Over a decade in the past, I used to be launched to Alain Ducasse, then as now, the world’s most revered chef. We have been on the opening of the Hermes Males’s retailer in New York and Ducasse, who not solely wears a whole lot of Hermes but in addition makes use of Hermes crockery in his restaurant was cooking the inaugural dinner.
After we have been achieved with the pleasantries (I stated what an honour it was to fulfill the world’s biggest chef; he seemed modest, and many others.), I requested why he had by no means achieved something in India. He replied that he had thought of opening a restaurant on the Taj Mahal Lodge in Mumbai. Considered one of his cooks had talked to Hemant Oberoi (then the Taj’s high chef) but it surely had not labored out.
Even so, I persevered, provided that he cooked all around the world, shouldn’t he at the least go to India, residence to one of many world’s nice cuisines?
Sure, he stated, it was definitely one thing he deliberate to do.
Final week, Ducasse lastly made it to India. He didn’t come to cook dinner or to open a restaurant, although. His present obsession is culinary training. He has opened (or is within the strategy of opening) Ecole Ducasses, his cooking colleges, all around the world. The Indian model has simply opened in Gurgaon, a collaboration with Dilip Puri’s state-of-the-art Indian College of Hospitality.
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Ducasse was right here for a number of days: He ate at Bukhara and at Indian Accent (“So that is trendy Indian meals”, he stated), was the star of a dinner cooked in his honour on the Leela Palace in Delhi by Julien Mercier, his govt chef and the Leela’s director of meals and beverage Sameer Sehgal, and managed to slot in a protracted stay chat with me.
The occasion, one of many sequence of Culinary Conversations I’ve been internet hosting, with the world’s biggest cooks was on the Ecole Ducasse, and was organised by Dilip Puri in affiliation with Culinary Tradition. It was attended by restaurateurs, cooks and hoteliers, all of whom have been clearly in awe of Ducasse.
Most individuals respect Ducasse due to his apparent achievements. He was the youngest chef to run a restaurant that acquired three Michelin stars. He’s the one chef to have ever run 4 eating places with three Michelin stars concurrently. His restaurant group has extra Michelin stars than any group helmed by any chef. Lots of the world’s nice cooks (Mauro Colagreco, Clare Smyth, Helene Darroze, Massimo Bottura, all with three Michelin stars at their eating places) have labored with him and even the uncommon Ducasse restaurant that doesn’t have a Michelin star will nonetheless have excellent meals: Such is the consistency he’s recognized for.
Whereas all that is spectacular sufficient, it isn’t the rationale I like Ducasse a lot. From my perspective, his biggest achievement is that not solely did he quietly rework French meals with out drawing consideration to himself, he has at all times been forward of the curve in terms of meals developments.
Followers of French delicacies will know that an epochal change befell within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, when a brand new technology of cooks threw out heavy flour-based sauces, stopped boiling greens until all of the crunch had gone out of them and started to worth lightness in meals. It was males like Michel Guerard, Alain Chapel and Roger Verge who led the change however many others (like Paul Bocuse and different disciples of the legendary Fernand Level) had roles to play within the creation of what got here to be referred to as nouvelle delicacies.
Ducasse skilled underneath many of those folks — Guerard, Chapel and Verge — and he rapidly mastered their strategies. (Guerard as soon as instructed me that Ducasse was probably the most sensible younger chef he had ever seen in his kitchen.)
However he took delicacies one step additional. Nouvelle delicacies had been about approach. Ducasse shifted the main target to components. As a result of he had grown up on a farm, he valued the provenance of each vegetable and of each free-range hen. He began the development of discovering the very best components and cooking solely with them.
It’s exhausting to over-emphasise what a elementary change this was. In the event you seemed on the classics of nouvelle delicacies, they have been all about approach. For example, the Troisgros brothers made their repute with a fish dish: Salmon with sorrel. The importance of the dish was the best way they cooked the fish: Flash-searing it, not poaching it. As praised as this was, no person requested the important thing query: The place is the salmon from?
After Ducasse, it’s the first query each severe chef will ask. In recent times, with the preponderance of nasty, mass-produced components (say, low-cost, flabby, farmed salmon), that query has develop into much more necessary. But it surely was Ducasse who first made cooks ask it regularly.
The job of a chef, he says, is to not exhibit his expertise at saucing however to take the best components from nature and determine how finest to deliver out their flavours with out pointless human intervention.
I reckon this as elementary a revolution as nouvelle delicacies was in its day. However in contrast to, say, Paul Bocuse and others who have been eager to challenge themselves, Ducasse is a modest man who by no means takes credit score for such improvements. As Massimo Bottura stated to me, “Ducasse was doing farm-to-table even earlier than the time period was invented.”
A second nice innovation was his use of greens as the celebs on the plate and never as facet dishes. Ducasse loves greens. However he desires them to style of themselves, not of any fripperies that the chef can provide you with.
