Good Taste E-Book

Alain Ducasse

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 168

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A memoir and manifesto from the world's most Michelin starred chef, Alain Ducasse, with introductions by internationally renowned writer Jay McInerney and chef Clare Smyth. At twelve years old, Alain Ducasse had never been to a restaurant. Less than fifteen years later, he received his first Michelin star. Today he is one of just two chefs to have been awarded twenty-one stars. Now, for the very first time, Ducasse shares a lifetime of culinary inspirations and passions in a book that is part memoir and part manifesto. Good Taste takes us on a journey from his childhood, where he picked mushrooms with his grandfather on a farm in Les Landes, to setting up groundbreaking schools and restaurants across the world. He is now taking off his chef's whites and passing on what he knows to the next generation. Ducasse writes a poignant ode to the humble vegetables that have inspired his entire cuisine and to the masters that guided him along the way, from Paris to New York to Tokyo. As he looks to the future, he reflects on just what 'good taste' means.

Leseprobe

Alain Ducasse is one of the most celebrated chefs of his generation and the author of several cookbooks. Born in 1956 on a farm in Les Landes, France, he went on to train with great chefs including Michel Guérard, Gaston Lenôtre, Alain Chapel and Roger Vergé. He received his first three Michelin stars in 1990 at the Louis XV restaurant in Monaco. Since then, he has set up schools, created artisan factories and opened restaurants across the world, most notably in Japan, the United States and London.

Jay McInerney is an American novelist, screenwriter and wine critic. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls and The Last of the Savages.

Clare Smyth MBE is the first and only British female chef to hold three Michelin stars. Born on a farm in County Antrim, she moved to England at the age of sixteen, building a career that included working at Alain Ducasse’s the Louis XV in Monaco and with Gordon Ramsay for thirteen years. Her first restaurant, Core, opened in London in August 2017.

Polly Mackintosh is an editor and a translator from the French.

GOOD TASTE

A Life of Food and Passion

ALAINDUCASSE

With introductions by

Jay McInerney and Clare Smyth

Translated by Polly Mackintosh

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

First published in France as Une vie de goûts et de passionsby Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, 2022Copyright © Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, 2022

English translation copyright © Gallic Books, 2023Foreword copyright © Jay McInerney, 2023Introduction copyright © Clare Smyth, 2023

First published in Great Britain in 2023 byGallic Books, 12 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LT

This book is copyright under the Berne ConventionNo reproduction without permissionAll rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-805334-07-1

Typeset in Garamond by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

To Gwénaëlle and to our children

CONTENTS

Foreword by Jay McInerney

Introduction by Clare Smyth

Earth and Wood

Learning, Teaching

Mediterranean Ventures

Paris, New York and Tokyo

The Factories

The Maison du Peuple

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

by Jay McInerney

I was lucky enough to spend a few days with Chef Ducasse more than a decade ago, exploring Provence with him and visiting his two properties there, and I was struck over and over again by his exquisite sense of taste, not just at the table, but at the antique stores and art galleries and bookstores we visited – his finely tuned and joyful aesthetic sensibility, the pleasure that he took in a carved antique wooden door or a piece of rustic pottery. He collects antique doors, luggage, cars, books, art and much more. Sharing five successive meals with him over the course of those days, I could see that he truly enjoyed eating and he had a wonderful facility in explaining and sharing his enthusiasm at the table.

Dining at Noma in Copenhagen with some friends recently, I heard a story which confirmed the extraordinary acuity of his sense of taste, in the most literal way – his ability to detect and parse flavours and nuances. The story comes from Dan Barber, the celebrated American chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, situated on a bucolic property in Westchester where much of the restaurant’s produce is grown. A few years back, he heard from Ducasse’s office that the chef was coming to the property for a sunrise photo shoot: the chef only had twenty minutes in his schedule to devote to eating.

