Dining on the Wine Trail: Odessa L'Ecole, Lormes
Lyonnais chef-restaurateur Mathieu Kochen has transformed a dilapidated Morvan schoolhouse into a thriving natural wine canteen in the hinterland between Burgundy and Sancerre.
Like Ardèche, the Morvan is one of those French geographical zones that hasn’t quite entered English parlance, despite mild renown within French culture. France’s smallest mountain range, the Morvan is a wooded hinterland at the nexus of four departments: the Yonne, the Côte d’Or, the Nièvre, and the Saône et Loire. In wine travelers’ terminology, it’s midway between Chablis, Sancerre, and Beaune.
Parisians seem to know it as a highly discreet country getaway. Indeed, no sooner had we sat down for lunch in the Morvan village of Lormes at Odessa L’Ecole - Lyonnais chef-restaurateur Mathieu Kochen’s natural wine canteen housed in a dilapidated former boys’ school - than did my French companions recognize a well-known French actress at the next table.
The sighting was fortuitous, if only to reassure my friends that Odessa L’Ecole’s significance was not limited to my own imagination. Kochen runs the establishment year-round with an ever-shifting cast of visiting chefs and servers, pitching in himself in between guest chefs, and our visit occurred just before the arrival of a chef from Amsterdam, when the menu was on a pleasant, but unexciting autopilot. (Hummus, oeufs mayonnaise, terrine, etc.)
Kochen, who is also a partner in Lyon natural wine bistrot Odessa Comptoir (est. 2017), is nowadays most often engaged in the kitchen at his companion Yasemin Krug’s Lyon natural wine bar Bufé, where he turns out marvelous Turkish-influenced small plates. He’s capable of far more than hummus. A main course of seared duck breast atop fennel-inflected rice was more substantial and more successful at Odessa L’Ecole that day.
But to dwell on the particulars of a given day’s menu at Odessa L’Ecole is to overlook the larger achievement-in-progress, which is the expansion of the natural wine community to the oft-ignored corners of rural France.
Kochen came upon the Odessa L’Ecole site in 2020 during COVID lockdowns, when he and his family (and later, the whole team from Odessa Comptoir) took refuge in Lormes. The Odessa L’Ecole project began as a pop-up event, which led to an offer from the mairie to lease the space outright. Initially Kochen balked at taking on a fixer-upper of such size. But when a search for similar spaces in the area proved fruitless, Kochen committed to the idea, running the entire kitchen as an outdoor barbecue the first summer in 2021. The response from the local community was overwhelming.
“I think people were very curious at first, because we were a guy from Lyon and two American guys, and we had our small community from Lyon and from Paris,” says Kochen. “But since then it’s been busy every summer.”
Kochen has a pragmatism and a common touch that is rare among chefs with his experience and taste. On some level, he understands that the key to success in an underserved rural community is to avoid scaring locals away with too many foams, fish eggs, Zalto glasses, or other metropolitan luxury signifiers. Similarly, at Odessa L’Ecole, he found locals very receptive to the natural wines he stocked - all the more so when he didn’t make a big deal about the fact they were natural wines. For Lormes, heretofore starved of wine destinations, it has been enough merely to offer a fun, approachable, affordable wine selection.
“People cared that we’re doing organic wine and organic food,” says Kochen. “Then we began inviting natural winemaker friends every two weeks during the summer, so people began to know we specialize in natural wine, and there aren’t too many places for that in the region.”
Today, four years into the project, Kochen is renovating the schoolhouse’s upper floors, aiming to house seasonal staff on-site. He’s also preparing the fourth edition of La Rentrée, an October natural wine salon held in the schoolhouse courtyard, uniting many of the vigneron friends he’s made over the years, including the Beaujolais’ Cyrille Vuillod and fellow Morvan inhabitant François Ecot. Last year’s edition drew four-hundred visitors to Lormes (population 1400).
“[Odessa L’Ecole] was a bet that I would never have imagined would work, because I was born in the city and I always lived in the city,” says Kochen. “And it surprised me every day to see that you can make anything anywhere, if you make something good.”
Odessa L’Ecole
6 Place des Roches
58140 LORMES
Hours and chefs vary according to the season, but the restaurant stays open all year. Check its Instagram for details before you travel.
FURTHER READING
A December 2013 visit to nearby Yonne natural wine négociant Nicholas Vauthier.
A July 2014 visit to nearby Morvan estate La Soeur Cadette.