I nonetheless bear in mind a dish at Louis XV, his unique three Michelin star restaurant in Monte Carlo. It consisted of three spears of the brand new season’s asparagus served with a little bit little bit of preserved lemon. The asparagus tasted extra asparagusy than any I had eaten earlier than or after. This was as a result of he had chosen the very best asparagus he may discover, cooked them simply sufficient and located an ideal complement within the lemon.
Ducasse was additionally the primary chef of consequence to introduce a vegetables-only menu, at the least 15 years forward of present developments. In contrast to say, Alain Passard, one other very achieved chef, nevertheless, he didn’t make a giant noise about it.
This time, in Delhi/NCR, he talked about Daniel Humm of New York’s Eleven Madison Park. Humm is a classically skilled Swiss-American chef, who risked his enterprise (and his three Michelin stars) by taking meat and fish off his menu and going completely plant-based. Ducasse ate there and says he was surprised by how good the meals was. It was top-of-the-line meals he had eaten in a very long time, he added.
Humm had taken a danger, Ducasse stated. But it surely had paid off: 1000’s of individuals nonetheless maintain asking for reservations at Eleven Madison Park. If cooks are extra adventurous, Ducasse believes, they may discover that the general public is more than pleased to attempt new issues.
Ducasse additionally praised the hospitality at Eleven Madison Park, one thing it has at all times been well-known for. For Ducasse, hospitality is every thing. Within the previous days, fancy eating places have been constructed to intimidate. Ducasse got down to change that; folks needed to really feel blissful, he decreed, not frightened or overawed in the event that they have been to get pleasure from meals.
In any respect his eating places, employees are instructed that the primary 5 minutes after a visitor enters the restaurant are essential. She or he should be made to really feel welcome. The employees should appear heat, pleasant and genuinely blissful to see the visitors. If in these first 5 minutes, you haven’t gained the visitors over, then it doesn’t matter how good the meals is; you’ve ruined the expertise for them.
In contrast to most conventional French cooks who enforced the division between the kitchen, the place the chef dominated, and the eating room the place a supervisor or a maître d’ resort was the boss, Ducasse has labored to deliver the kitchen and the eating room nearer. “There should be as little of a distinction as doable,” he insists. “Friends should really feel linked to the kitchen and to the cooks. The service folks and the kitchen brigade should work collectively,” he says, “like a crew.”
Ah sure, I stated. However who’s the captain of the crew: The supervisor or the chef?
He paused. “The chef, after all”, he stated, lastly.
For all that, Ducasse is firmly against the thought of the chef as famous person. He usually makes use of style parallels to explain what he does. For example, describing his most well-known dessert, the Baba au Rhum he defined that he had taken a wonderfully widespread dessert and created a high fashion model of it.
It was a superb parallel, I stated. So, given the circumstances wherein we had first met, wasn’t it applicable to explain Ducasse’s eating places as being the Hermes of meals? Oh no, he stated, that was too exalted a parallel.
Actually? I persevered. Weren’t cooks artists in the best way that high designers have been?
Oh no, he stated. “Cooks usually are not artists. “We’re simply craftsmen.”
What was the distinction? “Nicely,” he stated. “We don’t create artwork. We make folks blissful, which artists don’t should do. And we make the identical dishes evening after evening which artists would by no means do. We worth consistency in a approach that artists don’t.”
What did he consider cooks who regarded themselves as so sensible that visitors must be privileged and honoured to eat at their eating places?
Not a lot, it turned out. If folks went to a restaurant, they anticipated cooks to be good to them, so a part of the job was to make them snug and blissful. Friends have been going out to dinner. They weren’t occurring a pilgrimage.
Apart from, all these items about genius cooks was nonsense. Cooks have been by no means geniuses, nor have been they imagined to be.
It follows from this that Ducasse strongly disapproves of cooks who shout and scream within the kitchen or those that use 4 letter phrases. That’s completely unacceptable, he says, regardless of how nice the stress. A restaurant is a office. And in a office, you deal with your colleagues with respect and consideration. In the event you don’t, you have to be thrown out.
He offers the instance of a supervisor at his New York restaurant who made homophobic remarks to a homosexual employees member. “The second I heard about it,” he remembers, “the person was out on the road. Zero tolerance for this.”
I may go on. We talked for almost two hours on stage and there have been different chats, earlier than the stay occasion, after it, over lunch and many others. however it will take too lengthy to document every thing I discovered from Alain Ducasse. Let’s simply say that speaking to him made me realise how he has been capable of revolutionise French delicacies — and I feel, the entire world of eating places — whereas drawing so little consideration to his personal persona.
For many cooks, Ducasse stays a legendary determine who hardly ever talks about himself or his philosophy and lets the meals (and the Michelin stars) do the speaking.
However when he does open up — as he did throughout our session — you realise fairly how outstanding a person he’s. He might be the king of cooks. However he’s a considerate and benevolent king.
