Gastronomy in Burgundy

Then there are the snails, foie gras, frogs' legs, jambon persillé, sweetbreads, chickens and Epoisses cheese which, since Philippe le Bon first pulled on his scratchy woollen tights, have comprised the regional cuisine. I have been coming here since I was a student in a battered Citroën, making regular stops in Beaune en route to friends in the Jura. My trip this time, with my wife, ended in a windy field with Mont Blanc in the distance. Aristocratic Bresse hens - white with blue legs and red crops, tricouleur poultry - ranged free and the whiff of farmyard reminded me of John Armit's ineffable advice on wine tasting: good Burgundy should smell of merde.

Joigny, especially in the drizzle, fulfils many anticipations. The lonely nouvelle-vague girl on the station platform; the bold graphics of the Agence de la Gare (a liaison of Le Corbusier and Tintin); the corset-coloured pebbledash of the Bistro de la Gare, with its old Kronenberg signs and pitiless strip lighting. I find all of this almost intolerably romantic, but our destination is elsewhere. If Joigny's Bistro de la Gare is a frazzled old hooker with bad teeth, Joigny's riverbank La Côte Saint Jacques, is a serene grande dame, immaculately primped and maintained, even if a little bit against nature. Alter a single detail, ask for a change of pace, and you fear the stitches might burst.

La Côte Saint Jacques has had three Michelin stars since 1986 and confidently, even perhaps a little complacently, presents an essentially French version of luxury and food. The Michelin system now has many critics who say it is biased towards France, hostile to innovation, puts a false emphasis on ludicrous refinements and mistakes complexity for sophistication. Exactly so. This is the point. The Michelin system promotes fuss and contrivance above bestial gratification, and this is why it is magnificent: just like the Académie Française, it arrogantly refuses change and will never succumb to barbarian penetration. It is a thing unto itself, unalterably French.

But before dinner we check into our room, also unalterably French. The theme is brown, quite unnegotiably so. There is strange, geometric-patterned upholstery on a chair with a white-painted bamboo frame. A tunnel with a mirrored wall and ceiling, like an exciting concept for a 1960s discotheque, leads to a bathroom that's huge with reflected light from the river, but inexplicably uncomfortable.

The restaurant at La Côte Saint Jacques presents privilege, expertise and archaic cultural isolation. It is 7.40pm and the staff are standing tensely around the threshold while the bar's occupants are preparing to disengage from Champagne and go to dinner. This being three-star France, a party of four at the adjacent table has been discussing niceties of the menu for 20 minutes with the maître d'. The menu offers 'A spring walk between earth, sea and forest' for around £55. What about one of those Bresse chickens steamed in Champagne, the house signature dish? I am lost in contemplation when, like a manager before a match, Jean-Michel Lorain, the chef, arrives to give customers a pep talk. I wonder if he also does this at half time when we change ends and put on clean shirts. Asking if we need explanation or changes, Lorain, who it turns out has prepared a menu specially for us, is not looking as if he wants to explain or change anything much. He assures us without smiling 'I am not tyrannique'.

Here you begin to experience the complicated wonder of it all, the density of preparation that gives an establishment the three-star status for which, in turn, provincial folk will pay up to £200 for dinner and not grumble about it. And that's without wine. What we ate is almost beside the point because this is theatre, not dinner. It is about the chef, not about the eater. Anyway: to amuse-our-mouth, a 'cappuccino' of lobster with poireaux vinaigrette. A five-way deconstruction of oysters. I can happily taste them now. Bass steamed and smoked with caviar (farmed in Aquitaine). My wife said yum. Next, snails with sweet garlic, lentils and morels followed by cubes of veal treated in three ways: tête de veau, tongue, fillet. A shockingly delicious and oily Meursault from Olivier Leflaive.

Next morning we drive south to Chablis where a genial rogue in a seven-seater minivan meets us up an alleyway for a vineyard tour. A mere 5,200 hectares provide the planet's benchmark for flinty white wine: from the heights scaled by the van you appreciate the artifice. Gas tanks heat the vineyards while helicopters spray. The rogue gets a tripod stool from the back of the Nissan and, in a cutting wind, opens a bottle of Petit Chablis, nicely described as a 'pétanque wine'. We taste, we spit and we carry on to Dijon for lunch.

In my rattling Citroën days, Dijon was a busy, engaging town, but doctrinaire pedestrianisation has made it less dangerous, therefore more antiseptic. International clothes shops have replaced mad traffic and something characterful has been lost. Our destination is Loiseau des Ducs, off the vast and chilly Place de la Libération, just in front of the Musée des Beaux-Arts where once the dukes of Burgundy made sport.

It was the suicide of Burgundy's Bernard Loiseau in 2003 that made people question the integrity and sense of the Michelin star system: his Saulieu restaurant retained its three stars even after the gun had done its sombre work. But it was, they said, the pressures of the rating system that had, in any case, driven him to the bottle and then the trigger.

Loiseau des Ducs is La Veuve Loiseau's latest brand extension, a sort of gastro-memorial following the signature pinafores. Its menu features the presiding spirit's classics: jambonettes (frogs' legs) and a fist-sized ris de veau with a positively ducal excess of truffled mash. My wife said, 'What's that green thing you've just put your hand in?' as we looked bemused at uninvited kitchen gifts, including a beetroot velouté with cinnamon foam. Like all art forms, there is a skill-talent-genius triarchy in cooking. Here, we felt, was only skill. Perhaps that is what one star means.

