Ardent

Fire brought back to the pass

With the plate back to fire, Thomas Besnault is executive chef at Ardent in Esvres-sur-Indre. The restaurant works from a restored former farmhouse at Loire Valley Lodges, with a tasting menu shaped by the forest edge, the permaculture garden, and the kitchen’s use of flame. Besnault has held the pass since the hotel opened in 2020, and the room has been built around that continuity. He came to it from Brussels, young for the post, and his cooking takes its direction from the site rather than from a house style carried in: the wooded solemnity of the place, the perched lodges, the artworks set among them, and a carte blanche menu the forest and the potager decide. His register is braise and flame, which is a demanding way to work with foraged material because nothing about it is standard from one week to the next. The house names Paris Sainte-Maure and maquereau à la ronce among its signatures, plates that pull the kitchen toward Touraine, the garden, and the bramble outside the room.

Bramble, pine and the garden path

The method at Ardent begins with a narrow radius. Wild forest plants, vegetables from the permaculture potager, Sainte-Maure cheese, mackerel, duck, Douglas fir needles, nettle, sorrel, sap and bramble all appear in the restaurant’s account of itself, not as decoration but as working materials. The menu is seasonal and served as a tasting menu, with the kitchen moving between garden and forest rather than offering a fixed à la carte grammar. Fire gives the program its spine. Mackerel may pass through flame with radish and bramble oil; Mont d’Or may take on Douglas fir; foie gras can be set against woodland leaves and a marine bouillon. Those combinations matter because they ask the pass to hold two things at once, precision in cuisson and the less predictable edge of foraged material. The wine program follows the same register, curated around Loire selections and natural bottles that can sit beside smoke, greens, cheese and root sweetness without flattening them.

A room held by wood and clearing

The room does not fight the forest. Wood, a fireplace, hunting trophies and a terrace facing a clearing give Ardent the mood of a house built for weather, not for spectacle. Service is formal, but the atmosphere stays conversational; the work on the pass has enough force without the room raising its voice. From the table, the eye keeps returning to materials that match the plate: timber, fire, dark green, the edge of the terrace, the thought of the potager beyond the walls. The former farmhouse setting matters here because the menu keeps reaching outside it. A dish such as Paris Sainte-Maure lands differently when the room already smells faintly of wood and the forest is not a theme but the nearest neighbor.

Held to its own address

Ardent has bound its cooking tightly to its site, and the kitchen does not need to borrow grandeur from the Loire châteaux nearby. It has the Duporterie forest, the garden, the fireplace, and the bramble running through maquereau à la ronce.