L'Orée des Chênes, the Originals Relais

A lovely place to stay on our drive to SW France. Charming, helpful staff, a comfortable room plus excellent dinner & breakfast.

The setting is lovely and our room was pretty good with a super bath. It would have been nice to have tea or coffee making facilities. My big criticism is the food. It it relatively small and expensive and only one ‘Menu’ is available - a three course offering for €47 with cheese extra. There are only two choices for each course with no vegetarian option. If the chef is giving you so few options it should suggest supreme confidence in his dishes and we expected to be blown away but we weren’t. My wife emoted her two fish dishes but certainly didn’t rave about them. My foie gras starter was good but small. My main course consisted of two very small pieces of pork, a couple of bits each of broccoli and butternut squash and a thin jus that was supposed to taste of liquorice but didn’t. All was tepid and quickly cooled further on a cold plate. If the ingredients cost €1 I’d be surprised. VERY disappointing. We both quite enjoyed the mango sorbet covered with a lattice of crisp meringue described as a vacherin for dessert. We opted for the sommelier’s selection of wine. The first two glasses were appropriate for our respective food choices. The liquid described as orange wine served with the pudding was horrid. The staff were OK but slow to provide the bread which would have made the little freebies at the beginning more enjoyable. Over all, pretentious and totally overpriced!

For some reason our otherwise excellent SatNav couldn't find this place so I had to resort to asking for directions in the town. Having finally arrived we agreed that the hotel is in a lovely country location and looks very attractive. The lady on Reception was very helpful and friendly and pulled my wife's case to our, outside, room. The room was large, comfortable and warm, although rather dated with a large pale blue corner bath. I think that the hotel prides itself in it's cuisine and the prices certainly reflect that; my wife's 'Men des Chenes'' was 47 Euro and my 'Thyme crusted rack of lamb', which was in reality two lamb cutlets, was 27 Euro alone. We chose a bottle of Rose from the lower end of the list and it was only 52 Euro. The food was ok but nothing more, although our two servers were charming. In the morning we went in to breakfast at just after 9am and we were alone; as we had a long drive ahead of us we wanted a good cooked breakfast but there was only a smear of scrambled egg and one small sausage left. I asked the waiter if we could have some fried eggs but he had no English so I asked for "oeufs frittes" but he did not understand; I even tried pointing to the scrambled egg and miming breaking an egg into a frying pan but still nothing. He brought his phone and tried a translation and finally we were there - however, his reply was "pas possible". I was astonished that a kitchen that had prepared our dinner could not rise to frying some eggs! The waiter disappeared and, after some time, reappeared with two plates each containing a fried egg and three rashers of bacon, without a word. The (different) lady on Reception asked if everything had been good and, when I explained about breakfast, she deducted 20 Euro from our bill. A very good gesture but it should not have been necessary. No, we don't plan to return. My apologies for the long winded review.