Step Inside This Idyllic Garden Restaurant in the Biarritz Countryside
Secluded garden restaurant Villa Magnan, in the Biarritz countryside, woos Hannah-Rose Yee with its nonchalant vibes and exquisite Basque cuisine.
The aroma comes first. Smoke from a woodfire grill winds through the trees as I find my way from Villa Magnan – six rooms in an aristocratic bolthole outside Biarritz in south-western France – to De Puta Madre, the hotel’s celebrated restaurant. I follow the scent of simmering garlic into a clearing dominated by a bar. There’s a buzz of conversation – French, impassioned – from the coolest crowd I’ve ever seen. “Bonsoir,” a woman exclaims, leaning over to kiss the bartender on both cheeks. “J’ai soif!” I’m thirsty!
There’s a break in the trees and I spy the restaurant for the first time: a glimpse of the greenhouse that serves as its kitchen. Tables are arranged outdoors under jade-coloured scaffolding. Tonight is the first evening of service post-winter. Now summer has arrived and the streets of blissed-out Biarritz, about five hours from Paris by train, are crowded with sandy-haired surfers. It’s time to fire up the grill.
Dinner is served at an unhurried pace: a set menu of five courses, everything seasonal and local, cooked expertly but presented casually. Crisp artichokes for hors d’oeuvres, then a menestra, the Spanish salad of spring vegetables delicately draped with a curtain of ham, and a main course of ttoro, a rich Basque stew of mussels, clams, chickpeas and rice, brought to the table sizzling in a clay pot. A wedge of goat’s cheese and a glass of strawberries, meringue and cream to finish. As I dine, the sun sets behind the kitchen, bathing everything in buttery light. Even though it’s summertime, there’s a bite in the air. I wonder what it’s like here when it rains.
The next morning, after spending the night in one of Villa Magnan’s artfully undone rooms, I find out. “A bit wet,” says chef Luke Cockerill with a grin, ushering me undercover as the sky empties around us. It’s early morning and the kitchen team is literally battening down the hatches of the greenhouse before they prepare for the lunch service. Cockerill is sanguine. He’s from Yorkshire so used to a bit of rain. “It’ll pass in an hour,” he muses.
Rain is good, anyway. It’s why the area around Biarritz is so green and green means land rich in produce. De Puta Madre, which was opened in 2021 by Villa Magnan’s owners, Anne and Jérôme Israël, honours this unique culinary region. “Place is everything,” says Cockerill. “Pasta doesn’t make sense here. We did it once and we were like, ‘What are we doing?’” What does make sense is Basque food, which combines the neighbouring French and Spanish traditions into something completely new. Cockerill doesn’t claim to know or to cook it all. There will be dishes on the menu that aren’t strictly Basque “but there’s something about cooking ingredients from a place in the way they’ve always been cooked that results in something that feels very correct. And meant to be.”
Cockerill cut his culinary teeth at various celebrated English establishments, including award-winning The Man Behind The Curtain in Leeds, but he wears his credentials lightly. He joined De Puta Madre in 2023 and spent his first year building relationships with local producers. “It was like, ‘Are you going to show up? Are you going to visit my farm?’” Two important connections are Jean-Michel and Jonathan, who supply all of the restaurant’s fruit and vegetables.
And then there are the fishermen. “For me, fish is like fruit,” says Cockerill. “Over the phone with a shopping list, you have no idea. Seeing it changes everything.” The chef is committed to regularly driving for 40 minutes to the fish market in Capbreton to see his supplier’s haul. It’s where he got the shellfish that featured in the ttoro, which had a deep, salty heat from piment d’Espelette (made 30 minutes from Biarritz) and was so unctuous I wiped the pot clean with pieces of baguette.
After the rain subsides, I make for the kitchen at Villa Magnan, where Anne Israël is enjoying a coffee. She’s just finished laying out breakfast for the overnight guests – it’s an aesthetic smorgasbord served in brocante crockery – in the Orangerie. Israël recounts the story of buying and renovating the property with relish: she came across the main house, which had been abandoned for 80 years, while on holiday with her husband in 2017. (“If you don’t want, we divorce,” she told him.) He’s a cinematographer – though this morning he was hauling logs for De Puta Madre’s grill in the pouring rain – and she’s a set designer who went about decorating Villa Magnan as if she was dressing it for a movie. Each room has a lived-in quality that belies the fact that she kitted them out in two weeks with flea market finds, hoping to make it feel like someone had dusted off their grandmother’s elegant furniture to fill their first apartment.
This laid-back energy flows into the rest of the stay. Breakfast is served at a communal table and if you want to read a book in the overgrown garden, you may have to carry a chair out to sit on. A restaurant was never on the cards but then again, neither was a hotel. “I hate restaurants,” Israël tells me (perhaps that’s why she gave hers a Spanish expletive for a name). She’s passionate about awakening the “sleeping beauty” house, taming its “jungle” of a garden and inviting people to craft a “love community” around the table. “Maybe the place is not perfect and this non-perfection engages people to be human again.”
