Troisgros – a night at the family table in Ouches

For almost ninety years the Troisgros name meant a house opposite the railway station in Roanne, the textile town on the Loire north-west of Lyon. In 2017 the family left the town for the countryside ten minutes away, to a 17-hectare estate in the village of Ouches – a word for fertile, enclosed land planted with vegetables or fruit trees. There, with the architect Patrick Bouchain, Michel and Marie-Pierre Troisgros turned a 19th-century stone villa and its farm buildings into a single house: a glass dining room built around a century-old oak, a kitchen open to the fields, and 15 rooms upstairs and in the outbuildings. Their son César now cooks, and Le Bois sans Feuilles holds the three MICHELIN stars the family first won in 1968. The hotel, Le Bois Dormant, exists to let you stay for dinner and wake up to the meadows. The MICHELIN Guide gives Troisgros two Keys.

This is what a stay is like now, from the barn door to breakfast.

01The house

The story starts in 1930, when Jean-Baptiste and Marie Troisgros left their café in Chalon-sur-Saône and took over the Hôtel des Platanes in Roanne, opposite the station; they renamed it the Hôtel Moderne and made it a stop on the road south. In the early 1950s their sons Jean and Pierre took over the kitchen. They won a first MICHELIN star in 1956, created their salmon with sorrel seven years later – one of the first dishes of what became Nouvelle Cuisine – and won a second star in 1965 and a third in 1968.

Pierre's son Michel came home with his wife Marie-Pierre in 1983, after years cooking abroad, and took over in 1996. They opened Le Central, their café and delicatessen in Roanne, in 1995, a restaurant in Tokyo in 2006 and La Colline du Colombier on the Loire in 2008. In February 2017 they found Ouches. Bouchain linked the villa to the old farm buildings rather than keeping them apart, and added a U-shaped glass pavilion on steel columns that echo the trees outside.

02Rooms and suites

Le Bois Dormant has 15 rooms, suites and apartments, spread between the Italian-style manor house and the Maison des Kakis – kaki is French for the persimmons that grow in the garden. The rooms are large, with en-suite bathrooms, and Marie-Pierre has furnished them with her own colourful collections and with works lent by artists, so no two feel alike. A small welcome treat and a few family recipes wait for each guest. The tone is a family home rather than a grand hotel, and the house cats are part of it.

Insider tip

Open Wednesday evening to Sunday evening only – book the room and the table together.

Downstairs, lounges with blown-glass windows open onto a long terrace above the meadows and the forest. There is a green room with a fireplace and a library of art books and objects, and in summer a heated outdoor pool and a Nordic bath. The MICHELIN Guide also lists a sauna. Breakfast is a buffet, served without hurry.

03Where to eat: Le Bois sans Feuilles

The name means the leafless forest, and the way in is part of the meal. Guests enter through the old barn, pass the cellars and step into a glass clearing built around the oak, with the woods and fields on every side. César Troisgros, who trained with Michel Rostang in Paris, at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona and with Thomas Keller in the Napa Valley, joined his father in Roanne in 2011 and has led the kitchen at Ouches since the move. He cooks with clarity and a taste for acidity, sharpness and smoky, toasted notes, and he thinks in terms of a style rather than signature dishes.

Much of what reaches the table now comes from the estate: an orchard, beehives, a permaculture vegetable garden, persimmon and pepper trees, a pond and pasture. Since 2024 the house has baked its own sourdough. Lunch and dinner are served from tasting menus or à la carte, and the wine list is built with the head sommelier, Haik Manoukian. The restaurant is closed on Monday and Tuesday and at Wednesday lunch; children staying in the hotel can eat at the chefs' table in the kitchen.

04The bar and the estate

The bar is kept for restaurant and hotel guests only, which keeps the evenings unhurried and private. By day the estate is the attraction: the persimmon garden, a white walled courtyard with benches, the wishing tree, the forest and the pond. Neither the architect nor the landscape designer tried to tame it; nature is left to itself, and the glass lets it in from every side.

05The neighbourhood

Ouches lies in the Loire department, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, about ten minutes from Roanne. In town, Le Central still faces the station where the family began and serves home cooking and deli counters. A few minutes' walk from the hotel, the youngest generation has its own project: Le Pré Cheval, Marion Troisgros's farm with guest rooms and horse riding. Further down the Loire, La Colline du Colombier has been run since 2024 by her brother Léo and his partner Lisa.

06Making the most of a stay

Plan around the calendar: the hotel and restaurant are open from Wednesday evening to Sunday evening, with a break of about ten days in mid-August and three weeks in winter. Book the room and the table together, arrive by mid-afternoon to walk the estate, and take a seat for dinner by 21.00 at the latest. Rooms are yours from 16.00 until 11.00 the next day – long enough for a late breakfast and a last walk to the pond. Ask for a picnic basket for the road home.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.