One of the pleasures of the Michelin Guide Rouge is its precise symbology: besides the stars, there are knives and forks, diving boards and ironing boards to indicate a hotel's attractions and assets. When we arrived at the Abbaye de la Bussière, I wondered if little silhouettes of expensive cars might be included as well. Until recently it was a run-down religious institution with plastic stacking chairs and furtive monks; there were two Swiss-registered Aston Martins in the car park when our rental Renault pulled up.

This is a wonderful place: English owner Clive Cummimgs has reconciled Viollet-le-Duc's theory of Gothic restoration with country-house-hotel practice. Our bedroom was like sleeping in Philippe le Bon's junk room, all tapestries and drapes. I liked the ex-Legionnaire gofer, Robert, who, I felt certain, could strangle a critic while manhandling six pigskin bags from the boot of an Aston with his other hand. In nave-like spaces and on the primped lawn there are bad-sex Paul Day sculptures; I drank an exceptionally delicious Mâcon-Vergisson with a stained-glass window as a backdrop while waiting for my wife and dinner.

At the top of Emmanuel Hébrard's menu there is a rubric about gastronomy's relationship with nutrition and happiness sourced from Oxford's chair of Francophilia, Theodore Zeldin. A waiter appeared. I thought he was offering 'road sauce' with yet more frogs' legs, but I had misheard 'root' and a celeriac purée was in mind. This was good. We drank Rully La Perche from the Domaine Belleville and I felt Burgundian. Pleasantly before, and necessarily after dinner, you can ride bikes along the beautiful and hauntingly empty Canal de Bourgogne. There are owls.

Further south, just outside Beaune at Levernois, we saw three helicopters on the lawn at the Hostellerie de Levernois, suggesting another possible addition to Michelin's symbology. That and those square parasols signifying hotel hipness. Jean Louis Bottigliero's compound of bistro, restaurant and hotel was the most modern we found in Burgundy, but in a good way. We ate a perfect jambon persillée, a tartare of tomatoes with raw langoustines and escargots with garlic that had been cooked six times to reduce strength while retaining flavour. Oeufs en meurette with a white (instead of trad red) wine reduction was very clever. I asked Bottigliero if having only one Michelin star was a liberation and a relief and not the imposition that three stars bring. He rather agreed. Guests milled pleasantly between the terrace and the choppers while we dozed in the hull of a boat watching gnats in the river's sunshine.

In the celebrated Maison Lameloise at Chagny is another of France's three stars. A copy of Curnonsky in the bar ('la cuisine, c'est quand les choses ont le gout de ce qu'elles sont') was promising while escargot popcorn indicated ambition, if not bon goût. I stared at the menu. Langoustines came with 'riz croustillant' which seemed to mean Rice Krispies. At the next table an American couple was insisting in a spelling-it-out way: 'Tomorrow. I. Want. Meat, Cheese. And. Red. Wine.' The bedrooms reminded me of a hotel in St Albans I stayed in when I was 10. At breakfast, the orange juice was packaged. I spoke to some English cooks about this and they said such a transgression merited a Dreyfus-like breaking of the chef's sword and public shaming. So here it is.

We drove to a final night at the Château de Besseuil, a wine estate outside Mâcon, nicely re-worked into agritourisme by Swiss architect André Meillard. It was calm and beautiful. We lolled in the vineyard in strong sunshine, but, alas, French employment laws make it impossible for a rural establishment to run a credible restaurant of the Château's ambitions. Tired stuff was rolled out at breakfast. We clucked and then drove on to the chickens in their field south of Dole.

What does it say of France that Bresse chickens live better than Sarko's racaille with 10 square metres each, good diets and flocks restricted to 500 birds? What does it say of France that their melting flesh marbled with fat is much admired in Burgundy, but against modern English taste? Yet if I told a Frenchman I like chicken with crisp brown skin served with a bright green salad and a decent baguette, he would call me unsophisticated.

A lot has changed in the nearly 40 years since I first parked my Citroën up against some vines in a dusty car park. I enjoy clever inventions and beguiling curiosities on what I call the Andouillette Principle: if I cease to order them they will, like chitterlings, disappear and that would be sad. But why have a mini cheese soufflé with the lamb? Why bring uncommanded trays of sweet things? Why put flowers on food? Is it generosity or arrogance?

On the other hand, if I am going to die I would like to die with a glass of Volnay Premier Cru Hospices de Beaune in my hand, having eaten some of Jean-Michel Lorain's snails and feasted on the sight of vines disappearing to the horizon in a golden haze over the sonorously beautiful names of Pommard, Puligny-Montrachet and Clos Vougeot.

La Côte Saint-Jacques (+33 3 86 62 55 12). Doubles from about £180; menus from about £115. Loiseau des Ducs (+33 3 80 30 28 09). Menus from about £15. Abbaye de la Bussière (+33 3 80 49 02 29). Doubles from about £170; menus from £40. Hostellerie de Levernois (+33 3 80 24 73 58). Doubles from about £110; menus from about £55. Château de Besseuil (+33 3 85 36 92 49). Doubles from about £110; menus from about £20. Maison Lameloise (+33 3 85 876 565). Doubles from about £105; menus from £105. Visit www.burgundy-tourism.com

This feature first appeared in Condé Nast Traveller October 2014