Jean-François Beauduin

At La Croix Blanche in Veuzain-sur-Loire, France, Jean-François Beauduin works from a narrow set of priorities: local game, river fish, and a kitchen built on exact handling rather than ornament. The line that runs through the cooking is lièvre à la royale and Loire fish, each treated with direct sourcing and a technique that stays visible in the plate. The result is a style that depends on patience, precision and a clear read on the ingredient.

The current focus in the kitchen is lièvre à la royale, and Beauduin keeps the method legible. Of the sénateur Couteaux version, Jean-François Beauduin says: "With the sénateur Couteaux version, the hare is cooked as a stew with a very tannic red-wine sauce, lots of garlic and shallots." It is a compact technical description of a dish that needs depth, structure and control over long cooking. That same discipline shows up in how the sauce is finished.

"They can be bound with chocolate, but that brings bitterness and the characteristic of lièvre à la royale is lost." For Beauduin, the point is not to amplify the dish but to keep its profile intact. Tradition here is treated as a working standard: each addition has to protect the dish's identity, not blur it. Loire fish sits in the same register of specificity. "Antoine Proust, a professional fisherman, supplies me with all my Loire fish: barbel, mullet, eel, bream and, exceptionally, pikeperch, which it would be worth worrying about because of its rarity."

The supply line is direct, the species are named plainly, and the river remains central to the kitchen's material logic. In that framework, the cooking stays tied to what the Loire can actually give.