Cédric Navet, Executive Chef of La Mère Poulard Group’s restaurants, invites us to discover the new 2022 dishes: more locavore and gourmet dishes, combining tradition and modernity for all audiences at Mont Saint-Michel.
What is the ambition of your new menus in La Mère Poulard Group’s restaurants?
As we do every year, we're offering our customers new gourmet dishes in our restaurants. But in 2022, we're going one step further: we've completely overhauled the menus in our various establishments, to offer visitors to Mont Saint-Michel a more diversified gastronomic experience and dishes more in line with our ambitions and commitments. In particular, we've reinforced the seasonal nature of our menus, with the choice of fresh, seasonal produce, and also an even stronger attachment to our local supply chains for a timeless culinary experience. We tried out our new menus over a 5-month period: we tasted everything and kept the best for you to discover.
Where do the raw materials for your dishes come from? Do you give preference to local suppliers?
Yes, our local roots are very strong and are reflected in several partnerships with local producers. For example, with the lamb that will be featured on the menu of our restaurant Le Mouton Blanc. The lamb is 100% Breton. Another local and Breton producer: the farm that supplies our ham, made from pigs raised on straw a stone's throw from our home, and the one that supplies our poultry. Other 100% local products include our Normandy beef and PDO Isigny butter, our potatoes from the polders of Mont Saint-Michel, our local oysters, and of course, Jean-Paul Delaunay's farm, which has been supplying the Auberge de La Mère Poulard with free-range eggs for our famous wood-fired omelettes for over 130 years! These are partnerships we hold dear, enabling us to offer more local dishes, with more taste and more meaning, so that you can enjoy the tastiest dishes in our restaurants in Mont Saint-Michel.
What dishes will your Mont Saint-Michel restaurants be serving?
What's new at La Confiance
In our restaurant La Confiance, we'll be serving traditional French family dishes, served in cocottes. The menu will include stews such as boeuf bourguignon or blanquette de veau, duck leg confit, as well as regional desserts such as baked apple with caramel, typical of Brittany, or baba au rhum and crème brulée.
The new menu of the Auberge La Mère Poulard restaurant
Since March 2022, the restaurant at the Auberge La Mère Poulard has been offering a menu 100% made in Mont Saint-Michel, with French specialties and 100% homemade. Of course, you'll still be able to enjoy our legendary omelette, concocted from Annette Poulard's century-old recipe. It's an exclusive, gourmet soufflé omelette, cooked over a wood fire in copper pans by our four in-house-trained omelet-makers. A craft that only exists in our flagship establishment. In fact, The Auberge La Mère Poulard is the only establishment in France and abroad where you can enjoy this very special omelette. From now on, the fillings will be served on the plate: there will always be our traditional scallop omelettes, served with creamy rice, mushrooms and spinach; our gourmet bacon omelette, with pan-fried potatoes and mushrooms; and our salmon omelette with leek fondue. Three new omelettes will be on the menu at Auberge La Mère Poulard, including one with cinnamon carrot purée and seasonal vegetables, which will change throughout the year according to seasonal arrivals.
Opening of the new "Les Remparts" restaurant in Mont Saint-Michel
We want to meet the needs of our younger customers, with a quality burger and chips offer from our Mont Burger fast food restaurant, due to open in 2021. But we also have a new restaurant, Les Remparts, due to open in 2022. Here you'll find a wide variety of charcuterie and cheese boards, tartines and bruschettas, cocktails and fruit juices, all served to a background of warm music. Genuine open cuisine for everyone.
Lamb in all its guises at Le Mouton Blanc restaurant
In our restaurant Le Mouton Blanc, the star dish, requested by visitors for years, is lamb. These dishes feature the expertise of our in-house chefs, as the lamb will be worked in its entirety. This includes the less noble parts, such as the breast, which will be showcased in a delicious lamb terrine. We will sublimate all the parts of this local lamb by using, for example, the bone for sauces and broths.
Les Terrasses de la Baie for a fast, local experience
At Les Terrasses de la Baie, the restaurant with the most seats on the Mont Saint-Michel, we welcome up to 1,000 diners a day. The menu is simple and delicious, with dishes served quickly (as quickly as they are eaten!). Les Terrasses de la Baie has a very family brasserie feel, because we welcome a lot of families with children. They love our dishes, like our crêpes and galettes made in full view of the customers with our PDO Isigny Normandy butter. Or the lamb stir-fry with curry, a star dish already on the menu, which is a huge hit. Among our new dishes, we have introduced a vegetarian dish for our vegetarian or flexitarian customers: a quiche with ancient vegetables, served with rice and spelt. Come here for an easy meal with the kids at Mont Saint-Michel.
What about your partnerships with holders of the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France (MOF)?
In order to offer our customers ever higher quality products, we have established two partnerships with two of Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Best Craftsman of France). At the Auberge de la Mère Poulard and the Relais Saint Michel, we'll be offering ice creams created and designed by Alain Chartier, an ice-cream maker from Brittany who was voted Best Ice Cream Maker and Meilleur Ouvrier de France. At La Mère Poulard restaurant, you'll even be able to discover an exclusive sorbet: calvados apple. At Le Mouton Blanc, Les Remparts and La Digue, we'll be offering ice creams by another Meilleur Ouvrier de France and long-standing friend of the house: Philippe Urraca.
