A meeting with the creators of exceptional cuisine shares their views on the search for the perfect gesture of haute couture and haute cuisine
Haute couture and haute cuisine have a lot in common: a love and respect for raw materials, a relentless pursuit of the perfect gesture and the taste of a unique experience. L’Officiel therefore asked Pascal Barbot, chef at L’Astrance, Alain Passard, chef at L’Arpège, Christophe Pelé, chef at Clarence and Assaf Granit, chef at Shabour in Paris, for their views on the subject. A meeting with the creators of exceptional cuisine. Check it out!
A dress with exquisite finishes, a silky skirt with precious prints, a blouse cut close to the body in the finest fabrics: it would take very little for these same descriptions to reach the lexical field of gastronomic criticism, since certain dishes seem to have been created by the nimble fingers of lacemakers, with an aesthetic vision that aspires to dazzle, to the search for the perfect form. “This analogy is obvious to me,” says Pascal Barbot, chef at L’Astrance [a Michelin star greeted the reopening of his legendary restaurant a few months after its move]. We always talk about savoir-faire in these two professions. When talking about French cuisine, we can take inspiration from artisans: the potters, the cutlers, the tablecloth makers, the porcelain makers, the pedestal tables… everything that makes up the art of French hospitality. In luxury, the hands that work and the sourcing of raw materials are also at the heart of the matter.
In both worlds, these are the solid foundations on which we rely to create and imagine, where different professions meet.” At the piano of L’Arpège, which will soon celebrate 30 years of three stars, Alain Passard confirms this intuition: “They are two very similar professions: in their approach to the seasons, their needs and their appetites. I like this comparison: in the summer, the couturier works with light fabrics. We, the chefs, have cucumbers and tomatoes, which refresh us.” He adds: “Our numbers in the kitchen are four and five. Four seasons and five senses. The great couturier feeds on them too: the sound of scissors, sewing machines, the scent of fabrics, tweed or leather… The challenge of the fashion designer is to make his collection appetizing, to give it flavor.”
Haute couture is based on the history of the Maisons as much as on two essential pillars: the choice of exceptional raw materials and extraordinary technical mastery. “We are excellence,” says Pascal Barbot. “We seek the perfect cut, the perfect cooking. Like a fashion designer, we work with the precision of the gesture, with its perfection.” Alain Passard sees his approach as being in total symbiosis with that of designers: “I am a maniac of manual work, I always need to find a new gesture: for example, when I imagined my chimera [a hybrid meat, for example, a chicken and a duck cooked together]. On our worktops in the kitchen there are knives, scissors, threads for tying… I am looking for new shapes, as is evident in my apple pie with a bouquet of roses. This offers other flavors, other textures. You have to have this sensitivity, I love cutting, gluing, the play of shine and transparency. If I weren’t a cook, I could have been a dressmaker. I am very interested in this work, in weaving.”
Materials and methods
If award-winning cuisines favor the finest raw materials, it is not by blind reflex. Assaf Granit, who, together with Dan Yosha, runs Shabour [among other equally exceptional restaurants in Paris, Israel and Berlin], with a Michelin star, specifies: “I don’t like to use lobster, caviar or foie gras just for the sake of having them on the menu. If I use them, they must have a real function in expressing the dish”. Speaking at Clarence, which has two stars, Christophe Pelé theorizes this convention: “What is luxury today? Caviar or an excellent mackerel caught yesterday?” Along the same lines, Pascal Barbot develops his approach: “At the first location of L’Astrance, I made a bread soup, a courgette skin pie. What is noble? In my eyes, all products are noble! For me, an onion, a mackerel, caviar or courgette skins are all the same. Let’s take truffles as an example: they’re in every historical collection of French cuisine recipes, and why? They were found everywhere! They were served to pigs! This notion of luxury products is a consequence of the law of supply and demand. It’s the same in fashion: just because you work with a so-called luxury material doesn’t mean your clothes will be beautiful and well-cut.”
All chefs describe their relationship with the textures of the products they cook: “I need to touch the product, it’s a necessity, but there are touches and touches,” says Pascal Barbot. “You need to be very delicate in order to understand the product, to respect its fragility. You have to do this to understand its texture, to monitor the cooking process. But it’s not enough: the resistance will give you information, so you have to know the degree of maturity or freshness of the products.” Assaf Granit, and no one is surprised by this, since his culinary repertoire is lively, fiery, animal, goes even further: “I need to touch the products, smell them. I also have the urge to break them to see what I can do with the liquid that comes out of them, or to burn them to see if I can use the ashes. The way they react can also show me another way.”
