Maison Pic

The Pic story runs back to an Ardèche inn in 1889; Anne-Sophie's grandfather André won three Michelin stars in 1934, her father Jacques regained them in 1973, and the restaurant lost the third again in 1995 — three years after Jacques's sudden death, when Anne-Sophie had trained beside him for barely three months. Largely self-taught, she took control in the late 1990s and won the third star back in 2007, becoming the only woman in France to run a three-star kitchen and, today, the most-starred female chef in the world. Her culinary signature, which she calls Suffusion, is built on intricate aromatic layering and a deep love of Japan; she now serves a single set menu of seven or ten "ports of call," with original drink pairings drawing on wines, infusions and rare teas. The Valence dining room glows under a Starck-designed Baccarat chandelier, opening onto 400 square metres of aromatic gardens. A singular, sensory expression of one family's century at the summit.