had a minute training under another chef. I started in restaurants as a cleaner, then as a washer-up before becoming a waiter. Then I decided to travel to the UK in 1977 because I wanted to be a chef. I loved the idea of opera for the few and rock and roll for the many here in the UK, it was a changing country and I fell in love with food.”

How did you first find the house that would become Le Manoir?

“On a Sunday morning, I was reading a magazine called Country Life and I saw this house advertised in it for sale called Le Manoir. It was an old manor house in Oxfordshire and it connected with me. So, I took my little car and made my way there that same morning. When I arrived at the rusty gates and saw it, I fell in love — completely and utterly in love. It was an old house which had needed to be better kept, but the gardens were all uneven and beautiful. Sadly I had no money because I was just a young chef but sometimes luck is on your side. When I knocked on the door, a lady came out and I told her I wanted to buy her house. She looked at me, she looked at my battered Vauxhall car and said, ‘but who are you?’. I told her my name was Raymond Blanc and when I said that she said, ‘Monsieur Blanc, of course, I want to sell you my house for two reasons. I came to your little restaurant and it was unbelievable. The kindness, the beauty of the food, you made my family so happy. The second reason is that if I don't sell this house to you, it will be separated into flats and that would kill me.’ She helped me to buy this house and within a year, we had transformed it”.

In 1984 what was your dream for Le Manoir?

“The vision was to create something extraordinary. I wanted it to be full of joy, full of laughter, where food and friendships are the very heart of things. My dream was a small house with a huge garden, dreams never happen the way you dream them but this one did. I wanted effectively to create a beautiful restaurant and a hotel in total harmony, which will offer to our guests, the most extraordinary food, garden, and experiences. Now we have 32 bedrooms, and 14 gardens, amongst them a 2,500-tree orchard, a wild mushroom valley, a bee village, an extraordinary potager with 170 vegetable varieties, a Japanese garden, a water garden and a herb garden. It's a heavenly place. The garden is a canvas on which I form my gastronomy and that gastronomy is based on what my mom taught me, seasonality. Seasonality defines everything we do here.”