Meaning
Europe faced devastating forest fires this summer, driven by extreme heatwaves, wind and drought. It has been a hard season for many Spanish and French landowners, as wildfires took lives, land and livelihoods. In southwestern France, around Bordeaux, the damage was severe: whole towns and ten thousand hectares of forest turned to ash within days. Other parts of the French countryside went unscathed. A reminder that valuing farmers’ land and their hard work has always been important and supporting them now is even more key.
One of the regions mostly spared is the Loire Valley, known for its vineyards, grand châteaux and one of France's richest culinary traditions. Eating well in a place like this tends to leave people wanting to bring something of it home, even when the flavours are hard to recreate in your own kitchen. But what if you understood why, not just how a dish was made?
If you like cooking shows such as Top Chef, you might have found yourself salivating over how a chef spooned sizzling butter all over your television screen, masterfully perfecting a piece of meat. Inspired, you bought their cookbook, poured over pages of goodlooking recipes and video tutorials, building confidence with each attempt. But some of the Le Cordon Bleu-style cooking techniques were intimidating. You told yourself you'd get to them another day.
Now imagine wandering stalls at a farmers' market beside that same chef. You watch them smell each vegetable, sample everything in sight. You learn how they structure a menu from what produce is available that day. Then, within ten minutes, you’re in the kitchen with them, cooking that fresh farm produce, together.
This is how a culinary retreat goes down at Château de Jalesnes, in the heart of Loire.
Set across twenty-two acres of formal gardens, woodland and orchards, this Renaissance château has spent the past decade hosting weddings for couples from around the world. Somewhere along the way, the team noticed that food, more than anything else, was what drew couples to choose them. I reached out because I was curious about their move into wellness travel, where the meal itself becomes the centre of the experience. I spoke with Katy Dobson, who has coordinated events at the château for the past five years.
"It's fascinating going to the market with a star chef," she says. "You see how they think, why they choose particular ingredients, and what catches their eye. Great moments of learning that are unusual to come by."
There's another layer to this that makes these culinary retreats different: the chefs who lead them are rarely French. The château works with an international roster, each one bringing their own reading of French produce and technique. Cuisines blend, ingredients get paired in unexpected ways, and inspiration is shared freely.
Many chefs have been notoriously protective of their signature dishes, guarding kitchen secrets closely; some have even asked for a prized recipe to be carved into their gravestone. Locally, gastronomy comes with rules. A chef working outside their own tradition is often freed from certain expectations around legacy, and that's part of what makes these retreats feel different: chefs and guests all tap into their passion for cooking, bringing creative self-expression, they’re equally absorbed in the process of making a feast.
"We work with chefs who are open to the relaxed, generous sharing style of our retreats," Katy explains. "The retreats are very intimate. Our chefs aren't disappearing into the kitchen. They're joining the excursions, cooking together and sharing wonderful stories." The chefs don't only show you what they do and how. They explain why.
Eating well is often about more than the food itself. Cooking well, in the same way, becomes less about technique and more about understanding.
Why does one ingredient belong with another? Why is it so hard to get something crisp without drying it out? When do you bring the heat, and when do you hold back? How does heat actually behave? Why this wine with that sauce, and not another? Questions like these are what give people the confidence to experiment once they're home: to season with conviction, to combine ingredients in ways they hadn't tried before.
The only kitchen failure happens when you stop trying.
This isn't about comparing skill, or even learning technique for its own sake. "We're not trying to create a cooking school," Katy explains. "It's made for a much wider mix of people. Some guests love cooking for fun, some do it for a living, others simply love eating. A culinary retreat is ultimately about enjoyment: the food, the surroundings, getting to know the chefs, and the conversations shared along the way." Some chefs lean toward refined, Michelin-starred cooking, others are rooted in farm-to-table traditions. Future retreats will bring in pastry chefs and chocolatiers too, each with their own specialty.
A recent retreat was led by legendary chef and restaurateur Marco Pierre White, who trained numerous famed chef protégés like Gordon Ramsay, Mario Batali and Curtis Stone. The chef’s chef. Known for his artistic genius and supreme self-confidence, he disrupted the culinary world and at one point was dubbed the “enfant terrible” of the British restaurant scene. The first British and the youngest chef to earn three Michelin stars, he subsequently handed them all back because he didn’t find true worth and fulfilment in his career despite his successes. His charismatic personality shone during his spring retreat, when the kitchen evolved into a spontaneous Carbonara cook-off between him and the guests.
An example of how every retreat ultimately tastes and feels different because every harvest, every chef and every group of people bring their own edge to the table.
It doesn't matter whether you need a recipe in front of you, prefer to improvise, or think nothing of throwing dinner together from whatever's left in the fridge. Whether you learned to cook from someone at home, taught yourself, or are into plating micro-greens with tweezers, there's a place for you here. "Because everyone is open to learning, people are happy to share whatever level of experience they're at," Katy says.
Beyond the daily cooking, each gastronomy retreat includes a chef's workshop, a market visit and an excursion, such as a cheesery or a vineyard visit. Guests are free to spend the rest of their time as they like: long walks, cycling the back roads, swimming, a game of pétanque, or lounging by the pool with a good book.
"People often arrive with a long list of things they want to do," Katy says. "Then they realise they don't have to fill every hour." The pace changes how people connect, too. Cooking together, the chef and the group eat every meal at the same table. "Despite the château setting, it's not formal at all. It's more like a cosy salon where people relax quickly," Katy says.
Just as weddings and other key life milestones are celebrated with a feast, cooking and serving food carry their own sense of ceremony. It starts with mindful intention: respecting cultural traditions while gaining inspiration, choosing ingredients with care and gratitude, following precise steps and methods, paying attention to detail while collaborating throughout, and finally, sharing it. When you think of it this way, making a meal stops being a chore and becomes a meaningful, sensory experience done in community.
One that connects people to a place, to each other, to culture, to their past, the surrounding nature and even faith. One morsel at a time.
Guests leave Château de Jalesnes with chefs’ life stories, a few new tricks, and a different way of thinking about food: valued by a deeper appreciation of the environment it came from and the passionate people behind each recipe.
They leave curious too, having seen how an outside perspective can enrich a tradition.
If you missed the Wellness Tourism food series, here are three pieces to catch up on.
In A taste memory from Sicily we went down memory lane where one particular event nourished me differently. In the recent Long and Short I brought you along to Brazil, sharing what lessons living on a coffee farm taught me beyond flavour, provenance, climate, tradition and ethics. Last week’s Chew on this reflected on the craze of functional foods and how brands will try to make us believe that health and wellness come wrapped in a supercharged packet. It goes deeper than what we eat.
Everything is connected: what, when, where, how, with whom and why.
As we're approaching autumn and apple season, I’m sharing with you a classic Loire recipe, made the way Marco Pierre White himself cooks it.
Tarte Tatin à la Marco Pierre White
Tarte Tatin à la Marco Pierre White_Wellness Tourism.pdf
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