ReportageIn Valdeblore, in the Mercantour massif, near Nice, a trio of thirty-something with a pioneering spirit transformed a beautiful abandoned building into an inn. There, facing the sumptuous mountains, they offer a gourmet stopover made with products from the vegetable garden.
The sun is setting behind the Bois Noir. From a military camp bed dating from the Second World War, the vision of the orange sky is like a truce. In the Tinée valley, one hour from Nice and 1,100 meters above sea level just after Valdeblore, L’Auberge de La Roche serves as a refuge in the midst of the Covid turmoil. On the terrace built from the backs of wooden barges, under the wisteria at rest, the masks fall and the eyes widen in front of the majestic mountains still covered with snow of the Mercantour massif.
Along the path leading to one of the three downstairs bedrooms (there are five in all), the blackcurrant and currant hedges are still leafless. It’s the end of winter. No difficulty in visualizing the berries to peck before leaving to explore the henhouse below. There, Zeus, Gaïa and Adonis are worthy representatives of a forgotten breed of hen, the janzé, a fowl with intense bluish black plumage pampered by Alexis Bijaoui, one of the partners of the project.
Just above, on the squads – rough wooden railings that separate the upper garden from the lower garden – run the crazy lianas of honeysuckle which echo, in summer, the luxuriance of the carpets of cucurbits planted at their feet. At the top, as at the bottom of the field, the “gardens” rest. There are three of them, all pampered by Alexis Bijaoui, a cook by trade, but also a gardener who has worked in the houses of Alain Passard, the three-star chef of L’Arpège (with whom he worked for six months in the vegetable garden), and Dan Barber, American chef at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a gourmet restaurant in New York State where the vegetables produced on site are cooked.
Under the rubble, the vegetable gardens
When Alexis arrived in La Roche just over a year ago, his job consisted of separating the stones from the rubble to bring back arable land. A few months later, in the summer, three vegetable gardens – one in permaculture cultivated in a spiral, another in associated crops (where the plants provide protection or additional nutrients) and a last, organized online – shelter in bulk and according to seasons more than 600 herbs, chard, raspberry, sage, thyme, rosemary, anise hyssop, verbena, squash, leeks, tomatoes, chilli, physalis, spinach Vikings, marigolds, cabbages, melons, pickles, broccoli, pea and Jerusalem artichoke flowers …
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