If he’s not in the kitchen, challenging a chef one-third his age to a race to prepare girolle mushrooms, or upstairs on the first floor in his small, book-lined office, Raymond Blanc can often be found in the car park of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, the Oxfordshire restaurant and hotel he created. “Every lunch, you will see 60% small cars and 40% big cars,” says Blanc, when we meet at Le Manoir on one of the heatwave days of early summer. “Evening, it’s a switch: it’s 60% big cars, but there’s still 40% small cars. And that is the most crucial success of our business.”
Perhaps sensing my confusion at how the composition of a car park relates to excellence in gastronomy, the 73-year-old Blanc goes on: “I’m a working-class person. And I wanted always to create an environment that is totally inclusive, where my papa could come once a year, or a guest could come once in a lifetime. Where you don’t have a haughty waiter who looks down on you in a disappointing manner and you just feel your day is going to be totally ruined. It is a place of warmth.”
When Blanc opened Le Manoir 39-and-a-half years ago, it was not the most auspicious time for a Frenchman to launch an upmarket, season-driven restaurant. “There were recessions, there was Mr Arthur Scargill rampaging around the country,” he recalls. “There was 15% interest rate, 15% inflation, and you open a business because, ‘Oh my God, that’s what England needs, a French restaurant!’ You have to laugh about those times, your naivety.”
From the start in 1984, Le Manoir had something special. It was awarded two Michelin stars in its first year and has retained them ever since. Blanc helped pioneer garden-to-table, vegetable-forward cooking in the UK: he developed the gardens, created by monks in the 16th century, into a bucolic, organic haven that now includes a vast orchard, a mushroom valley, and beds that can produce dozens of different salad varieties and hundreds of courgette flowers. Le Manoir became the place for an ambitious young chef to train: Marco Pierre White and Heston Blumenthal came through early on, and latterly a new generation of stars followed, such as Hide’s Ollie Dabbous and Luke Selby, who made his name at the subterranean Soho shoebox Evelyn’s Table.
The one constant was Blanc himself. For the first decade, he estimates he worked 16 to 18 hours every day (and he has, according to him, his first divorce to prove it). But even Blanc has started to slow down. He has also begun to think about succession: Le Manoir has been owned since 2014 by the hospitality company Belmond, which was in turn acquired in 2018 by the luxury group LVMH.
When Blanc began to consider who might carry on his work, one name came to mind. Selby, who earned a Michelin star for Evelyn’s Table in 2022, first walked through the doors of Le Manoir to do work experience, aged 16. He impressed Blanc enough that the chef-patron agreed to hold a job open until Selby finished his A-levels. “There are some people you always remember; Ollie Dabbous is the same type,” says Blanc. “Those first five days with Luke, you could see somebody serious. Focus. No nonsense. Learning, learning, learning. A really quiet young man but still asking thousands of questions. That curiosity, it’s the building block of success.”
Selby, who was born in Saudi Arabia to a British father and a Filipino mother and grew up outside Brighton, was quickly promoted from commis to chef de partie at Le Manoir, then sous chef. During his six years at the restaurant, he was joined by his younger brothers, Nat and Theo, in junior roles. But Selby felt he needed to cut the apron strings from Blanc to widen his culinary education. In 2017, he became head chef at Dabbous’s eponymous restaurant and then followed him when he opened Hide, reuniting with his brothers; in between, Luke won a Roux scholarship and part of his prize was doing a stage at the three Michelin-starred Nihonryori RyuGin in Tokyo. Then, in 2020, he was approached to run Evelyn’s Table, a tiny, one-time beer cellar, which could seat just 12 people for each of its two sittings a night. He took his brothers with him.
Blanc knew all this: he never stopped checking in on the Selbys. When they won their Michelin star, he joined them to celebrate it at a six-hour lunch at the Waterside Inn in Bray. “I follow my people,” says Blanc. “I follow what kind of people they are. You learn, you talk to a chef. You can see his integrity, creativity, family values.”
In January this year, the 32-year-old Selby returned to Le Manoir as executive head chef; Nat, 30, and Theo, 28, joined him as his deputies. The move is part of a significant expansion that will see the hotel complex double in size by 2026 and includes plans for a spa, a brasserie and, Blanc’s great passion, a vineyard.
