Le Coq aux Champs
Mature size.
The age loves landmarks, it is in search, it seeks reassurance. To remain naughty and adventurous, it looks and attaches itself better than ever to come towards those who open the ways. And art will be one of our infinite graces.
As far as the art of the mouth is concerned, the Coq aux Champs is irrevocably asserting itself as a major destination for grasping the best and greatest of Walloon gastronomy.
On the heights of Condruz, between Huy and Marche, this magnificent restaurant invites its guests to a refuge turned towards nature, far from the urban tumult, in direct contact with an inhabited peace. Christophe and Catherine Pauly's restaurant, like the fields and trees of the landscape, offers the brilliance of a wooded purity and gives a gift of refined, accessible and silky comfort.
Christophe Pauly's cuisine is unquestionably French-based, having once worked in the brigade of the immense Maison Troisgros. Carried by meticulous cooking, graphic dressings, punctuated with sauces and studied juices, as only the great chefs know how to present them, everything here is gathered to offer culinary sensations of a very high level.
As with this preparation of Langoustine du Guilvinec; one of the 'Signature' dishes accompanied by Belgian Oscietra Caviar. The Chef reveals in this dish all the finesse of this product, to mark the spirit.
Christophe Pauly's technique is just as brilliant with the Asparagus from Stéphane Longlune's, seized on the Barbecue, with the Féra du Lac Léman, accompanied by mountain Âche, with its crispy Calf's sweetbread and its Béarnaise, its Pigeon from the Racan Farm and its morels.
The wine list is also focused on France, the modern France that we love. With a team that is ever more assertive in its mission of service, the cellar is also becoming more pleasant and the informed wine lover will take great pleasure in browsing a wine list that offers great possibilities for wine adventures.
Christophe Pauly has been at work in his lair for nearly twenty years, and has been a starred chef for almost as long. Each season he offers a recipe for gastronomic rejuvenation, and his cuisine remains timelessly modern, revealing a menu that reflects a certain state of the world: the land on one side, the sea on the other… without ever betraying one of its parts.
The Chef, the Pauly Man, is one of the infinitely rare ones to fathom souls, to read intentions, to guess the backgrounds of our sensibilities. Better, to reveal them.
A place like this one, one can try to tell it, but to live it is so much better. Essential even.