Great Breton

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GREAT BRETON

FO R OLIVIER BELLIN, THE DREAM WASN’T ABOUT THE PA R I S ELITE, BUT TO BRING HIS REGION’S REMARKABLE C UISINE TO THE FORE – AND HE’S DONE JUST THAT

BY J E F F R EY T IVE R S O N P H OTO S BY O LIVI E R MAR I E

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FO R OLIVIER BELLIN, THE DREAM WASN’T ABOUT THE PA R I S ELITE, BUT TO BRING HIS REGION’S REMARKABLE C UISINE TO THE FORE – AND HE’S DONE JUST THAT

BY J E F F R EY T IVE R S O N P H OTO S BY O LIVI E R MAR I E

76 T R AV E L , A R T & L I F E ST Y L E

COUNTRY PRIDE: Olivier Bellin surveys the rugged beauty of Brittany’s Le Ménez- Hom, part of the land that so inspires his work

FOR DECADES, BRITTANY HAS BEEN SOMETHING OF

a culinary enigma. The westernmost region of France has filled the larders of three-star kitchens around the country with its lobster, artichokes, sea bass, farm-fresh salted butter and oysters, yet it is often disregarded as a kind of gastronomic backwater where few chefs are creative enough to sublimate such products themselves.

Over the past decade, however, in a village on the extreme tip of Finistère – the last department of France before the Atlantic – chef Olivier Bellin has been patiently and passionately transforming his family’s country restaurant, l’Auberge des Glazicks, into a laboratory dedicated to inventing the Breton cuisine of the 21st century. As a chorus of critical praise grows for his elegant and richly flavourful mer paysan or “seaside peasant” cuisine, marrying noble products of the sea with humble products of the land, Bellin is emerging as one of the region’s most vocal culinary ambassadors.

“We have no reason to be envious of other regions,” he says.

“Brittany has an exceptional terroir, beautiful products and, thanks to chefs like Jacques Thorel who came before us, today a new chapter in Breton cuisine is being written by this generation.” Bellin’s message is reaching an ever wider audience, with his admission this year into the Les Grandes Tables du Monde, which groups together 158 of the world’s best chefs, and appearances on programmes like France’s Masterchef. Moreover, with his charming eight-room hotel, which opened last year, already helping to draw new gourmets from as far as Russia, and his restaurant being awarded two Michelin stars for the fourth year in a row this February, at 42 years old, Olivier Bellin’s loftiest dreams are almost within reach.

It’s a future no one could have foreseen for the insouciant Olivier as a child – nor for l’Auberge des Glazicks, which opened after World War One, when Bellin’s grandmother started serving soup to clients of her husband’s blacksmith shop in the village of Plomodiern. The

shop closed, but Bellin’s grandmother, and later his mother MarieNoëlle, continued serving hearty meals to labourers at lunchtime, and more elaborate banquet fare for weddings on the weekend.

Despite all the intrigues of nature surrounding him, for young Olivier, the most stimulating place was his mother’s kitchen. Bellin awoke to the odour of fresh milk boiling on the stove in the morning; in the afternoon rice pudding bubbled in the oven. On Fridays, Marie-Noëlle prepared sauces for the weekend banquets, boiling shells for her rich lobster à l’américaine. “I was always somewhere in the skirts of my mother and my grandmother while they were working,” says Bellin. “And my mother was always having me taste things – I always had a spoon in my mouth.”

Life was sweet, though by 15 his parents saw Bellin was clearly going nowhere. “One day my dad just decided: ‘Since all he does is eat and spend his time in the kitchen, we’re sending him to cooking school,’” Bellin recalls. “But having seen how hard my mother and grandmother worked, I never wanted to be a cook. For me it was a nightmare.”

Once at boarding school, though, Bellin had a change of heart.

Taken under the wing of a professor who recognised Bellin’s passion for food, a whole new world of gastronomy was opened to him. “Suddenly I realised that’s what I wanted to do,” says Bellin.

“My mother ran an exceptional workers’ restaurant, but what I was interested in was an amazing mastery of the flame, little crisp vegetables, reductions, sauces, pointages. And to experience that kind of cuisine, I needed to meet the greatest chefs.” After capping off cooking school by being named best young chef of Western France in 1991, he set off to do just that.

Bellin had several important initiations, such as his immersion in the cuisine of foie gras, ortolan and cèpes at chef Jean Coussau’s two-star Relais de la Poste in southwest France. He knew he’d

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THIS PAGE: Bellin’s tartelette of tripe and squid FACING PAGE: the chef at work in his kitchen at l’Auberge des Glazicks, left and right; buckwheat tube, caramelised apples and olive, centre

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“PARIS IS A MELTING POT OF CUISINES AND CULTURES BUT WHEN YOU ARE IN BRITTANY YOU NEED TO COOK BRETON”

reached the pinnacle of French cuisine in 1994, the day he joined the brigade at Joël Robuchon’s three-star restaurant at 59 avenue Poincaré, named that year the best restaurant in the world by the International Herald Tribune. The first lesson was in humility. “At Robuchon there were 20 others who were best young chef of their region too, and everyone was hungry with ambition,” he recalls.

