Mosaic Restaurant at Château des Tesnières – Chef Chantel Dartnall and part of her South African brigade
Crowned the World’s Best Female Chef, in 2017, Chantel Dartnall is embarking on a new chapter in her career in France. At the Château des Tesnières, near Rennes, the 46-year-old South African chef has created the menu for Mosaic, a fine-dining restaurant that opened in May 2025, where nature inspires every creation.
A floral symphony at the heart of the plate
“Cuisine becomes art the moment it is seasoned with the soul.” says Chantel Dartnall.
Chantel Dartnall’s haute cuisine unfolds like a hymn to nature and aromatic herbs. Her culinary signature, deeply floral and poetic, transforms every table into a Garden of Eden. In her creations, lemongrass, basil, magnolia blossoms and hibiscus act as highlights. Her dishes bear names evocative of woodland tales, such as ‘Whispers of the Forest Pigeons’ or the enchanting ‘On the Way to Brocéliande’. For it is indeed a journey she is taking us on.
Far from being an exact replica of her iconic Pretoria establishment, the Breton restaurant is limited to a dining room seating around twenty guests, serving lunch and dinner. Named ‘Mosaic’, like its South African counterpart, the restaurant has adapted to appeal to French palates. Mosaic is the result of a 10-year quest by the Dartnall family to set up home in France. This journey led them back to an ancestor, a Breton pastry chef from the Plessis family, who had left Europe to emigrate to South Africa. It was love at first sight when they found a château online during the Covid pandemic, one morning in 2020, whilst her father was browsing property listings.
This intercontinental connection has led her to combine the techniques she learnt in South Africa with dishes adapted to French culture, such as pigeon, whose exceptional quality in France has inspired her. Guided by a spirit of finesse, Chantel Dartnall infuses her original recipes with “ milder flavours, with less sweetness and less salt”, she explains.
To bring her culinary creations to life, Chantel Dartnall has forged close ties with local producers. From Cancale oysters to locally grown produce, every ingredient is selected for its excellence. At Château des Tesnières, the chef can rely on an on-site vegetable garden featuring vegetables and edible flowers. She is particularly delighted to be able to “enhance her creations with plants she rarely used in South Africa”.
International recognition and honours from the French Republic
Chantel Dartnall’s career is characterised by her consistently high standards. She won the title of World’s Best Female Chef in 2017 and, in the same year, was named ‘Chef of the Year’ in South Africa and the Middle East by the prestigious Luxury Travel Guide Awards. Ranked 32nd in the world on The Best Chef Awards Top 100 list (2017), she has established herself as one of the highest-ranked women in the profession and one of only three women chefs to feature in the global top 50. More recently, her talent has once again been recognised in the prestigious La Liste ranking for the 2026–2027 edition. This recognition is now coupled with a state honour: having been elevated to the rank of Knight of the National Order of Merit, the chef was invited to the presidential table for the second time on 10 July 2026. This took place during the state visit of the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa.
Beyond the accolades, Chantel Dartnall embodies a humanist and feminist vision of her profession, in which chefs become figures capable of transcending boundaries. As a testament to this loyalty and team spirit, five of her South African staff members have chosen to follow ‘Chef Chantel’ – as they affectionately call her – to continue the adventure by her side. Surrounded by her family (her parents and sister) – her rock, with whom she has restored this magnificent estate – she proves that haute cuisine is, above all, a collective endeavour.
A creative family united by talent
Behind the magic of Mosaic lies a true ‘quiet force’: a close-knit team, upholding the values of kindness so dear to the chef. In the kitchen, Johanna, a loyal member from the very beginning and a true cornerstone of this culinary family, brings the passion and humility she has developed over fifteen years working alongside Chantel. Working alongside her, the poetic precision of pastry chef Antro Davel elevates every dessert, whilst the young apprentices Morgan – armed with her diploma from Silwood College – and Molly (pictured), a young prodigy and finalist on the TV programme The Tastemaster SA, bring a freshness and a new perspective that are essential to the reinterpretation of flavours.
This harmony is beautifully extended into the dining room through the charm of two cultures. The smile of Kgomotso Surprise Nkabinde, who has been devoted to the head chef for seventeen years, provides service of unrivalled warmth. She forms a close-knit partnership with Amélie Dufresne, a sparkling maître d’ who trained at PIC, whose international outlook immediately puts guests at ease. Finally, the sensory journey is rounded off by a duo of top-class sommeliers: the South African expert René Veldhuizen, a true wine connoisseur, works hand in hand with the local scholar Hugo Betin, a 27-year-old sommelier from Brittany.
When a plate becomes a masterpiece
For this keen art lover, every plate is conceived ‘as a painting’. This painterly attention to detail becomes fully apparent in her Grande Dégustation menu, conceived as a work in several acts. It all begins with the Préludes, where the traditional Franschhoek Mosbolletjes are paired with Comté cheese and aniseed, followed by the poetic amuse-bouches Les Fleurs de mon Jardin and Bassin de Marée. The ingredients — whether spring vegetables, squid or delicate ‘sea grapes’ (those textured fish roe known as sea grapes) — are arranged with surgical precision using fine plating tweezers. The menu continues with starters such as Chant de la Mer or Ecume de Mer (combining langoustine and rooibos), before giving way to the main course: Marché des Lices or its famous Murmures des Pigeons de la Forêt.
A collection of Impressionist painters in the spotlight
This passion for aesthetics extends far beyond the kitchens: Chantel Dartnall has decorated the château with over a thousand works of art from the family collection. Visitors can admire bronze statues of women by Tienie Pritchard (1938–2021) as well as a large number of Impressionist paintings by South African artists, with a particular focus on the works of Adriann Boshoff (1935–2007). The chef also confides her absolute adoration for the “vibrancy of the light, which is reminiscent of the brilliance of Sorolla’s paintings”. This collection has a bright future ahead of it: a museum is planned for 2027, to be situated just behind the Château des Tesnières, providing a new setting for these works, which are so little known in France.
The hidden treasures of the Mosaic cellar
To complement these visual masterpieces and the sweet-and-savoury notes of the menu’s ‘Saveurs Finales’ — such as the Sakura with Valrhona dark chocolate and cherry mousse — the journey continues underground. The temperature there never exceeds 14 degrees. Head sommelier René Veldhuizen, who also comes from South Africa and followed Chantel to Brittany, looks after an exceptional treasure: a remarkable cellar housing 37,000 bottles. An impressive volume, and yet the sommelier admits with a smile that she is short of space, as an equivalent collection remains in Pretoria. From vintage grands crus to exceptional champagnes, the establishment offers bottles each as precious as the next. “It is one of the largest wine cellars in the region and the country,” René Weldhuizen acknowledges with pride, before looking to the future: “We continue to explore regions all over the world and enrich our collection.” A food and wine pairing that definitively elevates the Mosaic restaurant to the very pinnacle of the French gastronomic scene.
