GBASS BOTS

On a road trip deep into the culinary heart of France, Rosecrans Baldwin visits the village restaurants and country hotels updating the age-old French tradition of cooking local.

- Rosecrans Baldwin

I ALWAYS KNOW I've arrived in France when I take the first bite of a particular food-usually something simple, like a lemon tart or an almond croissant. Mostly I crave a good jambon beurre. One afternoon last June, my sense of that quintessentially French simplicity was redefined. I was visiting Domaine des Etangs, a resort in a château outside Massignac, a village in the southwest. I'd gone to meet the property's farmer at his potager, or vegetable garden. When I arrived, a young man in chef whites was leaving with a basket on his arm; less than an hour later, five little plates appeared on a wooden picnic table in the middle of the farmer's plot. No tablecloth, no formality, just a gourmet meal made from produce that, 45 minutes before, had been growing in the sun.

I was on day four of a 10-day road trip through France, during which I ate everything in sight, and this was probably the best meal I had. Call it "locavore traveling" to the extreme--this in a nation where the idea of eating locally is a bedrock of the culinary culture. I selected places-destination restaurants and hotels with restaurants-that emphasize terroir, as the French call it. To me, this means experiencing a place as deeply as possible through food and wine, as well as interactions with the people responsible for putting them on the table.