“Every plate was a work of art, and you had to either keep up, or get off the train.” Seventeen-hour days were not uncommon. “That is the School of Robuchon. Even today in my kitchen, there is still that organisation and technique I’ll never forget, that is my foundation.”

But Bellin never intended to stay in Paris indefinitely, and after two momentous years with Robuchon, he was ready for the challenge closest to his heart: taking over his family restaurant. To prepare, he returned to Brittany and spent a formative year as sous chef at Jacques Thorel’s two-star l’Auberge Bretonne. Thorel taught Bellin how to adapt the fundamentals of the Robuchon school to a provincial establishment, where he’d not only have to cook, but manage a business. “Paris is a melting pot of cuisines and cultures, but when you’re in Brittany you need to cook Breton,” says Bellin.

“Thorel helped me understand that, and this was the beginning of what has become my cuisine today.”

After his return to l’Auberge des Glazicks in 1998, and the transition from country inn to gastronomic restaurant within a couple of years, Bellin finally heeded Thorel’s advice in 2003. Faced

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“LIKE THE NOBLE AND EXCEPTIONAL PRODUCTS THAT I ALSO HAVE IN MY KITCHEN, THERE ARE LOCAL ‘PEASANT’ PRODUCTS THAT CAN BECOME SUBLIME”

with only a trickle of clientele, Bellin began a deep reflection on his Breton roots and the “library of flavours” he’d assembled during his childhood. “I learnt my technique with Robuchon, but taste I learnt with my mother,” he says. By 2005, he’d found his answer in memories of simple Sunday meals mixing charcuterie and scallops, and the smell he’d taken in countless afternoons of the traditional buckwheat crêpe, when its edges caramelise in the pan and give off aromas of almonds and hazelnuts. That year, he received his first Michelin star for his exquisite new terre-mer (land and sea) cuisine, where lobster married with crisp pork belly, and desserts included buckwheat-infused, salted butter caramel ice cream.

In 2006, it was a Bellin come-of-age who travelled to Paris to prepare a meal for a hoard of gastronomes at the Plaza Athénée restaurant, as part of an initiative by chef Alain Ducasse to highlight France’s young talent. Bellin thrilled his guests with daring associations hitherto rarely – if ever – seen in the capital: buckwheat crème brûlée, foie gras and cockles, scallops and black pudding, buckwheat “tartelette” of tripe and squid. “My palate was educated that way, for some [this mer paysan cuisine] is surprising, but for me it was always natural,” he says. “Like the noble and exceptional products that I also have in my kitchen, there are local ‘peasant’ products that can become sublime … we can elicit emotions with the simplest things.”

That conviction is manifest in Bellin’s current project to adapt Breton classics for the 21st century, such as the old peasant dish, bouillie d’avoine. Traditionally a mix of oat flour cooked for hours until becoming a thick mass, served with a healthy lump of butter, Bellin’s version is surprisingly light, yet richly flavourful: an airy oat cream, laced with an emulsion of butter, gives way to deliciously briny mussels and cockles underneath – one’s spoon in effect diving from land into sea. Then there’s the great classic of northern Finistère, kig ha farz – literally “meat and stuffing” in Breton, a kind of meatladen pot-au-feu with a large buckwheat dumpling – which Bellin has reimagined by breaking it down and incorporating lobster, naming it kig homardz. “These are dishes that tell my story,” says Bellin.

That Bellin’s story is so deeply rooted in such a wild and ruggedly beautiful region as Finistère is certainly part of his appeal. There’s something irresistible about a chef who leaves Robuchon to invest everything in improbable dreams in a country restaurant at the end of the world. “Other chefs I knew thought I was nuts, that I wouldn’t last, and I’d return to Paris,” he says. “But for me in my head, it was clear that the day I came back to Plomo and stepped in the kitchen, it was to get three stars.”

Bellin’s passion is infectious, and his recent recruits, most with three-star experience – a pastry chef from Pierre Gagnaire, a waiter from Anne-Sophie Pic, a sommelier from Michel Trama – have clearly made Bellin’s dream their own. And for the woman who has known Olivier all his life, they are right to believe in him. “There is only cuisine in his life ... it’s a bit like the priesthood,” laughs his mother Marie-Noëlle. “I think Robuchon gave him the desire to become one of the greats. But to do so, you have to work a lot.” Luckily, she says, Bellin has that in his blood. aubergedesglazick.com

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THIS PAGE: buckwheat macaroon and ice cream FACING PAGE: Bellin surrounded by la terre that provides the ingredients for his cuisine, top; l’Auberge des Glazicks, bottom