The Godfather

No one has more Michelin stars than Frenchman Alain Ducasse, and at the age of 66 he’s bemused by the pension protests in the country of his birth

WORDS: HANNAH EVANS

When Alain Ducasse, the godfather of French cuisine, arrives at his chocolate shop, Le Chocolat Alain Ducasse, in south London, the first thing he does is walk straight back out again. It’s his first trip since the shop’s new chocolate production site, La Manufacture, opened and he’s not completely satisfied.

The chef has a rule that a door shouldn’t make a sound when it opens, a member of his team tells me, and lo and behold, when he walks back in, the heavy wooden door makes a hiss. It’s barely audible, but enough to set the notoriously particular chef off on a tour, quietly pointing out tiny things that need fixing: there’s a thin wire above the door that needs to be painted and hidden; something is not right with the lighting; and one of the legs of the cabinets displaying boxes of chocolates is wonky. “We like the details,” he says in his thick French accent.

This morning Ducasse is supposed to be giving me a tour of La Manufacture, but trying to keep his attention while he’s near a kitchen is like herding a very curious cat. He keeps wandering off. One moment he’s posing for a photo or telling me where he found the antique handle for the door; the next he has gone to see if the chefs are piping the chocolate into the moulds correctly. “He just reminded me to make sure I got the level right. Not too much and not too little,” one of them tells me.

Well, you can’t be one of the world’s most decorated chefs without being a bit fussy. We are meeting two days after the latest Michelin guide was announced. There were no surprises or upsets for him or his restaurants, including Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, which retained its three. “We were not worried. We didn’t have much pressure,” he says with a shrug once we’ve finally sat down. “I have a lot of trust in the team right now.”

At 66, Ducasse is one of only two chefs to have held 21 stars, being trumped only by the late Joël Robuchon (he had 31). He now has 20, more than anyone else alive. Ducasse is a parable of someone who has dedicated his life to work. As well as 34 restaurants, he has a cookery school, two luxury auberges in Provence available to rent, cookery books, a culinary consultancy and his chocolate empire.

Some might call him a workaholic, so it’s ironic that his home country has experienced violent demonstrations about

President Macron’s unpopular decision to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. “French people are too difficult to manage,” Ducasse says with a sigh. “We live longer, you work more. The French are the only people who don’t understand that. The rest of the world gets it. I’m not sure how it is all happening.”

This may be considered a somewhat cheeky observation given that Ducasse relinquished his French citizenship when he became a citizen of Monaco in 2008. But still, even under Macron’s new measures, Ducasse would be owed two years of overtime.

That’s not to say that France’s love of a protest has been lost on him. The one time he came close to some kind of industrial action was when he worked for the French master chef Alain Chapel in 1976, aged 20. Fed up with the low pay, Ducasse turned up to work in his car with all his belongings and threatened to leave if he didn’t get a raise. “I was sharing a small apartment with no heating. It was difficult and I was not paid a lot so I decided I would put a stop to it. I went and saw the chef and said if he didn’t increase my wage, I would quit for ever.”

Thankfully, his boss agreed. If he hadn’t, Ducasse might not have gone on to become the first chef to own three restaurants with three Michelin stars in three different cities. Being successful in this field is like playing a very competitive sport, Ducasse says. “When you reach that level of excellence you have to train, train, train every day. If you enter this type of competition, it’s what you need to do. It’s intense.”

Some chefs burn out. In January René Redzepi, the owner of the three-Michelinstar Noma in Copenhagen, announced that the restaurant would close in 2024 because running it was unsustainable “financially and emotionally”, despite there being no shortage of guests paying £600 ($750)- for the tasting menu with wine. Noma has regularly been named the best restaurant in the world for its “new Nordic cuisine” and tables are notoriously difficult to book.

“He is a marketing genius, that man,” Ducasse says of Redzepi. “He’s not closing for 24 months. It’s great marketing. He’ll be sold out for the rest of the time.”

Ducasse is far off retiring. “Non,” he ays when I mention “slowing down”. He’s already working on another “100 per cent sustainable project”. In 2021 he opened his first permanent plantbased space, a casual dining restaurant called Sapid in Paris, which serves vegan food, and has also opened Burgal, a vegan burger pop-up in an old kiosk in the city. Although you won’t see him making a foray into the world of chain restaurants like his contemporary Gordon Ramsay, whose restaurants hold seven stars. Ramsay’s Street Burgers have been panned by some critics.

“That’s [Gordon’s] choice. He is a good guy and a good chef. I am a craftsman. My projects are about craftsmanship. My restaurants and shops are little ateliers, not copycat chains. I’m into projects that have a deep sense of significance.”

Which brings us to Le Chocolat. “We’re making haute chocolate here,” he says. “Haute biscuits and haute gelato.”

Lining the shelves and glass cabinets are boxes and boxes of handmade praline chocolates and truffles. There’s a cabinet filled with his signature chocolate animals — not cute bunnies, but geometric 3D piggy banks, an Easter lamb and a supernatural-looking parthen, part-fish, part-rabbit creature filled with lobster-shaped pralines. There are biscuits bursting with flavours and an ice-cream shop serving flavours like the most delicious pistachio, made with four different varieties, and an incredible five-herb sorbet of mint, basil, coriander, tarragon and parsley. It takes a year to develop a flavour, I’m told. Behind glass panels at the back of the shop is La Manufacture, where a team of expert chocolatiers that Ducasse selected make everything on the shelves. In the middle of the room is a tap from which a lava of thick melted chocolate pours nonstop. In the oven madeleines are being baked and on the table Ducasse’s favourite biscuits are being piped with lemon curd and topped with confit lemon peel. Every few minutes a chef comes out to deliver a platter of things for us to try. How many does Ducasse eat a day? “A lot,” he says with a laugh as we work our way through a row of almond pralines. He’s sitting in a leather chair wearing a grey tweed suit and thick black-rimmed glasses with his hair swept back. He looks very chic, like a French Stanley Tucci. Ducasse spends most of his time in Paris. On the rare occasion (“I am always out”) he cooks at his home, where he lives with his wife and three young children, he is commis and chef, prepping and cooking vegetables grown in his garden and fish from the local market. “My family always pushes me to do both because they don’t want to peel vegetables and prep. Nobody likes to be commis. It’s why I went so quickly from that to being a chef.” He’s a perfectionist, but says he doesn’t deserve the reputation that he is demanding. “I am a very positive person. If I have a problem I will try to obtain two solutions,” he says. “I have to learn from every experience.”

It’s a mindset he credits to an accident he survived in his twenties. Three months after being awarded his first two stars, in 1984, he was flying to Courchevel in the Alps with his staff. “It was foggy. Then suddenly we saw the face of a mountain and the plane crashed.”

Ducasse was the only survivor. He was thrown from the aircraft and lay for seven hours bleeding in the snow until he was rescued. “Life now is like an extra. Everything that comes after is a plus, so I have to live it to 100 per cent. I am lucky to be here. I think about it every day — but in a positive way.”

The final treat to arrive at our table is from the gelateria: dinky cups of Ducasse’s favourite flavour glacé, vermouth and grapefruit, in a nod to the negroni. Ever the gentleman, he kindly extends an offer to come to Paris to visit his first ice-cream shop before saying au revoir. I’m out of the door for only a few seconds before I look over my shoulder and see he’s already inspecting the chairs.