La Grenouillère

La Grenouillère is a restaurant and hotel on the river Canche below Montreuil-sur-Mer, in the north of France. It stands in the village of La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil, and chef Alexandre Gauthier runs it.

The house is a 16th-century farm that became an inn in the 1930s, and it won a Michelin star under its early owners. Frescoes of frogs painted in the sitting room by Frank Reynolds, a cartoonist and art editor of the London magazine Punch, gave the place its name. Roland Gauthier and his wife Claudine took over at the end of the 1970s, just days before their son Alexandre was born, and Roland held a star for nearly two decades. Alexandre trained at the hotel school of Le Touquet, cooked for Régis Marcon and at Lasserre in Paris, and took over his father's kitchen in 2003.

Gauthier won back the Michelin star and later gave the old inn a new form. The architect Patrick Bouchain rebuilt the restaurant around a glass-walled dining room facing the garden, and wooden huts in the grounds became the hotel rooms; a dark corridor with openings looks into a kitchen of steel and light. La Grenouillère joined Relais & Châteaux, and in 2017 it received a second Michelin star. Gault&Millau named Gauthier its chef of the year, and he has published two books on his cooking.

His tasting menu plays with surprise. A cheese bite has been served in the hollow of a whole scooped-out Mimolette, strands of chocolate come with a vinegar dressing, and a spoon is drawn through honeycomb straight from the hive. Gauthier also runs Anecdote in Montreuil, and he cooked for heads of state during the COP21 climate conference in Paris.