Saint Joachim: La Mare aux Oiseaux

I had heard raves about chef Eric Guérin’s cooking at La Mare aux Oiseaux long before I finally made it to the village of Saint Joachim, a huddle of thatched cottages on the Ile de Fédrun in the Parc de Brière, a remote and beautiful nature reserve in the département of Loire Atlantique. “No one used to come here before the boy opened his inn,” offered a rotund, beret-topped dog-watcher after I asked him for directions. “So today I get an American, yesterday three pretty Japanese ladies. It makes me proud.”

Only 40 minutes from Nantes and ten minutes from the chic Atlantic beach resort La Baule, the Brière is a vast, hauntingly luminous salt marsh, where patches of still water in the shaggy green landscape mirror the sky on a flat horizon, blurring the boundary between the two.

Guérin’s auberge occupies a snug, whitewashed 18th-century cottage with a steep reed-thatched roof right in the village center. The best rooms—9, 10 and 11—are in a clapboard outbuilding overlooking one of the many canals that lace the region. The comfortable rooms have a maritime vibe, with white-varnished wooden walls and decks with Adirondack chairs.

Guérin’s cooking thrums with an antic, unbridled creativity, and it’s beautiful too, every dish as carefully composed as a Flemish still life. I don’t like some of the trademarks of young French cooking here—Guérin uses too much sugar, often in the wrong places, like a tuile of salt caramel filled with crabmeat and guacamole, in which the sugar overpowered everything else. Add the fiddly sorbets used as garnishes, and the nursery nostalgia expressed in reworked kiddie favorites like Fraises Tagada (strawberry marshmallows). But I suspect he’ll shed these gimmicks eventually, because he’s a very talented chef.

My sea bass carpaccio in two sauces—foamy buttermilk and orange-and-apricot coulis—was served with roasted and raw asparagus and a salad of mustard cress and nasturtiums; it was as pretty to contemplate as it was delicious to eat. A terrine of tête de cochon was brilliantly garnished with fava beans and lemon-marinated squid rolled in a slice of country ham. And Guérin’s fresh goat cheese soufflé with Moroccan-inspired, cinnamon-marinated carrots and oranges, served with carrot-apricot sorbet, was one of the best desserts I’ve had in a long time.

Between meals, there is lots to see and do nearby. A canal outing in a chaland, or flat-bottomed wooden boat, is highly recommended, and so is a visit to the fascinating walled city of Guérande, the center of the salt pans that produce some of the world’s finest salt, fleur de sel de Guérande.

La Mare aux Oiseaux Parc National de Brière, 162 Ile de Fédrun, Saint Joachim, 02.40.88.53.01. website

Originally published in the June 2010 issue of France Today; updated in March 2012