Dining on the Wine Trail: Hostel Orfenor, Brioude
Laura Victor & Zach Watson's adorable restaurant-auberge embodies the pluck and can-do spirit of the Auvergne neo-paysan new wave.
The last time I experienced the full dinner menu1 at Auvergne destination restaurant-hotel L’Auberge de Chassignolles, I spent the night shivering with my winemaker dinner companions in a bed situated in the back of a van owned by one of them. That restaurant-hotel is renowned and deservedly in-demand for its refinement and cuisine; yet the same qualities that make it a destination for savvy diners from around the world can make it slightly impractical for the scrappy, cash-strapped young winemakers who comprise the Auvergne neo-paysan new wave.
Thankfully for these latter, there exists since 2019, in downtown Brioude, another natural wine restaurant-hotel, Hostel Orfenor, that plays the role of Southside Johnny to the Auberge de Chassignolles’ Bruce Springsteen: the local hero, of more limited ambition and fame.
The hotel comprises five rooms; two have private bathrooms; one is a family room with five beds. There is usually availability; there is no two-night minimum stay (as at Chassignolles); and the locally-sourced cuisine is more bistrot than bistronomie. Instead of globe-trotting gourmands and renowned vignerons, one encounters a local cast of debuting négociants. (Claire Sage of Belly Wine Experiment also works at Orfenor.)
Orfenor proprietors Laura Victor and American chef Zachary Watson are almost entirely self-taught, a fact that lends their establishment an air of the miraculous. Originally from Vannes, Bretagne and Orlando, Florida, respectively, the couple met abroad and moved to Paris in 2017. Watson worked as a tour guide and Victor worked in a bar, both far removed from the natural wine and fine restaurant scene. They were, in fact, unaware of the Auberge de Chassignolles (and the wider natural wine scene) when they opened Orfenor in 2019, inspired primarily by fond memories of a two-month stay at Victor’s uncle’s home in Auvergne back in 2014.
I first met Watson in 2022, during a six-week work internship he conducted alongside chefs Harry Lester and Mike Hazlewood at Le Saint Eutrope (Watson having committed to learning a chef’s trade somewhat ex post facto, three years after opening his restaurant). The couple’s establishment sits right at the halfway point of my trajectories south for various winemaking activities in the Hérault, so I’ve since had numerous occasions to witness Watson’s cuisine blossom from well-intentioned American breakfast food to genuinely satisfying French country cooking.
Similarly, Orfenor’s wine list has come to reflect the restaurant’s central position in the Auvergne neo-paysan new wave. (Since 2021, Victor and Watson have hosted their own June salon, entitled Nouvel Ordre, originally organized in collaboration with former Saint Eutrope server and occasional part-time winemaker Victor dos Santos, and more recently in collaboration with Paul Aublet-Cuvelier and Lisa Le Postec of L’Eau Qui Dort). At Orfenor, work of a new generation of négociant upstarts like Hannah Fuellenkemper and Belly Wine Experiment sits alongside perennially underrated masterpieces by the likes of Le Mazel and Les Bories Jefferies.
On the night I first visited Orfenor, I arrived after sunset to see Laura Victor in the courtyard standing in a large steel kitchen pot. She had harvested the grapes on the stray vines climbing the courtyard walls and was crushing them to make grape juice. I expressed surprise that the couple weren’t planning on making any wine with it. I said I had a tiny demijohn in the car they could use. Through the mist of a fatigue familiar to overstretched restaurateurs the world over, they looked at me like the thought had never occurred to them. “Maybe next year,” they said, and we opened more wine and toasted to year to come.
Hostel Orfenor
18 Bd Aristide Briand
43100 BRIOUDE
Tel: 06 64 45 65 45
Orfenor’s salon NOUVEL ORDRE will take place on June 15th.
Subscribers can scroll down for an interview with Orfenor chef-owner Zach Watson, on the evolution of Orfenor, the challenges of running a rural auberge, and his recent favorite Auvergne wines.