Wild flowers and herbs for flavoring and garnishes are picked straight from the fields around chef Régis Marcon's Auberge et Clos de Cimes, which people in the know say may soon get a rare third-star rating from the Michelin restaurant guide.

An editor-friend immediately suggested I go to see Régis Marcon in Saint-Bonnet-le-Froid.

Winner of the coveted Bocuse d'Or, Prix International Taittinger, Régis Marcon is one of the most accomplished chefs in France. His Auberge et Clos de Cimes boasts two Michelin stars. What's more, everything he serves, he purchases within a kind of social ecology, consciously trying to preserve the old ways and the environment that sustains them.

I had my destination.
 

	Presentation is part of the art of fine dining at Auberge et Clos de Cimes in the remote French village of Saint-Bonnet-le-Froid. Here cooks decorate an almond-crusted cake of foie gras with wild flowers.

Saint-Bonnet straddles two sparsely populated, very remote regions known as Valey and Ardèche. Cherished by the French as one of "the last good places," the Ardèche is a patchwork of broad, flower-filled alpine meadows and forests full of chestnuts and nut-bearing pine trees, wild game and edible mushrooms. Valey, also known as the Haute Loire, is a region of extinct volcanoes — so remote that, even though I had crisscrossed France from Normandy to Provence, I had never heard of it.

Later I would learn that the capital of the region is Le Puy, home of the famous green lentils du Puy.

But the inaccessibility of the village only serves to make the place more alluring. Within a matter of weeks, dazed with jet lag, I rose early on a rainy morning in Lyon, climbed into a rented car and set out for Saint-Bonnet-le-Froid.
 

Chef Régis Marcon helps prepare vegetables for the evening's dinner, showing the kind of attention to detail that distinguishes a great restaurant.

For hours, the rain stayed with me as I ventured up the Rhone Valley and into the hills. I passed through baffling circular hill towns where impossibly narrow roads seemed to lead to the heart of some great labyrinth.

Suddenly, I was in the village. The moment I turned off the car, the rain stopped, too, and a rainbow exploded over the valley of the Ardèche. I had arrived.

But I did not feel entirely at ease. Ten years earlier I'd taken a turn in another great French restaurant and worked like a slave. In split shifts that began at 9 in the morning and concluded at midnight, I pried open mountains of scallops and helped with everything from breaking down rabbit carcasses to cleaning mushrooms. I was prepared for more of the same. But I was in for surprises.

"Tonight, you will have dinner as my guest," insisted the chef. I thought I'd fallen down a rabbit hole where anything could happen. "Tomorrow you may work a little." In a state of amazement bordering on hypnosis, I accepted a glass of champagne into which Marcon's wife, Michele, drizzled chestnut liqueur. Hors d'oeuvres appeared: paper-thin, mushroom-shaped cookies made from lentil flour, then tiny gougeres, the little puffs crafted with aromatic Saint Nectaire cheese.
 

	In the kitchen at Auberge et Clos de Cimes, the staff carefully tends to every pot, pan and burner, assuring quality control and perfection on every plate.

The first course was an almond-crusted "cake" of pure foie gras, surrounded by wild flowers and herbs I had seen in the fields. The "cake" was perched on a bed of cool, diced melon. Madame poured a semillon to go with the foie gras, and more of the same to accompany the omble chevalier, a trout drawn from a nearby stream and served with early chanterelles and tiny stems of wild asparagus.

A little clay pot of lentils arrived, topped with a Lilliputian quail egg and shavings of black truffles. Then came a teapot filled with broth made from a mushroom reminiscent of matsutake.

Next, Madame poured Hermitage and the chef himself delivered a pigeon, spinning slowly on a weird brass contraption, which projected a little flame that gave the illusion of roasting the bird right there at the table. I felt like the emperor who was presented with a mechanical nightingale, but this bird sang in my mouth.

At last came the cheese cart, and after cheese came dessert, an array of chocolate bonbons flavored with pine boughs, and a silver bowl of ripe cherries and blushing apricots. There were cookies and jelly candies, too, and a glass of the local verbena cordial, Verveine. "Be careful," said the waiter, "it has magical properties." But no magical elixir was needed; I was completely under the spell of these people.

The next morning, when I came into the kitchen, I was the first one there.

When chef Marcon arrived, he offered me a cup of coffee and fixed us each a little sandwich of brown bread and paté of foie gras. "Have you ever had foie gras for breakfast?" he wanted to know. "It helps the hangover."

I was way down the rabbit hole now.

Then he walked over to the dry-erase board on one wall and said, "I have in my mind a terrine of foie gras, and you will make it." In five minutes he had spoken as many words to me as the other chef had in a week in that kitchen 10 years earlier. Marcon sketched a diagram of a terrine. Spinach lined the pan. Layers of duck breast and foie gras were to be stacked and sealed in a jelly made from duck stock. "The other chefs will help you."

Over the course of the week I spent with Marcon, I was drawn into the slavish drudge work that haute cuisine demands. One day I labored in the basement kitchen plucking a hundred pigeons, burning the tougher feathers off with a hand-held torch. In the pastry kitchen, I carefully brushed at least a thousand leaves and flower petals with egg white and rolled them in sugar to garnish various dessert plates.

And after four hours of this my shoulders were knotted into wads of pain, but the magic of that first night, that one glimpse of the Holy Grail, kept me going through all the tedious chores. Even now, three years later, it's hard to remember the work. I can only recall the beauty and the magic of that place.