Alain Ducasse, the reigning champion among French chefs, is more than a cook. He is a kind of one-man industry whose prodigious talents seem astonishingly divisible.
In the morning, he may be at Restaurant Alain Ducasse in the fashionable 16th arondissement of Paris; in the afternoon, at the palatial Louis XV restaurant in the Hotel de Paris 400 miles away in Monaco.
He’s worked out a schedule that enables him to spend at least parts of five days each week in the two restaurants, and in doing so he has become, as of last month, the only chef in the world who holds the supreme accolade of three Michelin stars twice over.
Ducasse, 41, won three stars for the first time in Monaco in 1990 when he was just 33. In August 1996 he opened his Paris restaurant and,seven months later, won three stars there — but at a price. The Louis XV restaurant was demoted to two stars, apparently reflecting the judgment of Michelin that no chef could maintain three-star quality in two restaurants at once.
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As far as Ducasse is concerned, Michelin was simply wrong and, in restoring the lost Louis XV star, has corrected an injustice. His friend Wolfgang Puck runs multiple restaurants in California successfully. Sir Terence Conran does the same in London. But until now, in conservative France, Ducasse said such a feat was not considered possible.
“Such a restaurant as this is the work of a team,” he said, sitting behind the desk of his cramped office above his eponymous Paris restaurant, wearing a double-breasted white chef’s smock. “It involves a continuous evolution. I have to manage it, give it vitality and create the evolution. I want always to be there to keep up the tempo. I am the director, the one who anticipates, who gives a signature to the restaurant.
“But when you’ve mastered the technique, and have a team that has mastered it, it falls automatically into place.”
He likes to compare the production of haute cuisine to haute couture. “You don’t expect a jacket from Yves St. Laurent to be stitched by him personally,” he said. Likewise, a three-star restaurant in his view doesn’t require the chef to be in the kitchen at all times.
Few things in life matter to the great French chefs more than Michelin stars. In the 1970s, one Paris chef killed himself when he lost a star. Ducasse evidently is not satisfied with a mere six.
Asked if he thinks one chef could run more than two three-star restaurants, he gets a twinkle in his eye and responds: “It is possible.” With his ambition and energy, it may be that he can go on dividing himself endlessly, like a culinary amoeba.
Would he perhaps even contemplate running restaurants in France and abroad at the same time? “A very good question,” he says, his eyes lighting up even more. “Maybe.” Clearly, something is up but Ducasse is not giving anything away.
Already, in addition to his two flagship restaurants, he owns a 17th Century inn called La Bastide de Moustiers, with seven rooms and a Ducasse restaurant, in the Alps of Haute-Provence. He acts as a consultant to three other Paris restaurants and to Monte’s, a private club in London.
He has also just started a company called Objets Saveurs which produces about 100 kitchen items ranging from napkin rings to decorative white porcelain garlic bulbs and various vegetables. He plans to market these through leading French and American department stores.
Visiting Chicago
He has written three cookbooks and will be in Chicago Friday and Saturday at the Book Expo to promote his forthcoming book, “The New Taste of France,” which will be released in November. This book offers a synthesis of three culinary themes — from Paris, Provence and the Mediterranean.
Soon he plans to collaborate with the well-known French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel on a book about the philosophy of Alain Ducasse. “Cuisine is the expression of a culture,” he says.
He claims never to take time off but then, he says, he doesn’t have a job. “I haven’t started work yet,” he said. “This is my hobby. I’ve never worked, but I’m more comfortable with this than with being a miner.”
Ducasse took over his elegant Paris restaurant when Joel Robuchon, widely regarded as one of the great chefs of the century, retired, exhausted, at 51. The restaurant, in the belle epoque style, is in an early 20th Century building that was once the residence of a wealthy industrialist, and adjoins the Hotel du Parc, which owns it. The restaurant has seating for 50 people in three rooms.
When Ducasse speaks of his cooking, he uses the word “evolution” often, and says the most important thing for him is to release the natural flavor of a dish, using the juices from meats and vegetables to form the basis for their sauces.
He creates recipes, then drops them from his menus after a season, or further refines them. It is, he says, a process of continuous evolution. His recipes, all stored on computer, would fill seven large volumes if printed.
He makes no apology for the fact haute cuisine comes with an haute price tag. “This level of cuisine has a high price, but it is a fair price,” he wrote recently in the newspaper Le Monde. “We must not talk about good cuisine and haute French cuisine as if they were comparable.”
At Restaurant Alain Ducasse, he offers an a la carte menu and three fixed-price menus that range from $80 for five courses to $250. Bottles on the wine list start at about $65, and zoom upward astronomically.
When he came to Paris, Ducasse introduced a degustation menu that reflected the emphasis on fresh vegetables he had used successfully in Monaco. The meat-and-fish-and-cheese eaters of Paris were not impressed. They do not go to grand restaurants to eat vegetables. In any case, Ducasse concluded the vegetables available in Paris lack the full flavor of those from Monaco.
“Nothing in the world equals what is available there,” he said. “The sun and soil are perfect for creating the produce.”
Shellfish for Paris
So in Paris he abandoned that menu and substituted one based on Atlantic crustaceans and shellfish. “The north of France offers the best of seafood,” he said. “Paris cooking is Atlantic, and Monaco cooking is Mediterranean.”
Ducasse said he has long felt most champagnes do not serve as an adequate aperitif preceding his cooking. So he worked with Paul Drouet at Marne, France’s second largest maker of champagne and producer of the Lanson brand, to come up with a champagne to his taste. The Special Reserve Alain Ducasse, which he describes as “very elegant,” recently was introduced into his restaurants and so far is only available there.
About 30 percent of Ducasse’s Paris clients are Americans. A sniffy English food writer recently remarked that Americans like to go to famous restaurants, but do not understand food. Ducasse emphatically disagrees.
“The Americans are foodies,” he said, using the English word. “They are very curious and very educated about food, real food lovers. They appreciate good food and good wine, and choose the best bottles.
“The Japanese (10 percent of his clientele) don’t drink as a rule, so they are already cutting out part of the pleasure. But the Americans love wine.”
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He said his sommelier is in the United States now, choosing wines for a list that he says includes more non-French wines than any to be found in France. Some American wines, he said, are as good as or better than top French wines.
But have American restaurants achieved a French level of haute cuisine?
“There has been an incredible evolution in American cooking,” he replies. “The quality of produce and technique are truly unbelievable. I consulted for a restaurant in New York 20 years ago, and the flour and vegetables were not good. Now the quality is unbelievable. France is still the capital of bread, but New York is a close second.
“New York is the most culinarily advanced American city, but in Chicago recently I saw things that were absolutely amazing. I saw the products in the fridge at Charlie Trotter’s, and they were very high quality. Everything will improve in quality in American cooking.”
Ducasse grew up on a farm in the Landes region of southwest France and, influenced by his grandmother, decided at 12 he wanted to become a chef.
After attending hotel school in Bordeaux, he went to work for some of the great French chefs — Michel Guerard, Roger Verge’ and the late Alain Chapel. He regards Chapel as his chief mentor.
“From him I learned discipline, rigor, hard work, using quality produce and preserving the original flavor of each product that composes a dish,” he said.
Ducasse regards all that as essential to becoming a three-star chef, along with the ability to find a good, highly motivated team and “to create a new style, not follow an existing movement.”