When I finally got to Brittany, it turned out that the real place was better than the one I’d imagined. Sensual? Yes, Brittany piqued all the senses, but with Celtic vigor rather than Mediterranean Ianguor and it was also mysterious, friendly and beautiful. On that first visit ten years ago, I was awed by the menhirs, or prehistoric stones, arranged in careful rows for unknown reasons in Carnac, and I was charmed by tiny Locronan, a perfectly preserved stone village that grew rich making sailcloth in the seventeenth century.

I soon discovered that I wasn’t alone in having succumbed to the region’s allure. I heard English accents, saw Dutch and German license plates and met an Italian family at an oyster bar. What has completely changed within the past few years, though, is that the province has become the destination of choice for the French themselves.

"The future is the Atlantic," said Michelin two-star chef Jacques Thorel. "Even during the summer, you can always find an empty beach in Brittany." Located in the pretty port of La Roche-Bernard on the Vilaine River, Thorel’s hotel and restaurant, Auberge Bretonne, is the ideal place to begin a cook’s tour of Bnttany, since no less an authority than retired three-star chef Joel Robuchon has said of Thorel, "This man can really cook."

Picking up a car in Rennes, the capital of Brittany only two hours from Paris by train, I headed south to La Roche-Bernard, the first stop of a weeklong south-to-north trip through the province. Brittany is a great place to come and wool-gather; and the trip I made left me with plenty of time to walk on the beach and linger at lunch while also taking in many of the most famous sights.

"We eat much better today in Brittany than we did when I was a boy," Thorel told me before lunch. "The Bretons have more money and more confidence, and they’ve created a new relationship with their local products. In the past, the best of everything was always sold outside of the province."

Thorel celebrated his thirtieth year in the kitchen last July, having started as an apprentice at the age of 14. Aside from a stint with Robuchon at Jamin in Paris for a few months, he has never strayed from the region. Plainspoken and modest, Thorel left me unprepared for remarkable dishes like roasted langoustines with fresh almonds and girolle mushrooms on a bed of roasted apricots and spinach; and lobster roasted on a bed of lime leaves.

After an assortment of wonderful desserts, including rhubarb with rum-marinated raisins, and egg custard ice cream sprinkled with cracked coffee beans, I tried some of Thorel’s California pear eau-de-vie made by St. George Spirits. I probably could have tippled by the fire with him well into the afternoon, but thanks to his wife, Solange, I found myself aboard a tiny ferryboat headed for the Ile aux Moines. "The Golfe du Morbihan is one of the most beautiful places in the world," she said. "You must see it, and some exercise will do you good."

Back on the mainland, just up the road from La Roche-Bernard, is Château de Locguénolé, one of my favorite Breton hotels. Located outside the town of Hennebont, the château has been in the family of owner Bruno de Ia Sablière for generations, and that is what helps create its charm. In the evening, a chic but friendly crowd gathers on the terrace for drinks before heading to the dining room downstairs, where young chef Philippe Peudenier does light modem dishes. His rack of lamb with baby vegetables and a basil-bright pistou sauce, and a roasted white peach in black currant sauce show how refined Breton cooking has become.

"What changed Brittany was the coming of the railroads in the nineteenth century;" de la Sablière told me. "They ended the isolation of the area. Even if Brittany had officially been a part of France since 1532, its regional identity was stronger than its national one."

Along with its spectacular scenery and remarkable light, this is why the newly accessible province came to hold such a powerful fascination for artists. In search of a world unspoiled by industrialization, in 1886 the painter Paul Gauguin settled in Pont-Aven, a village built along the banks of the Aven River. Before leaving for Tahiti, he did many vivid canvases of Breton life. The fame of the Pont-Aven school of painters, founded by Gauguin, drew many other artists to the area.

The town’s other claim to fame is gastronomic. The butter cookies known as Pont-Aven galettes are made at the Traou Mad bakery here. Packed in tins decorated with Gauguin paintings, they make great gifts. The village also has two excellent restaurants. The Moulin de Rosmadec does a renowned grilled lobster doused with fresh cream and has a delightful setting in an old mill on the banks of the Aven.

But if you’re going to have only one meal in the area, head out of town for La Taupinière, a charming thatched farmhouse where chef Guy Guilloux works in an open kitchen. I had just settled in for lunch when the couple at the neighboring table invited me to join them.

Docteur Loyer and his wife, Michele, were both retired and now lived in Nice, but they came north every year to spend the warmer months in the house where Madame Loyer had grown up. Both of them spoke the Breton language, as did their daughter, but they worried that their grandchildren wouldn’t.

"It would be a tragedy if it died out, since the language contains so much history, and it has survived against such odds," Madame Loyer said. "At school when I was a girl, we were punished if we spoke anything but French."

We ate a superb lunch—buckwheat rolls, fresh mackerel terrine, smoked ham with white beans and pommes paillison (crispy cakes of finely grated potatoes) and a dessert of roasted strawberries in caramel sauce with pistachio ice cream.