“It is true there is always a great danger in growing,” says Blanc. “Growing bigger and better, it’s often a contradiction. That is why I need to really assess well. I am always organically thinking 10 years ahead what I’m going to do: I want to grow it carefully, lovingly, because I am the custodian of this wonderful place.”
In many ways, it is hard to picture two dining operations more different than Le Manoir and Evelyn’s Table. Le Manoir is set in 27 acres of manicured gardens, with sweeping, lavender-lined paths; Evelyn’s is under a Soho boozer, the Blue Posts. At Evelyn’s the galley kitchen was so cramped that the Selby brothers did, literally, everything; at Le Manoir, Luke Selby is in charge of a brigade of 54 chefs.
Was it a difficult decision for Selby to leave London to return to Oxfordshire? “When Raymond asked me if I’d be interested, it was not something that I’d ever really considered coming back to,” he says, as we walk through the vegetable beds. “Because I was very much on my own path. At Evelyn’s, I think I only missed one service in two and a half years. I made the sauces, prepped the meat and fish. It was just me, Nat and Theo; it was all in and it had to be all in.
“Whereas here, we’ve got a mature business,” Selby continues. “It’s been operating for 39 years, it’s an amazing place with a lot of infrastructure. I’ve got a PA now, I’ve got all these people around me to support me and my dream and what I want to achieve.”
As Selby says this, we walk past a croquet lawn. How’s his game? “I’ve never played croquet,” he laughs. “But the garden was a huge part of my decision. I don’t think there’s any other restaurant with organic gardens of this standard anywhere else. In London you pay £3.50 for one courgette flower; we get them every morning. That’s a big goal of mine: to reconnect garden to plate.”
Clearly a big factor for Selby was working again with Blanc, his mentor for the past 15 years. Blanc may talk about “stepping back”, but he can still usually be found in the kitchen at Le Manoir five days a week. “He’s the most passionate man you’ll ever meet,” says Selby. “If he sees anyone doing anything, he wants to know: ‘Where it’s from? How much does it cost? What dish is it for?’ Showing them how to work, be faster, it’s a real inspiration.”
Selby, who has a warm smile and gravity-defying, jet-black hair, has been at Le Manoir six months when we meet. Much of that time has been spent overhauling the working practices in the kitchen. Blanc has long had the ambition to reduce working hours and Selby has restructured operations so that 90% of his team now work a 48-hour week over four days, with paid overtime (sadly, a precious rarity in fine dining). “My aims are simple,” says Blanc. “It’s a tough industry, but I worked for 50 years and I went through two divorces, two strokes … it is heartless. I didn’t want that, it was too much pain. You cannot burn it both ends.”
Next up, Blanc and Selby are going to collaborate on updating Blanc’s classic repertoire of dishes. For Selby, the key is maintaining the flavour combinations, but simplifying the process, which in turn should provide greater value for money for customers. (Within reason, of course, and it won’t be everyone’s definition of “inclusive”: lunch is six courses and costs £205 per person; their seven-course dinner is £230.) Selby cites one dish that has been on the menu since Le Manoir opened – morels stuffed with chicken mousse, served on white asparagus – that can now be made with six pages of instructions, rather than the original 20. “RB was very modern, and he still is, to this day,” says Selby.
When asked for an example of how he has put his stamp on Le Manoir, Selby suggests “le maquereau”, where Cornish mackerel is cured with vinegar and salt, a Japanese process called shime saba. The fillet is then blowtorched lightly and served almost raw with apples from the orchard and horseradish, both as a sorbet and freshly grated. “I have no ego whatsoever,” says Blanc about the new tweaks, “and Luke does it with love. He does it with respect.”
Next March, Le Manoir will celebrate its 40th birthday. For Blanc, this period is about “preparing this place beyond me”. For Selby, it is about making his mark, but also, he hopes, finding and bringing through a new generation of chefs much as Blanc did with him and his brothers. Both are convinced that this Oxfordshire idyll will remain as pioneering as ever. “I’m one of those silly dreamers,” says Blanc. “And in my micro world here at Le Manoir with my team, that’s what we’re trying to do. As simple as that.”
Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Church Road, Great Milton OX44 7PD
• The headline and subheading of this article were amended on 23 August 2023 to clarify that Luke Selby is not “taking over” from Raymond Blanc, as an earlier version said; rather, the pair are working alongside each other.