Barber, boldly, decided to serve bread and butter. ‘I was particularly excited about the butter because it’s from the farm my brother David and I took over from our grandmother and reconfigured into an all-pasture dairy. Since we had done so much work to improve the pasture, I thought the quality of the butter was better than ever.’ Arriving promptly at 7 a.m., Ducasse took several minutes to eat the bread and butter. ‘It was clear,’ Barber said, ‘that he did not find the butter to be the best butter of his life. He said “I have a question. Has it been raining recently?”’ In fact, Hurricane Irene had just doused the area. ‘He was suggesting that the butter was washed out. Dude could taste the weather. Then he said, “I have another question for you. Was the butter made by hand or in an electric mixer?” I said, “By hand.” “And was the butter from cows pasturing near the barn or far away from the barn?” he asked. I said, “Near the barn.” Because I always see them near the barn.’

‘A week later I saw my pastry intern making butter in an electric mixer.’ Barber asked him what he was doing. ‘The intern turned to me and said, “Chef, I’ve discovered I can make the butter a lot faster in an electric mixer.”’ Score two for Ducasse’s palate. A week and a half later Barber was up at the dairy farm and he didn’t see any cows. ‘And I turned to Sean the farmer and asked, “Where are the cows?” He said, “I’ve been trying an experiment for the past month. I’m pasturing them in Field seven, the field farthest away from the barn. It’s in bad shape, it’s all weeds, it needs manure and I want to bring it back to the shape that the pasture right here next to the barn is in.” It’s human nature if you’re a dairy farmer that at five in the morning you are least inclined to walk your cows out a mile and a half to Field Seven. You keep them close to the barn. So the fields closest to the barn are the most fertilised, the most diverse, the healthiest, resulting in the fattiest milk and cream and the most delicious butter. Ducasse could taste Field Seven.’

His feel for ingredients was cultivated as a child growing up near Castel-Sarrazin in the south-west of France; he was mesmerised by the smells coming from his grandmother’s kitchen directly below his bedroom; of ceps sautéing with garlic, of braised veal cooking with peas and spring onions. ‘My grandmother didn’t care to teach me to cook,’ he told me over lunch at his inn in Moustiers. His constant questions and criticisms annoyed her, not least when he pronounced her food to be overcooked. But he was allowed to gather produce from the garden, which is where he developed his famous ability to pick the tastiest and the freshest ingredients. After working at a truck stop restaurant in nearby Mont-de-Marsan he had a brief stint at the Lycée Hôtelier de Bordeaux-Talence before talking his way into some of the best kitchens in France, including Michel Guérard’s in Eugénie-les-Bains and Roger Vergé’s Le Moulin de Mougins, where he fell in love with the Mediterranean landscape and cuisine.

The apprenticeship he describes as the most influential took place at Alain Chapel’s restaurant outside Lyon. Ducasse credits Chapel with teaching him the supreme importance of fresh ingredients. While it may be a cliché now, forty years ago the idea that a meal was only as good as its raw materials was radical, even in France, or especially in France, where heavy sauces could cover a multitude of sins. The concept dovetailed with Ducasse’s passion for sunny Provence and the Côte d’Azur’s bounty of fresh vegetables and seafood. After two years with Chapel he returned to the south, working first as head chef at La Terrasse in Juan-les-Pins. Putting Chapel’s lesson into practice, he told me, ‘I got to know the fisherman and the farmers, and I went to the market every day at five in the morning for seven years – apparently an unusual practice for a head chef in those days.’ A few years later, at the behest of Prince Rainier, he moved down the coast to the Louis XV in Monaco, the restaurant that sealed his reputation as the greatest French chef of his generation. He promised the prince that he would garner three Michelin stars and less than three years later he achieved that goal.

In these pages Ducasse describes receiving a phone call at the restaurant of the Hotel Okura in Japan informing him that Michelin had awarded him that third star. ‘I can remember the feeling of delight and success,’ he writes, ‘of having achieved an aim I had set myself and had promised Prince Rainier thirty-three months previously – an aim that I had promised myself several years before that, even. But as soon as I hung up, the delight, celebrations and fulfilled promises were offset by questions. Now what? And what about after that?’

Serendipitously enough, Joël Robuchon had received a similar phone call at the exact same location six years previously, informing him that his restaurant in Paris had been awarded three stars. And it would be Robuchon who would provide Ducasse with the answer to ‘Now what?’

In 1996 Robuchon called to say he was thinking of retiring, and Ducasse, on an impulse, offered to take over. A crazy suggestion, since he was intending to remain at the helm of the Louis XV. But take over he did, in August 1996. It was here, a year later, that I first tasted Ducasse’s cooking and became a fan. I can still conjure the taste and texture of the Bresse chicken breast with white truffles in Albufera sauce – a cream-based concoction turbocharged with foie gras and port. For all its luxury, the dish is actually fairly straightforward, based on the perfect provenance of the humblest of fowl, highlighted by, rather than smothered in, a perfect sauce. This for me is the signature of Ducasse’s cooking: the freshness of ingredients and the relative simplicity of presentation (if not preparation). As Walt Whitman remarked, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve the appearance of effortless simplicity. Ducasse’s clean cuisine rests on a solid foundation of classical technique. (The chicken was poached in a pig’s bladder, a traditional method that helps keep it moist.)

Ducasse was greeted with some scepticism in Paris; in those days the idea that a chef could operate two different major restaurants in two different cities was considered absurd. When Michelin gave him three stars in Paris, it initially stripped a star from the Louis XV, as if out of spite. But that star was eventually restored, making Ducasse, at the age of forty, the first chef to simultaneously helm two separate three-star establishments. When I was travelling with him in Provence in 2005, the chef told me a story I’d never heard or read before, which he talks about in these pages; in 1984 he was the sole survivor of a plane crash which left him severely injured. For more than a year he was unable to stand or walk. ‘Intellectually I was still working,’ he told me. ‘But it was impossible for me to go back to the kitchen. It was necessary for me to do the job in a different way. From that time I had to start cooking in my head.’ Which may explain how, with the help of extraordinary collaborators, he was able to essentially be in two places at once. Or thirty-six at once, which is the number of restaurants he is currently overseeing, in France and around the globe.

But as he has continued to expand, he has also been engaged in a kind of paring back, a search for simplicity. This was noticeable in the menu at the Plaza Athénée, where he moved to from the 59 Poincaré in 2000, and where he sought, as he writes, ‘to dare to create a natural kind of cuisine, to make something great out of something simple, to pare down the preparation process and to put technique back where it belonged so that the real flavours of nature could shine through.’ In 2014, Ducasse took the concept even further, developing, in concert with the chef Romain Meder, ‘a nature-forward style of cuisine […] serving essentially vegetables, grains and a small amount of fish that was sustainable or whose source, seasonality and breeding season we knew exactly.’ He called it Naturality.

As with most of the big changes Ducasse has instigated in his career, this was met with resistance, although, almost ten years on, this concept has entered the mainstream. I encountered an early example seventeen years ago when I had a simple sauté de légumes at his Provençal inn, La Bastide de Moustiers. Every vegetable seemed to sing the lead even though it harmonised with its neighbours. When I raved about the dish to Ducasse, he said, ‘The Mediterranean sun gives the taste to the vegetables.’ Naturality, indeed.

INTRODUCTION

by Clare Smyth

It’s hard to put into so many words the greatness of Alain Ducasse – his achievements, his legacy, and the way he transmits his passion and knowledge through the food he serves. His influence on gastronomy cannot be overstated, and his empire extends to all corners of the globe, across every facet of hospitality, as a flagbearer for our profession at its highest level. And his influence on me – first as an idol, then as a mentor – has been immeasurable, something that has driven me all the way through my career and still pushes me on today.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget my first impression of Chef Ducasse. I was twenty-three years old when I first saw the grand dining room of the Louis XV in Monaco, in the pages of a book compiling the best restaurants in the world. I’d never seen anywhere look so glamorous, so beautiful – it appeared, to me, as the pinnacle of our profession, and I knew straight away that if I wanted to work in the very best kitchens, with the very best chefs, I had to go there and be a part of it.

So, I did what any enterprising young chef would do: I went there to eat, and begged for a job. Before dinner, the team invited me into the kitchen for a look around, and the glamour in there was just as breathtaking as the dining room. Spotless counters, gleaming copper pans, crisp white toques adorning the heads of the brigade. The way they moved, the way they worked, was all so elegant. And yet, for how haute and opulent everything seemed, the food was more than pure luxury: it was honest and humble yet extraordinarily refined; proudly vegetable-forward and centred on the purity of each ingredient. This, I would come to learn, was Chef Ducasse’s unshakeable culinary identity, one that endures to this day, and one that continues to set his food apart.

Mind you, this purist approach is by no means simple. It is, in fact, incredibly challenging to execute night after night, service after service, in the Louis XV and in all of his kitchens. Behind the effortless, near-silent movement of the kitchen brigade is a tightly organised choreography, in which even the slightest misstep can throw the whole dance out of order. To cook à la minute is to cook on the edge, bringing anything you’re responsible for – a risotto, three spears of asparagus – to the absolute point of perfection, and then sending it straight out to the dining room. It’s real cooking for real cooks, where you live and die on the strength of your technique and ability.

Cooking this way would not be possible were it not for Chef Ducasse’s skills as a teacher, someone who has trained so many young talents across his empire to embrace his philosophy and embody his values in the kitchen. He is, in many ways, the grand conductor of his orchestra. Calm and considered in everything he does, yet a man in constant motion, going from restaurant to restaurant all over the world ensuring that the highest standards – his standards – are being maintained. Whenever he arrived at the Louis XV, he would cast his eye over everything, and such is the quality of his training that he could leave again more than satisfied, safe in the knowledge that his team were fully committed to upholding his levels of excellence.

He also retains, and imparts, an incredible breadth of knowledge about the produce he works with. When he would taste things in his kitchen, he would know exactly what it was, what it should be, where it came from and what it needed in order to be perfect. Better still, he would always explain why, and it was those moments that I never took for granted: to learn from him is to learn from the best. And I know how important these moments are for Chef Ducasse, too. He has always endeavoured to encourage his young chefs, to share in their journey, and to show how rewarding this profession can be.

When I first arrived to work at the Louis XV, I was given a handbook outlining the twelve values that Chef Ducasse expects of his staff. The one value which resonated with me most deeply, and, in my view, best embodies Chef’s philosophy, is respect. Respect for the produce, and the producer. Respect for nature: its beauty, its bounty, and the urgent need for its preservation. Respect for the guest, who has spent months in expectation of the meal they’re about to receive. Respect for the colleagues all around you who depend on your total commitment, and in turn give you theirs. And respect for the chef’s whites, the profession and its traditions, for those who came before you and those who will succeed you. ‘My move moves the other,’ he says – act with grace, and leave things better than you found them.

And yet, the value that always impressed me the most – the one I see him demonstrate like no other – is ‘audacity’. Chef Ducasse is still leading the pack and a giant of our profession, because he is completely unafraid of facing the future. Less meat, less sugar, less fat, less salt and more vegetables and more grains; sustainability over luxury, and nature above all – these positions might seem scary for our profession to embrace, but time and again, he has proved right.

I’ve held on to that old handbook all these years, and still read through it today; its principles have served me well, and are the foundation of what I pass on to my team. Looking back over my twenty-plus years in the kitchen, I am still learning from Chef Ducasse. He is just as inspirational to me now as he was at the beginning of my career, and I’m certain that this book, with all the knowledge it contains, will guide and inspire generations of chefs to come.

EARTH AND WOOD

I was born on a farm in the south-west of France, in the Chalosse, in the middle of the undulating countryside between the Adour and Gave de Pau rivers that is often likened to Tuscany. My memories are of the vegetable garden, the surrounding forest, our modest lifestyle and the simple food the land offered us.

So many memories. The vegetables we grew. The way my grandmother cooked them. The forest of oaks where I would walk with my grandfather, who was a joiner and carpenter. The family meals every Sunday. The first strawberries. The lettuce, still soaked in dew, that we would go and pick before lunch, and its milky-white sap that would appear when we pulled it from the ground…

It was there on the farm that my first tastes were formed, there that the seeds of my life were sown. It is my native land. Other places and other flavours came along to influence me, and to add to my obsessions, but it was that part of Les Landes where it all began, and which still inspires me to this day.

From my childhood there, came two major passions which can be found in all my restaurants and in my cuisine.