The Top 69 Places to Eat Near Les Chênes

The desserts come from the chef's mother, who also bakes the bread, which tells you most of what you need to know about this family-run restaurant in the Auvergne hills. The son took over the kitchen after training elsewhere and came back with sharper technique, so the menu leans on local game, nearby fish farm trout, and regional cheese but lands with more confidence than a country inn usually bothers with. The Monts du Forez sit out the window.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

Stone and timber buildings caught between a fir forest and a lake set the mood before you even sit down. The restaurant leans into that setting hard, with a fireplace built for lingering in winter and a terrace that earns its keep in summer. The cooking is comfort-forward modern cuisine, with pâté en croûte a year-round fixture that changes form by season. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the room fills fast enough that snappy service matters.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A one-Michelin-star restaurant tucked beside a medieval castle outside Issoire, with a dining room that frames the kind of countryside view people drive hours for. The cooking is rooted in Auvergne: the chef keeps a kitchen garden and uses it, folding the local terroir into a restrained, technically precise modern menu. Nothing here shouts for attention, which somehow makes it louder.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A farmhouse restaurant outside Clermont-Ferrand where the lunch menu is recited aloud rather than handed over, which sets the tone nicely. The cooking sits somewhere between tradition and a quiet ambition, so stuffed cabbage might arrive with braised cuttlefish and a citrus-laced jus. The room is cosy and the welcome is warm, and desserts are taken more seriously than the casual country setting might suggest.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Michelin-starred tasting menu spot tucked into Clermont-Ferrand, where the chef turns out quietly ambitious creative cooking for a room of about twenty lucky people at a time. It's intimate in the way that actually means something, not just a buzzword, and the multi-course menu moves with real confidence and personality. The crowd skews curious and local, the kind who book weeks out and don't need convincing. Go hungry and go soon.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Michelin-starred fine dining room perched above the Saint-Pierre Market in central Clermont-Ferrand, with contemporary interiors and tableware that take themselves seriously, in a good way. The chef came from Poland with a deep feeling for Auvergne, finding something familiar in its landscape, and channels that into precise, visually deliberate plates built around noble ingredients treated simply rather than fussed to death.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The dining rooms at this three-Michelin-star restaurant are built around a century-old oak tree, which sets the tone nicely. Patrick Bouchain designed the glass-and-timber space, and the kitchen garden outside is run on permaculture principles. The Troisgros family has held this level of cooking for generations, and the current chef keeps the signature acidity sharp while nudging the vegetable work into new territory.

1. Michelin Guide 3 Stars
2. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

A Michelin-starred fine dining room near the Clermont-Ferrand courthouse, where the chef has been turning out confident, season-driven French cooking for longer than some of his diners have been alive. The room is elegant in a contemporary way, the cooking leans classically rich, and the crowd tends to linger over it all rather than rush. Exactly the kind of place locals claim as their own.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

The building used to be a train station, and the team has kept every bit of it: brick arches, green shutters the exact shade of old SNCF rolling stock, terracotta tiles, and 1970s wallpaper that somehow works. It's a proper bistro, the kind where seasonal market cooking shows up as colourful, unfussy plates at prices that make you order dessert without thinking twice. A young couple run it, one out front and one in the kitchen, which tends to mean everyone cares more.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

A partially open kitchen anchors this modern French restaurant in the La Pardieu business district, where the chef plates seasonal dishes that drift pleasantly sideways, Auvergne beef with a mole-inspired sauce, pollock with Champagne and fennel. The room is large and light-filled, the pricing is measured, and a Vietnamese street food counter shares the building for when the mood shifts entirely.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

The Art Deco dining room inside this hotel has mosaic floors, wrought iron, and enough glass and mirrors to make you feel like you've wandered into a 1930s film set. The chef holds a Michelin star for modern cuisine that draws quietly on both Normandy and Auvergne, pairing those two regions in ways nobody thought to try. The cheese trolley, apparently, causes something of a scene.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

Around 200 plants and wild herbs, many gathered from the volcanic slopes nearby or the restaurant's own garden, anchor the tasting menus at this two-Michelin-starred creative table outside Clermont-Ferrand. The chef's cooking is rooted in Auvergne in a way that reads less like a concept and more like a deeply personal argument: frog's legs, pike, rabbit, foie gras, all folded into something that feels both wild and precise. The wine list keeps up.

