La Nauve, Hôtel & Jardin

The chef and the house line

The kitchen garden sets the pace before service. Anthony Carballo, chef at La Nauve, Hôtel & Jardin in Cognac, brings its herbs and vegetables back to the pass with the authority of a house role that is larger than the stove. He is named here as chef, and also as chef exécutif et co-directeur d’exploitation, a title that keeps the kitchen line and the running of the house in the same hands. Since 2022, that post has defined his current work: not a guest turn, not a consulting signature, but the daily direction of a hotel kitchen built around service, season, and place.

La Nauve gives him an unusual frame for that discipline. The property began as a Cognac producer’s mansion and distillery, set beside the Charente with 12 acres, or 4 hectares, of gardens and lawns, and a 150-year-old sequoia in the grounds. After a four-year restoration, the house opened in 2023 as a Relais & Châteaux address. Carballo’s station sits inside that wider act of preservation, where old stone, garden yield, and formal dining meet without needing to announce themselves. His 2025 Relais Chateaux Award belongs to this present chapter, and the work still returns to the same immediate question: what the garden, the region, and the house can carry today.

A menu led by the garden

The program moves through two dining rooms, with Notes as the intimate gastronomic restaurant and La Brasserie des Flâneurs in the restored distillery. At Notes, a Napoleon III salon with mouldings, mirrors, and red accents, the menu follows the estate’s vegetable garden and the produce of the region: forest, sea, Cognac distilleries, and nearby farms. The room seats 20, small enough for the pass to feel close to the table. The work is seasonal by structure rather than decoration.

Carballo’s brasserie cooking draws from childhood memory, but the method stays grounded in what the house can supply and what Cognac can bring in. Herbs and vegetables come from the kitchen garden; fruit comes from the orchard; the wider pantry reaches toward the Charente landscape and the Atlantic edge. The hotel also extends that thinking into garden picnics, where the same produce leaves the dining room and returns to the lawn. Pastry is part of the larger kitchen program, though the house does not place a public grammar around individual desserts. The rhythm is harvest, decision, prep, service.

The room around the pass

Service at Notes takes place in a restored salon rather than a neutral dining room. The mouldings and mirrors hold the light; warm lamps soften the red accents; the scale keeps the room quiet enough for the small sounds of service to register. Plates cross from the pass into a space that still reads as a house, not a stage set. That matters here. The food is tied to a property with gardens, old stone, and a distillery past, and the room lets those layers remain in view.

Across the property, La Brasserie des Flâneurs gives the kitchen another register: wood beams, fireplaces in winter, and the garden close by in summer. Carballo’s work has to hold both rooms without flattening either one. The formal salon asks for precision and quiet pace; the brasserie asks for memory, warmth, and the ease of a dish that can survive conversation. The same hand sits behind both, and the same garden keeps returning to the bench. Endings here are best kept concrete: a service in Notes, a cut of herbs from the kitchen garden, and Anthony Carballo back at the pass in Cognac.