On the heights of the Aubrac plateau, the Bras family home is fashioned in a spirit of total harmony with the landscape: a world of plants, stone and light. The cuisine of Michel and Sébastien is inspired by this locality and reveals to their guests unsuspected flavors, as in the "gargouillou de jeunes légumes," the "pièce de b'uf fermier Aubrac," or even the "biscuit au chocolat coulant."

 

Michel Bras, the carnal ascetic
An iconic figure of Laguiole in Aubrac, Michel Bras received three stars from the MIchelin guide in 1999. This supreme distinction recognzied the immense talent of this son of the land, as well as his philosophy of life imbued with rigor, asceticism and purity.

"My cooking, like the Aubrac plateau, cuts to the essential," says Michel Bras with his characteristic earnestness. In fact, the man and his environment are one. The symbiosis is complete and intense, as much spiritual as carnal. His menus, "Evasion et Terre," or "Decouverte en Nature," are imagined as Bras travels the wide open spaces of the Aubrac, the pastures, rocky sheep paths and beech groves, passing a newly-opened daffodil, smelling the waterfalls and taking in the ineffable light of Aubrac. "From these gray skies, occasionally pierced with a shaft of light, comes the black shadow of my monkfish fillet.": everything is said, everything is there on the plates of amazed diners in this modern-day farmhouse that is Bras' fiefdom. A high tech granite, schist and basalt ship whose contours follow the mountain, the architecture opening onto the breathtaking vista that takes on a journey that speaks both to the senses and to the soul.

Man, land and magic
"Eternal learners in the face of infinity, we must breath, taste and observe.  The almond-scented queen of the meadows, the elder with its aroma of muscat. Vegetables, too, spinach-like 'baselle' with its mucilaginous leaves, delicately-flavored chickweed. Anything that crunches, cracks, prickles or smells good ends up adorning plates."