1. Michelin Guide 2 Stars

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A vaulted ceiling in what was once the rival town to Clermont gives this cosy little restaurant a quietly historic feel. The menu divides neatly into a meat route or a fish route, with a weekly changing lunch menu that keeps the regulars coming back. Seasonal modern French cooking, careful and unfussy. There's a small terrace out back when the weather cooperates.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A pedestrian street off Place de Jaude is not the worst place to stumble onto a relaxed modern bistro with a Michelin Bib Gourmand. The kitchen leans into seasonal Auvergne produce with a light nostalgia, turning out dishes that feel rooted without being fussy. The set menus are sensibly priced, the cocktail list takes itself seriously enough to be interesting, and the welcome is the kind that makes you stay longer than planned.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

The cheese trolley alone justifies the detour: wheels aged on-site, rolled out with the kind of quiet confidence that suggests they've been doing this for generations. Le Petit Prince is a fine dining restaurant in a village whose name you'll mispronounce once and remember forever. Several-course menus lean modern, with land-and-sea pairings and plates that look considered rather than fussy. A simpler lunch menu exists for those who haven't cleared the afternoon.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A friendly bistro in a quiet town outside Clermont-Ferrand, the kind of place where locally sourced ingredients get turned into hearty French cooking without any fuss. The chef has done time with serious kitchens and brought the technique home, letting the food speak plainly. The Michelin Guide has given it a Bib Gourmand, and the easy, cheerful service makes it feel like the neighborhood's own little secret, even if it isn't.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The name nods to the chef's great-grandmother and to the sonnet, which explains the fourteen-course tasting menu shaped like a poem. This intimate modern restaurant near Place de Jaude is run by a couple who built the recycled-material decor themselves, bake their own bread, and churn their own ice cream. The cooking draws on Auvergne terroir and family memory, which sounds precious until you taste how grounded it is.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Period terracotta floors and stone fireplaces set the stage in a 16th-century château, where the dining room feels like a film set someone forgot to strike. This is a Michelin-starred restaurant where the chef's modern French cooking quietly folds in Japanese and Asian accents, the kind of move that sounds like a gimmick until the dish arrives and it just makes sense. Dress for the room.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

The name nods to the Mercedes "Silver Arrows" that raced at the nearby Circuit de Charade, so there's a certain drama before the bread arrives. Inside Hôtel Princesse Flore, the restaurant serves modern French tasting menus with a steady hand: foie gras from the Plaine de Limagne, saffron from Mazayes. The grandmother's Agen prune flan, flambéed tableside, gets its own moment. Lunch runs a market menu; Sundays bring brunch.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Napoleon III mansion in the heart of Vichy, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, sets the stage for Jacques Decoret's one-Michelin-star French restaurant. It's a family operation, with his wife running the room and his sons cooking savory and pastry respectively, which gives the whole thing a warmth that formal dining rooms don't always manage. The cooking leans inventive, drawing on Auvergne producers, with a dessert paying tribute to the town's famous pastille candy.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

Street art, unusual tableware, and plant sculptures fill a Belle Époque ground floor in a quiet spa town, which is one way to signal that the food won't be conventional either. This is a creative restaurant with a Michelin star, where the chef, a Puy-de-Dôme native with Vietnamese roots, builds menus around a single ingredient at a time, tracing Japanese and broader Asian lines through French technique.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

