HE CANNES

from The Cocktail Lovers Magazine Issue 45 Summer 2023

COMMUNITY MATTERS

Bartender, botanist,

Beekeeper

– Emanuele Balestra brings the rich scents and aromas of the French Riviera together in his creative cocktails

Emanuele Balestra uses the word beautiful – a lot. It’s his love language. His other great loves are bartending, people and nature. Although not necessarily in that order.

Let’s start with that last one, nature. Emanuele still remembers distinctly when he caught the botanical bug. “It was when I was asked to be part of the opening team at La Mamounia, in Marrakech – probably one of the most beautiful hotels in the world,” he recalls. That was 14 years ago, a long time before sexy, high-end alcohol brands were available in that part of the world. “So I helped to bring in as many of them as possible,” he says. “I introduced brands like Hendrick’s and Monkey 47 to Morocco and La Mamounia in particular. And as my brief was to devise something different for the hotel, I decided to create a beautiful garden, something to showcase the beautiful plants that grew in the region. I began with orange blossom, edible geranium and basil, then I turned them into beautiful jellies and flavoured sugars – very simple things. But from those early days, I would play around, hollowing out an orange, freezing the skin, then using it as a frozen glass to serve a jelly with delicate orange blossom frozen inside. It looked beautiful but more than that, the jelly added texture and had a lovely long finish. Nobody was doing that in 2009.”

Born in Lombardy, in northern Italy, Emanuele was drawn to hospitality from an early age, first helping his ‘grammy’ in the family trattoria after school, then as he got older, spurred on by an innate desire to travel. After learning the basics as a barback at a five-star hotel in Italy, he travelled extensively, taking on bartending roles in Brussels, on board a cruise ship and at hotels in Glasgow (“not good pay, not the best food at the time and pretty bad weather but the people were amazing and I learned so much about whisky”). Then came Trump Tower in Chicago – “working there taught me how to budget and the intricacies of profit and loss”. Sydney was next (“an amazing place”), followed by La Mamounia, which is still very close to his heart.

But for the past eight years, he’s made the opulent, five-star Hôtel Barrière Le Majestic in Cannes his home. “Why am I here?” he asks, pre-empting the question. “I didn’t come for the film festival. For me, being in Cannes is about the beautiful ecosystem to grow plants. I live in a region, between Provence and the French Riviera, that is rich in scents and aroma. Being here allows me to continue doing what I’d started with the garden at Mamounia.”

Emanuele and his team have around 130 edible plants growing in their two herb gardens at Le Majestic – one in front of the hotel, the other on the roof. “Some we use, some not,” he says, as he walks round, scissors in hand, tenderly pruning a bit here and proffering up a leaf to taste there. “We also have something like 40,000-60,000 bees on our rooftop.” There’s a lab too, lined with shelves of neatly arranged containers, labels angled just-so, filled with all manner of dried herbs, flowers and roots. The giant fridges are equally mesmerising and precisely arranged with bottles containing distillates of various description, all gathered from the garden. The pristine space is completed with all of the high-tech paraphernalia required to extract, distil and infuse the bounty Emanuele grows outside and transforms into liquid works of art for his guests. Which brings us on to his other passion, people. “I like people. When you like people, you can build a beautiful team.” He’s not just talking about those he works with at the hotel (who, by the way, refer to themselves as the Smurf family) but the wider community as well. “In the summer, we get lots of tourists here but in the winter, it becomes the village of Cannes and the locals. We have Grasse and the garden of the Musée International de la Parfumerie in nearby Mouans-Sartoux. There’s the Comte de Grasse distillery; Robertet, the world leader in sustainable, natural raw materials; and La Verrerie de Biot, one of the best artisanal glassblowers in the world.” All masters in their respective fields, and Emanuele collaborates with all of them.

“The first partnership was with the

Musée International de la Parfumerie. I learned more about botanicals and they taught me about insects, the secrets to filling a beautiful garden with life and the importance of bees, hence our beehives,” he beams. “To optimise the plants you need technology, which is where Comte de Grasse came in. They taught me how to use the ultrasound machine and I work with them on some of their expressions. With the team at Robertet, it’s different – we work together on the borders of fragrance and flavours, making edible perfumes as well as a range of soaps and candles.”

Everything comes back to bartending, the thing that captured his attention from an early age – and still does: the craft of creating cocktails and delivering unique guest experiences. Those fragrances he talks about? They’re used to spray around and inside the Champagne glass, as well as the hands, “to enhance the olfactory experience”. The candles and soaps are more than pretty scents: “Together with the team at Robertet, we worked on deconstructing one of our cocktails, The Grande Dame, and made it into a soap. You have juniper, verbena, orange bitters and the effect of the effervescence you get from Champagne, recreated from a molecule you get from apples,” Emanuele explains. “You can use it to wash your hands, of course, but it’s nice to place in a drawer or your luggage.”