Even Robuchon had only had one restaurant at a time. The notion that a true chef might preside over multiple establishments was a truly radical departure. Certainly it was to prove too radical for the Guide Michelin. Only Eugenie Brazier in the 1930’s held six stars at once; for La Mere Brazier in Lyons and Le Col de la Luere in the countryside nearby. Ducasse intended to shuttle between Paris and Monaco. Ducasse puts it plainly. “Everybody thought I was crazy.”
STARS WON AND LOST The year after he had taken over from Robuchon he retained—or re-earned—the restaurant’s three stars. It was a remarkable feat. Only it was not to be a triumph. The Michelin judges had seen fit to take a star from the Louis XV, as if unwilling to imagine that a single chef, however brilliant, could be capable of such achievement. Ducasse was. The downgrading was seen merely as a sanction, and it was not to last. Not least, it had to be acknowledged that for a man nearly killed in an air crash, flying weekly between Monaco and Paris required a dramatic strength of will. And from then on, Ducasse was virtually unstoppable. He opened another restaurant in Paris. One in Tokyo. Another in Paris. As his wife, more than twenty years his junior, says: “That’s how he works. If he has a passion, if he wants something, he will not give up.” He, like everyone, wanted New York. “I have Paris, Monaco, Tokyo,” he says, “but New York … gives you global legitimacy. One can live without New York, but it’s better not to.” Don’t let it be said he failed. He opened Alain Ducasse at Essex House in 2000, and for a while possessed an unprecedented nine Michelin stars. New Yorkers, however, proved
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to be a tough crowd, and after the initial success criticisms soon appeared. The prices were too high! The food pretentious! They gave you a choice of ten pens with which to sign the bill! Even his other restaurants were not immune: one reviewer travelled to Paris and Monaco to make comparisons. “We have gone from Robuchon,” she wrote, “to Robo-chef.” The Essex House restaurant closed in 2007.
WHAT NEXT? His mentor, Alain Chapel once claimed that if his restaurant were to turn over twenty million francs a year “I would sell it and go and start another little restaurant.” He refused to serve more than seventy covers at any meal. We could not begin to calculate how many meals Alain Ducasse serves: every night food is presented in his name on three continents (as well as in space: in 2003 he devised the menu for the international space station) by chefs whose names will never rank alongside his. This is no doubt as it should be. His restaurants are no mere conveyor-belts for standardised food— there is no central warehouse, no dishes on multiple menus, no knives or plates or glasses that are shared. Yet each of the dishes comes from the mind of just one man. Alain Ducasse. A man whose grandmother was so annoyed by his constant questions that she refused to teach him. Instead, she would send him to the garden to pick vegetables. “I now have in my head the original memory of the taste of a tomato, a cucumber, an onion, lettuce,” he explains. “My grandmother would wash them, and exactly ten minutes after they’d been growing, we would eat. Feeding yourself from nature, that’s true luxury, absolute and elemental. It cannot be bought. It must be cultivated.” This from a man who now makes his ice cream with milk from the Prince of Monaco’s cows.
GREAT, GR AND & FAMOUS CHEFS AND THEIR SIGNATURE DISHES