AT a time where food has become so complex that we deconstruct, spherify and be-foam our suppers as a matter of course, going back to basics is increasingly relevant. Freshly-cooked crabs, halved to reveal pink and brown meat marbling into each other at an open-air fishmonger. A peppery radish plucked from a bunch of its pink-bodied buddies and eaten to test its freshness at a food market. Brittany, France’s most north-westerly province, has got the simplicity down pat.

For full-blown gluttons, Brittany is paradise. We arrive in Dinard and drive to St Malo – a historic walled city in the north of the region – in search of authentic cooking and, more importantly, good grub. As any phagomaniac (the Sunday name for a food obsessive) will tell you, authenticity is not always synonymous with decent cooking. Luckily, Brittany has both in abundance.

An unforeseen car malfunction means that instead of the scheduled trip to a creperie we find ourselves briefly stranded in St Malo awaiting a replacement vehicle. Le Bulot, a classic bistro, is where we get our first experience of the treasures Brittany conceals within its land and sea. We try our first snails, fleshy and satisfying once coaxed from their shells. As well as oysters, proper bread (a common theme, we would come to realise), salted butter – another Brittany staple – and steak tartare also abound.

There is one thing that is not included in guidebooks to eating out. You learn it over time, but it is still a shock how exhausting the ceremony of consuming rich food really is. It is a happy thing, then, that Brittany holds its own in boutique B&Bs ideal for resting weary heads and full bellies. On our first night we bed down at Le Coq Gadby, a hip hotel that has welcomed the likes of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis in its time. The hotel also has a restaurant led by chef Julien Leminarie, who we accompany the next morning to one of the biggest food markets in the region, Rennes’ Marche des Lices, to pick up the ingredients for our lunch that day. Seeking the stall-holders’ best asparagus (straight and not too thin is key) we city dwellers put down our iPhones to help examine tender green stems.

It pays to visit markets like this early. By late morning the Marche des Lices is a mass of bodies and we exit with our purchases, but not before sampling another of the area’s specialties, a galette sausage or sausage wrapped in a buckwheat crepe with melted cheese. It is pure gourmet Greggs on its holidays; those whose bodies are temples need not apply.

Back at the restaurant, chef Julien, along with his team, turns our finds into finery. His Japanese garden in a bowl – a reimagining of seafood broth filled with greenery and a nubbin of an oyster at the bottom – is nothing short of triumphant.

Oysters are harvested richly off the coasts of Brittany. This we learn a few days later at an oyster farm at Viviers de la Houle. We are taught the difference in shape between the cultivated oysters (curved, craggy) and the natural oyster (straight, smooth, flat). It would be imprudent not to try to distinguish between the pair’s tasting notes at Au Pied d’Cheval, a restaurant in Cancale. The eatery is French to its core: it even has an awning, which is, of course, blue and white striped. But there are also enormous crab claws, the kind that bond different nationalities with the unspoken joy of eating something perfect in company. There are fries, thin as shoelaces, as well as sleeves catching in pots of aioli. The scene is completed by a grumpy Cancalian behind the counter ready to shoo you away from the mens’ toilets with a frown when you try to use the wrong bathroom in error.

A particular strength of Brittany is that for every butter-soaked meal, every "sante" of Chouchenn (a kind of mead made in the area from honey and water), there is a scenic walk to work off the excess nearby. Cap Frehel is a good spot to explore – a peninsula in the north of the region where you can look out on to the Emerald Coast and the Channel islands. Back in St Malo, a trot around the city walls which were destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt throughout the 1950s transports us back to a time where only aristocracy ate as well as we have done for dinner.

We bob in the saltwater of the spa pool at Spa Marin du Val Andre in Pleneuf-Val-Andre that night, stomachs alarmingly distended from the past few days of eating. We have become inflated versions of ourselves in the pursuit of gourmet cooking, and found an area rich in culture and history along the way.

Gabriella Bennett was a guest of Brittany Tourism. Visit brittanytourism.com