Armor amour

After swapping city life for Côtes-d’Armor, Peter Innes extols the virtues of this tranquil and friendly department in beautiful Brittany

- Peter Innes

As writer Samuel Johnson famously said: “If you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life.”

Well in 2005 I wasn’t really tired of life, or London, but I was tired of the process of getting to London and home again. Of packed trains, tubes, buses. Of trying to park, of hearing sirens wailing again and that terrible hush settling over a whole city and wondering am I even going to get home today?

Add in the fact we wanted more room for our young family to grow and that’s why we decided to move to Brittany. We’d been coming for several years for holidays and breaks and it just seemed like a calmer, quieter and friendlier way of life. We could go to beaches, markets, medieval towns, cities at any time and park the car, for free. It was a world away from the almost pre-dawn sorties we were doing in the UK.

We also found out that we could sell our three-bedroom terrace and buy something much, much bigger in the Côtes-d’Armor, giving our two children, then aged seven and 18 months, the extra space we all craved.

So, we did it! Sold in the UK, bought in Brittany, did some renovating, opened a B&B and settled the children in a great village school. Easy. Well, not quite – a journey like that is always going to have its ups and downs.

CHEF TO CHEF

Like most others, the B&B suffered after the financial crash and as there was no sign of a lottery win, we were in need of more income.

My wonderful supportive wife set up her own enterprise and I turned to the only thing I really knew: cooking. At that time I had been cooking for around 25 years, a good few of them spent running high-end London kitchens. As they will do in small friendly communities, a neighbor told me a restaurant in the village of Plessala was looking for a chef. So I took a deep breath and called at Restaurant l’Olivier.