INTERVIEW WITH
R AY M O N D BLANC
In a special year
Top chef Raymond Blanc celebrates two milestones this year – his 70th birthday and the 35th anniversary of his hotel-restaurant, Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. The perfect interviewee tells Max Wooldridge how the UK food scene has changed and who remains his greatest influence
G
OSH, IF ONLY every interview was as delightful as an hour in the company of the renowned chef Raymond Blanc. I’ve chatted with a number of celebrities over the years, mostly about where they’ve travelled to, and what inspires them. Not every meeting has been an enjoyable experience. There was one celebrity who couldn’t remember the country he’d been to on a free holiday; another couldn’t properly pronounce the key destinations in the region she was being paid handsomely to promote. And too often than not there’s an overzealous PR close by to steer their client towards the key points that need to be hammered home. At times, you’re even left to decipher monosyllabic grunts and somehow transform them into a sentence or two. An interview with Raymond Blanc is a different encounter entirely. He’s cheerful, garrulous with a ready smile and makes the writer’s job very easy indeed. All the reporter has to do is turn up and remember to switch on their recording device.
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But best of all, perhaps, is the famous chef’s joie de vivre and passion for food and life. His attitude soon rubs off and you walk away from the meeting feeling another two feet tall. For a long time afterwards you apply his inspiration to what makes you tick. I simply need not have bothered with the long list of carefully thought-out questions prepared in advance. Blanc talks continuously and passionately in a thick, melodic French accent, which is regularly punctuated with his trademark “ooh la la”. And as he talks, you tick off the questions one-by-one until suddenly there’s none left. In fact, Blanc answers my first question before we’ve even sat down. He says he has certainly seen the food scene in this country improve drastically since he arrived in the UK in the early 1970s. “Back then the British food scene was very different, totally unrecognisable with nowadays,” he recalls. “The UK was simply not a nation of foodlovers. Sure good food was available but it
