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.”
