Bonjour!

March. The month of reawakening. Cherry blossom appears on the trees, flowers on the vines, and millions of green shoots are pushing their little heads through the soil. Everything seems to come to life.

And it was 39 years ago this month that the manor house of Great Milton in Oxfordshire was reborn as Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons.

We opened the pair of large iron gates on 17^th March – St Patrick’s Day – 1984. Since then they have never been closed. In fact, as we celebrate our anniversary, I have flashbacks that are making me smile – my father on a ladder, hard at work, scraping away the rust from the gates before painting them black.

Papa was Le Manoir’s unpaid handyman, and he helped to sort out the tangled wilderness that was our garden. From our family home in Franche-Comté he brought seeds for fabulous varieties of vegetables: Ratte and Belle de Fontenay potatoes; coco and flageolet beans; Marmande tomatoes. All of these were mostly unknown to British gardeners who also tended to think that, when it came to vegetables, big was best. I remember lifting beautiful Nantes carrots from the soil as Richard, the gardener, looked pained. ‘Chef, those carrots aren’t even grown,’ he said. ‘They’re tinier than your little toe…’

Le Manoir’s opening night was not great, I must confess. The service was agonisingly slow and most guests didn’t receive dessert – caramel soufflé – until the early hours of the following day. Et voilà! They laughed, they forgave us, they came back to us. And I am still here to tell the tale.