Château d’Audrieu

From the same house to the pass

Samuel Gaspar keeps the tempo as executive chef at Château d’Audrieu in Audrieu, where the pass belongs to a house he already knew from inside. His progression ran from chef at Le Séran to executive chef of Château d’Audrieu, a change of title that kept him at the same address and deepened his authority over the brigade, the room, and the daily standard. That continuity matters in a château kitchen. The work is not only the making of plates; it is the holding of a tone, service after service, within a property whose hospitality has its own pace. Gaspar’s cooking is described by the house through local and short supply chains, with a Norman register that favors clarity over display. He did not arrive as an outside signature imposed on the room. He advanced through the house, and the kitchen now carries the confidence of someone who has learned its cadence before directing it. Predecessor Olivier Barbarin shaped an earlier modern identity for Le Séran, tying the kitchen to the garden and to a simple, gourmand idea of Normandy. Gaspar keeps that line close, refining it through seasonal products, the brigade’s discipline, and the exacting calm required by formal service in period rooms.

Normandy measured by the garden

The method at Le Séran begins with proximity. The kitchen works from a seasonal approach and a local sourcing discipline that the house frames around Normandy products, including the potager, the verger, and the ruches. Published accounts put the sourcing emphasis at 90% within 60km, with vegetables, herbs, apples, honey, dairy, cheeses, shellfish, and fish shaping the register of the menu. The dishes stay close to recognizable gestures: barigoule, poaching, gratiné, beurre blanc, confit egg, flamed fish. A plate of maquereau à la flamme with chèvre normand and beet refreshed with hibiscus sits in the same vocabulary as lieu jaune poché au beurre d’algues and beurre blanc, or artichaut barigoule normande with poutargue. The menu changes seasonally, with rotations described every two months, so the kitchen’s repetition is not fixed by signature alone. It is fixed by method. Gaspar’s station is to keep those ingredients legible, to let apple, cream, Livarot, Pont-l’Évêque, oyster, mussel, and Saint-Jacques remain themselves while moving through a fine-dining pass. The wine program extends that same formal discipline, with more than 600 bottles displayed in the first salle and 200 references led by chef sommelier Guillaume Darricarrère-Burneau.

Red rooms, white cloth, park light

The room gives the cooking its frame. Le Séran sits inside an 18th-century château, among period rooms marked by red and gray tones, white tablecloths, and the quiet expected of a gastronomic sanctuary. The formality is not brittle. It has the settled weight of a house that became a hotel in 1976, joined Relais & Châteaux in 1977, and still draws part of its atmosphere from park views and salons rather than spectacle. During service, the room holds a low register: plates crossing the pass, wine moving from the visible cellar display, cutlery reset without theatre. Outside, the property’s gardens cover 25 hectares, designed by Louis Benech in 1985, and that landscape is not just scenery for the dining room. It supplies the kitchen’s language of potager, orchard, bees, and season. The final impression is of a restaurant working inside a house rather than beside it. Gaspar’s next plate returns to the same grammar: beurre d’algues, Normandy honey, and the pass at Le Séran.