Matthias Marc leaves Paris for a lakeside house in the Jura

Matthias Marc has closed his Paris chapter and opened La Maison des Cimes at Malbuisson, in the Haut-Doubs, facing Lake Saint-Point, with the first guests received on 29 August.

The house has nine rooms and suites, some with Nordic baths, and is rated four stars. The dining room, La Table des Cimes, looks over the lake; lunch starts at 65 euros. The property has been taken directly into the Relais & Chateaux collection, which is unusual for a first year.

He did not do it alone. The project is run with his wife Hanna, and the pair have been talking about it publicly since early summer. Marc was born in the Doubs in 1993 into a family that has worked forestry for six generations, which explains a good deal about a menu built around wood, lake fish and the mountain larder.

Paris rewards a good cook with rent. The Jura rewards him with a season.

What Matthias Marc left behind

Substance, his Michelin-starred Paris restaurant, and the whole apparatus that comes with a starred address in the 16th: the suppliers, the critics, the guests who book six weeks out because the room is in the city they already live in. A chef who moves to a village of a few hundred people has to rebuild all of it, one booking at a time.

The compensation is control. In Malbuisson he owns the rooms upstairs, the terrace, the lake view and the calendar. Paris rewards a good cook with rent; the Jura rewards him with a season.

The bistro arrives in November

The second restaurant, Le Bistrot des Bucherons, opens in November with wood-fired cooking in what the house describes as a contemporary inn. Two rooms at two price points in one building is the model that has kept country hotels alive since the 1970s, and the reason the gastronomic table can afford to be small.

Whether the guides follow him up the mountain is the open question. Michelin has been generous to rural France in recent years, and Relais & Chateaux membership already puts the address in front of the people who drive four hours for dinner. Paris, meanwhile, keeps reshuffling its own kitchens.