Michelin-starred chef dives into Dordogne river to save dachshund

A Michelin-starred chef jumped into a river in south-west France last week to save a small dog that had escaped a neighbour’s garden.

The chef, Nick Honeyman, performed the heroics in the Vézère river to save the miniature dachshund belonging to Connexion reader Julie Harris.  

The incident happened after Ms Harris had to return to the UK to visit her sick parents and a friend in Montignac (Dordogne) offered to look after the 11-year-old dog, Yvi, for the week.

The morning after Ms Harris left and as she was driving through France back to the UK her phone rang twice. It was a vet in Montignac. “We have your dog,” the vet told her as they had traced her by the dog’s microchip. 

Yvi had escaped from her friend’s garden, ran under a moving car and came out the other side unhurt before ending up in the Vézère.

Mr Honeyman, chef at Michelin-starred Le Petit Léon in Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère, happened to be driving through Montignac when he saw her.

“I saw a dog get hit by a car in front of me, like two cars up,” he said. “I just saw this dog come out, pop out the back of the car.”

He initially thought the dog belonged to an elderly woman walking nearby, but Yvi suddenly ran off.

“I chased after it, and it went around the corner, and then out of the corner of my eye I saw it turned left at the bridge at Montignac.”

Mr Honeyman then followed the dog to the river. “By the time I got there I saw that it was down by the river, and then it just jumped straight into the river…so I decided to strip down and swim.”

Yvi had never swum before but was somehow able to swim around 300 metres downstream and hide in a small grotto on the opposite bank.

“She was just so terrified.” Mr Honeyman said. He eventually managed to swim where she was, slowly approach her and get her into his arms.

“Then I realised that I was going to have to swim back with her, which was harder than I thought.”

After managing to swim back across the river with Yvi, he drove around the village asking if anyone knew the dog’s owner, before deciding to take her to the vet.

“I arrived there. I was wearing shorts and nothing else, completely dripping wet with a cold, shaking dachshund underneath me.”

Following the rescue, Ms Harris and Yvi went to Le Petit Léon to meet Mr Honeyman and thank him in person.

However, while Mr Honeyman was pleased to see Yvi again and went over to give her a little treat, it seems the Michelin-starred chef was not quite the hero in her eyes. 

The South African-born chef, who also runs a restaurant in Auckland, New Zealand, said: “She growled at me. I was like, ‘Oh, we were such good mates!’”

Mr Honeyman said he understood that Yvi had been frightened by the experience and may have associated him with the ordeal.

The reunion nevertheless gave Ms Harris the opportunity to personally thank the man who had jumped into the Vézère to save her dog.

“We've got pets, and we've had pets our whole lives, and so it was nothing out of the ordinary. It was something that I think that anybody would have done,” Mr Honeyman said.