Cycling and sleeping in wine country

Tom Kevill-Davies and I are sitting on the deck of the Hungry Cyclist Lodge chatting about food and adventures. This enchanting forty-six-year-old man, a cyclist and a chef, arrived in the village of Auxey-Duresses in Burgundy eleven years ago, where he found an abandoned mill that was ripe for renovation. He met Aude, a local teacher, and they have two toddlers.

Perhaps Tom is better known (but only slightly) for his captivating bestseller The Hungry Cyclist which he wrote in 2009. The book recounts his two-year-long trip by bike from New York to the beaches of Brazil.

The Lodge is neither a B&B nor a gîte. Tom thinks of it as more like an auberge, “a home away from home,” he says. “It’s an ideal place for a group of friends or a family who love cycling, wine and home cooking. Who want to experience the best of Burgundy.” A double room is €150, a single €130 per day with continental breakfast. There is a three-day minimum stay.

Tom cooks dinner twice a week but will cook other nights if guests wish. “I really am offering a cycling experience à la carte. My caveau holds well-priced, easy-drinking burgundies. I am delighted to set up days where I lead guests on bike trails, point out interesting sites and arrange lunches at little known bistros or restaurants.”

Most mornings in Auxey-Duresses, Tom can be seen with croissants and baguettes poking out of his saddlebags as he makes the round trip between la boulangerie of nearby Meursault and the Lodge. There is probably a chicken or some stew meat (for a divine boeuf Bourguignon or escalope de veau) in there, too, from the butcher. Giant rhubarb from the garden will be turned into rhubarb mess for that night’s menu. If it’s sunny, Tom takes guests for a mid-afternoon coffee or beer at La Place, where Meursault’s fountain is the backdrop.

The Lodge’s five rooms are filled with antiques, as well as every comfort cyclists need as they follow the Côte d’Or’s many routes through the vineyards of Meursault, Volnay, Pommard and Auxey-Duresses. The Tour de France passes through in July and the Lodge is always booked up around then. Two additional rooms are in the offing.

“I don’t need to advertise,” Tom explains. “The rooms fill up via word-of-mouth or repeat cyclists from everywhere — the UK, the US, Australia, Holland, Germany. The list is very international and is not only composed of keen cyclers but also those who appreciate the marriage of gears and gastronomy.”

He grew up in the UK but spent summers as a teenager in the Catskills in America, where his vicar father was an honorary chaplain in the area. “It was between the ages of eleven and sixteen that I got a taste for the big outdoors after growing up playing (lots of cricket) on the village greens of Essex,” Tom tells me. “I was only too aware that food tastes better when shared and enjoyed with another human being, be it a cowboy, a lumberjack, a fisherman or a beauty queen, a best friend or a total stranger. The best chef on the planet and the very freshest of ingredients cannot compensate for a lack of good eating companions. Without good company food is simply fuel.” After studying product design at London’s Central St. Martins, he started working at Christie’s auction house unloading lorries. It gave him an eye for unusual (even quirky) objets d’art.

He was already a keen cyclist at this point. But when his faithful yellow and purple Raleigh Aztec bike was pinched, Tom decided to invest in a more up-to-date steed; he went with a friend on a nine-day cycling trip to the South of France and put London in his rear-view mirror. In France, he discovered that “cycling and food are one of the great French double acts.” It was perhaps inevitable that he would someday find a way to combine his three loves, cycling, food and France.

Another job working as a harvester brought him to Gevrey-Chambertin, above Nuits-Saint-Georges, after which he joined a company that took well-heeled cyclists through Champagne and Burgundy. He started to look for a place to set up his own business combining his love of food and cycling. “I’m really a cycling gardener now, who takes enormous pleasure in understanding how seasons, food and wine can combine to feed those who appreciate what I feel passionate about,” Tom confesses. As he points out, “On a bicycle you work for your food.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2024 World edition.