I shared a table the next day, too, this time in the pottery town of Quimper. A local woman, her granddaughter and I were sitting outdoors at a café, watching the crowds and having the same snack— crepes spread with salty Breton butter and sprinkled with brown sugar. Having just visited two of Brittany’s best museums— the Musée des Beaux-Arts, with its collection by Pont-Aven artists, and the Musée Départemental Breton, devoted to regional history, including a fine display of Quimper faience—l was glad to get some air.

The woman told me that a meal at La Ferme du Letty was a must. This restaurant, housed in an old stone farmhouse, was started in 1969 by Jean-Paul Guilbaut, formerly the head barman at the Crillon hotel in Paris. With Jean-Paul and his wife turning out omelets, salads and crepes, the business thrived for years. Eventually their only son, Jean-Marie, decided to become a cook.

And what a cook he has become. Guilbaut marinates scallops in oil that has been perfumed with crist-niarine, a type of seaweed that imparts a citrusy tang. He has also designed his own lobster rotisserie, which produces the most tender lobster I’ve ever had. "The idea of this dish is very simple," Guilbaut said. "The lobster cooks in its own juices." With his mother and his wife running the beamed dining room, Guilbaut is free to perfect his brilliant culinary style.

Finding such extraordinary food in such a tiny village underlines another trend. For years Brittany was exporting not only its produce, but also its chefs. Now many of them are returning after training elsewhere, Bellin went to hotel school in Quimper at the age of 14, then apprenticed and eventually worked with Robuchon for two years. After a stint with Jacques Thorel, he came home. "Brittany has such superb produce, and I think this is the most beautiful part of France," he explained.

Beautiful, indeed. Extending north from Plomodièm, the austere moors and still lakes of the Montagnes Noires recall the Scottish Highlands and make the resort town of Locquirec seem especially luxuriant to visitors. Sheltered by chestnut trees and cypresses in a little seaside park, my hotel, the Grand Hotel des Bains, has become popular with vacationing Parisians. There just might be no prettier place in Brittany to bury your nose in a fat paperback than in a chair under the grove of lime trees here.

East of town, in the direction of St.-Malo and Cancale, there is arguably Brittany’s most dramatic scenery, known as the Côte de Granit Rose, or "pink granite coast." If the southern coast of Brittany is lacy with inlets, bays and estuaries, like the Chesapeake Bay, the northern coast has the natural grandeur of California’s Big Sur, Carmel and Monterey. Waves explode in deep crevices along cliffside walks, and the pink-and-black striated stone is carved into fantastic shapes by the wind and the water.

The wildness of the granite coast eventually gives way to the Côte d’Emeraude, which is named for the blue-green color of the sea as it finds its way into still bays and coves. Farther along, the Cap Fréhel offers superb views around every corner, while the nearby Fort Ta Latte is the most attractive of Brittany’s many coastal castles. Standing on the ramparts on a clear day, you can see the citadel town of St.-MaIo looming across the bay.

One of the most famous of all French ports, St.-Malo was almost completely destroyed by bombing in 1944, but so scrupulously rebuilt that you wouldn’t know unless you were told. The best way to get a sense of this boisterous little city is to stroll along its ramparts early in the morning or at sunset.

More relaxed than St.-Malo, tiny Cancale, perched on the edge of the tidal bay of Mont-St.-Michel, is a name that chimes pleasurably among French gourmands, since it has the double distinctions of producing excellent mussels and oysters and being the location of Olivier Roellinger’s eponymous restaurant. Perhaps more than any other chef in Brittany, this soft-spoken man has raised local awareness of the region’s cooking traditions.

Roellinger’s style is aptly shown in his version of cot riade, a Breton soup of fish and potatoes seasoned with onions, cider vinegar and cloves. Unique, precise and richly imagined, dishes like this make local history wonderfully edible.

Sipping hard cider one afternoon at Richeux, his hotel, Roellinger explained his thoughts on Breton cuisine: "Until the eighteenth century, the Bretons lived on oats, buckwheat, lard and bacon, with a few vegetables. Then cocoa, coffee, potatoes and tomatoes came, and changed the kitchen. The ancient Celtic belief that hell and the devil were found in the sea meant that almost no one ate fish. This changed when tourists started coming and asking for seafood. I think we’re living in a similar period of culinary revolution. Now we can eat anything we want in any season, so fresh local food, simply prepared, has become the greatest luxury. We don’t want to become like everyone else, but we have to avoid falling into the trap of nostalgia. So we must innovate but also defend the traditions of Breton cooking and the quality of Breton produce, or the region will lose part of its identity."

As I lunched on Cancale oysters and smoked lobster on the shady terrace of Richeux, with the bay of Mont-S t.-Michel before me, it seemed safe to conclude that the integrity of Brittany will withstand the tides for a long time to come, and that for me, anyway, Brittany is a passion that will last a lifetime..