An old stone house that glows blue at night, with a courtyard terrace that earns its keep for a long summer dinner. This is a fine dining restaurant in a small market town near Roanne, where the chef builds modern French plates that put vegetables front and center, presented with some care. The cheese trolley is the kind that slows everything down, pleasantly. His partner runs the floor with the ease of someone who actually wants you there.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A modern French restaurant tucked inside a shopping mall that wraps around a bandstand and a historic spa spring, which sounds like a setup for a punchline but somehow works. The room has a contemporary feel, and the table by the park window is the one to ask for. The cooking follows the seasons closely, and the chef's touch with rack of pork and black pudding suggests she prefers restraint to showmanship.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A red-shuttered country inn made of volcanic stone sits on the back road between Clermont and the motorway, looking out over the Puy de Dôme countryside. Inside, the room is rustic and warm, and the kitchen runs a traditional French menu built around solid ingredients. The Paris-Brest alone has been known to derail dessert plans made elsewhere. Exactly the kind of place you hope to stumble across but rarely do.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Profiteroles filled with mustard ice cream signal what kind of brasserie this is: a place where the menu changes daily and traditional French cooking gets quietly, cheerfully subverted. The Troisgros family runs it out of a vintage hotel space with warm, retro bones, and the room is almost always full. A concise menu plus a few à la carte options keep things moving at a pace that matches the relaxed, smart-casual mood.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Michelin-starred fine dining room in a small Loire town, where the chef, a local who grew up minutes away, runs a surprise tasting menu built around hand-picked regional suppliers. The cooking is seasonal and quietly inventive, the sauces apparently worth the drive on their own. Bright, contemporary room, the kind of place where the menu arrives after you sit down, because there isn't one.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A chef who trained under serious French talent set up this modern restaurant in a quietly handsome old building near a church that has been standing since before anyone was counting. Inside, the room is unfussy, with a small courtyard terrace for warmer days. The menu follows the seasons closely, and the wine list runs from modest to serious. A neighborhood spot that doesn't feel like one.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Michelin-starred inn on the banks of the Loire, where nearly five acres of kitchen garden and orchard supply most of what lands on the table, right through winter. The chef runs a single set menu built around whatever the soil is doing that week, with local zander, lamb, and rabbit filling the gaps. In summer the linden-shaded terrace makes the whole arrangement feel almost unreasonably pleasant.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A Renaissance-inspired château wrapped in parkland, with mythological friezes under the eaves and marble everywhere you look. Inside, the colonnaded dining room goes a different direction, all embedded lighting and armchairs, which somehow works. Two brothers run the place, one cooking Michelin-starred modern French, the other steering the wine list with the enthusiasm of someone who has genuinely read every label. Dress up a little.

1. Michelin Guide 1 Star

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Orange walls on the D10 make this former roadside inn hard to miss, and the interior delivers on the intrigue: untreated beams, exposed stone, and Scandinavian chairs that somehow all agree with each other. The two chef-owners grow much of what lands on the plate in a sprawling kitchen garden out back, hens included. It's a modern restaurant that roots itself firmly in local rivers and seasonal produce, with berry desserts that feel like a logical conclusion.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The dining room windows frame a valley view wide enough to make you forget to order, while somewhere out back a 5,000-square-meter kitchen garden, orchard, and beehives quietly supply most of what lands on the plate. This inn between Saint-Étienne and Le Puy-en-Velay runs as a family operation, the chef handling bold, produce-led cooking and his wife the pastry, with the wine list leaning hard into Volcanic Loire and Ardèche bottles.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Le Fooding Le Fooding Guide

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The sourdough arrives before anything else, baked in-house and good enough to derail your plans for the meal ahead. This is a relaxed bistro in Saint-Etienne with an open kitchen and exposed pipework, run by a young chef who ferments, bakes, and sources from small producers with the zeal of a recent convert who actually did the reading. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Bib Gourmand, and the seasonal menu changes with whatever that network turns up.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A stone building in a small Loire town, with wooden beams and forest-green walls that feel lifted from a mountain refuge. Two brothers run this creative restaurant, one cooking, one hosting, and their menu drifts between the Auvergne, Iberian Spain, and Japan with more logic than that sounds. The name honors a grandfather who was a forest ranger in Spain, which explains the room and half the menu at once.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A sleek contemporary dining room overlooking a golf course in Saint-Etienne, where the kitchen runs on seasonal instincts and the sauces are taken seriously. The chef's menu moves through Charolais beef and Charolais and the like with a confidence that draws a loyal crowd of regulars who've memorized the cheese platter more than the scorecard outside.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant