Alain Passard is an artist. It only takes one look at “L’Arpège” in Paris to understand the concept of taste, applied to ingredients, recipes and presentation as well as setting. Amazing representative of French Cuisine as it develops in an ever more sustainable society, you won’t find any meat in his creations: the chef decided two decades ago to give organic vegetables and fruits the first role in his three-Michelin-starred restaurant, after having built an already reputable career on roasted meats. Nowadays, each morning Passard takes delivery of freshly picked items from his two farms (one in Eure, the other in the Sarthe department for different soil qualities) and improvises the menu of the day with the objects of his unconditional love: 100% natural and 100% seasonal garden produces, to which he adds seafood.
Growing 400 varieties of edible greens to be hand-picked daily in his Sarthe domain, Passard takes loving care of his land with the help of a plough horse, to produce 20 tons of organic veggies per year. We are in presence of a humanist, who encourages his customers to visit the restaurant’s kitchen, but also of a culinary artist, voted world’s best chef by 534 fellow starred chefs, which he comments upon with the following words:
“It is a fantastic homage to French Cuisine, our patrimony, our terroir and our know-how”
Alain Passard’s know-how is indeed applied every step of the way, starting with the decision on the date to pick anything from the garden, at perfect ripeness. His haute cuisine, which like haute couture has no replicable model, is created from top material, which in Alain’s world never goes into a fridge, and serves as fabric of a unique experience each time, explained by Passard this way:
“Preparing a vegetable picked from the garden on the day changes everything: the taste, the aroma, the colour, the texture and mostly the emotion… The chef is a man of emotions. ”
Nature has written the most beautiful things of life does he say, contemplating the beautifully colored range of seasonal vegetables at hand, suffice to respect the marvelous calendar that it gives us. The menu is thus improvised on what the garden gave that day. And if Alain talks about the rhythm of nature, his customers say of him he’s got the swing of the saxophone player that he is, and of his restaurant that it has not only a jazz feel to it but a huge creative freedom, very rare in this area.
What Alain fulfills in his cuisine is an apparent simplicity which in gastronomy is never simple to achieve, for on the contrary, it is most technical. As in jewelry, he mentions the hand work, the precision, the accuracy.
Source: “Un chef fondu de légumes”, a portrait signed by Peggy Leroy, Matthieu Houel and Henri Desaunay for France 2 magazine 13h15, broadcasted on 17 February 2019.