Chef
Benjamin Reilhes
- Discipline
- Chef
Portrait of Benjamin Reilhes
i. Biography
Born in Castres, Benjamin Reilhes came into the trade through a domestic kitchen where preservation, harvest, and shared meals were part of the working rhythm. Before he led the gastronomic restaurant Le Clair de la Plume in Grignan, that early environment—garden vegetables turned into preserves, food laid out for the table, repetition as habit—set the terms of his palate and his sense of hospitality. His own words put the method plainly: "We made our own preserves, using the vegetables from our garden. We shared a lot around the table." It points to seasonality, economy, and the way eating together can be built from routine labor.
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The Climb
Training at Toulouse gave Benjamin Reilhes a base before a run through kitchens where discipline is built by repetition and standard. From Toulouse, he moved to the Lausanne Palace in Lausanne, then on to La Vague d’Or in Saint-Tropez, and the Grand Hôtel de Bordeaux. The sequence maps a professional path through different houses, each one adding pressure, pace, and its own standard of execution. In 2017, he joined Frères Ibarboure, adding another stage to a career that advanced step by step rather than by sudden break.
That matters in the trade: movement across kitchens builds range, and each stop leaves its own imprint on timing, organization, and the demands of service. The line of that progression reaches Grignan, where a new role followed in 2022.
Today
Since 2022, Benjamin Reilhes has been chef of Le Clair de la Plume in Grignan, France. The post places him inside a gastronomic restaurant shaped by place, with a career arc that links domestic food memory to formal dining-room work. The kitchen he runs now sits at the meeting point of technique, memory, and the everyday discipline of feeding people well.
In Their Words “We made our own preserves, using the vegetables from our garden. We shared a lot around the table.” The sentence is simple, but it names three fundamentals of the craft: preserving what the season gives, working by hand, and treating the table as a social tool rather than a display. In that one line, Benjamin Reilhes describes a kitchen economy where flavor comes with restraint, and where the act of making is the act of sharing.
Recognition
He has led the gastronomic restaurant Le Clair de la Plume in Grignan since 2022. For Benjamin Reilhes, that role extends a path that begins in a kitchen of preserves and shared meals and continues through a string of professional houses, bringing domestic discipline into a gastronomic setting.
FAQ
Asked of Benjamin
What is Benjamin Reilhes's current role?
As of 2026, Benjamin Reilhes is Chef of the gastronomic restaurant.
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The Sunday email
Read about chefs like Benjamin Reilhes in the Sunday email.
Every Sunday we send a lead story and up to four more about the chefs, winemakers, sommeliers and hoteliers behind the restaurants, bars, wineries and hotels we cover.
Recent stories
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