La Mère Poulard, Historic restaurant and hotel in Le Mont-Saint-Michel, France

La Mère Poulard is a restaurant and hotel set within Le Mont-Saint-Michel's medieval walls, with rooms and dining spaces overlooking the bay. The kitchen prepares traditional dishes using cooking methods that have remained unchanged for generations.

Anne "Annette" Boutiaut married Victor Poulard on 14 January 1873 and founded the Hostellerie de la Tête d'Or in 1879. Seeing customers leave with the tide, they cooked giant omelettes in a wooden hearth to make them stay. The restaurant is known for a wall of autographs from over a century of diners, including Ernest Hemingway and Yves Saint Laurent.

The house speciality is the Omelette de la Mère Poulard, a portion several inches thick made in hand-hammered copper bowls and cooked over an open wood fire; it resembles a soufflé more than a flat omelette. Annette Poulard is credited with around seven hundred recipes from her years running the kitchen. The dining-room walls carry autographs of more than a hundred famous guests, among them Ernest Hemingway and Yves Saint Laurent.

The dining room sits on the main street of the island, so it is reached on foot after the shuttle or the walk from the causeway; luggage is carried up by hand or cart. The kitchen serves through the day, and the famous omelette is priced by weight, with a minimum portion. Reserve a table in high season, when day-trippers fill the street between tides.

The omelette is beaten in hand-hammered copper bowls and cooked over an open wood fire, puffing up several inches thick like a soufflé rather than a flat omelette. Annette Poulard's kitchen devised it because tide-bound travellers arrived and left in a rush, and the long cooking time kept them at the table.