Alain Passard sheds even more light on this interweaving of visions: “We are talking about plant or animal tissue. We are fortunate to be able to touch different grains, to experience different emotions. Our creativity, like that of a couturier, comes from this. I touch products mainly with my eyes: it is very important to visualize them. I can observe a turnip for a quarter of an hour, impressed by what the earth offers us: this gradient of shades of white, a little faded, a little ivory, this touch of mauve that seems to flow like a sauce, its majestic plume… All this gives us a lot of information, especially about cooking times.”
And Christophe Pelé, from the sublime salons of Clarence, adds: “There are undoubtedly parallels, especially in the designers’ attachment to materials, to their evolution in their own history. Touch and sensitivity are at the heart of our professions.”
On the table, ecoresponsibility
Another point that unites haute cuisine and haute couture, although the problems posed by contemporary issues concern all levels of gastronomy and fashion: the duty of ecological responsibility. Assaf Granit has an encouraging point of view: “Eco-responsibility makes us better chefs. When I started, we would take a piece of meat from a carcass and throw away the rest, the same with asparagus, we would only use part of it. We didn’t think about the potential of our waste. When we started to take an interest in it, it made us more creative. We even give broken glasses to a craftsman who makes cutlery handles out of them. Reflecting on these new parameters opens up more interesting fields”. The efforts made by the fashion world to invent other techniques, to find other sources of supply, meet imperatives that have long been taken into account by, among others, Pascal Barbot: “We have the same concerns: the origin of raw materials, giving priority to local producers, thinking about animal welfare, not wasting, recycling. We thought about creating a route, like bringing nature into the city, for example, with plants on tables that will then be returned to the forest to be replanted. We worked with French oak for the wood, lime on the walls, volcanic stone on the floor, French linen, even the piano is French, even though it came from the Molteni, a family of Italian immigrants who arrived in France in 1923. We tried to go all the way with our approach.”
Horta moodboard
While some garments are born from a sketch, from a dream, others derive from a sublime material: a wool that is suitable for a coat and a tweed for a skirt. The chefs work no differently: “Sometimes I think in terms of color combinations,” reveals Pascal Barbot. “I love yellow with green, black with green. But that comes naturally, with the seasons. Now [spring at the time of the interview], we have red, orange, yellow, green… The assembly starts in the vegetable garden! I’ve already made dishes based on carotene, everything orange.” Alain Passard, whose produce from his two vegetable gardens feeds his kitchen, sees them as a salvation in times of doubt: “When I have a crisis in my creativity, I turn to an axis of colors. I tell myself that I’ll work around mauve, I grab my basket and go to my gardens. And we realize that, taste-wise, smell-wise, visually, it works.”
Assaf Granit testifies to an evolution in his creative process: “Until a year and a half ago, I would have said that I always started with the products. For twenty years, I would look at an ingredient, at its best in season, and imagine a dish. A few months ago at Shabour, we created a whole menu based around the tableware, starting with the plates, the cutlery… For example, a jug of absinthe, a magnificent art deco object. What can we do with it? We went back to absinthe to think of its Israeli equivalent, arak, with its aniseed flavors. We added lemon juice, a little sugar, salt, hot pepper, more olive oil to the jug: and that’s how we got the fish sauce. This really changed my approach to cooking. I know the seasons, the condiments, the products, I’ve been cooking for twenty years, and rethinking my techniques based on this information is stimulating.”
Final touches
We have noticed that another challenge brings together the sewing workshops and the kitchen teams: presenting the perfect dish, the perfect dressing, without unnecessary coquetry. “Presentation is also an element of reflection,” argues Pascal Barbot. “In my first place, the kitchen was tiny, we had to get down to the essentials and that became my signature: focusing on the cutting, the cooking, the seasoning. I wanted this to be our guiding principle. Then, we could put it on the plate as naturally as possible. Today, I have much more space and a much larger team. We can do work that was impossible to do before. But how difficult it is to keep things simple! I aspire to purity. It’s the same thing in luxury: we can advertise beautiful materials, but it’s the cuts that make the difference. This is a concept I aspire to: serving the perfect rice, without butter, without salt, with a sea urchin.” Christophe Pelé also stated: “You have to hide behind the product; perhaps just one seasoning is enough.
The problem for a chef is to add, to hide, because offering an almost raw product means showing yourself naked, which is very difficult, we tend to dress and sometimes to dress too much”. Like a fashion designer who corrects a silhouette at the last minute, presentation is the result of both reflection and instinct, but above all, of experience: “The more I mature, the more I focus on minimalism, on interfering as little as possible, for me elegance is that”, says Assaf Granit. “It’s what Coco Chanel said, ‘when you leave the house, look in the mirror and take off one accessory’… When I started, I tried to add more and more, today I look for the essence of the dish.”
In the kitchens of L’Arpège, Alain Passard doesn’t aspire to anything different: “As in sewing, we practice simple gestures: sewing on a button or cutting a spring onion… But if you do it gracefully, it becomes an artistic gesture and it changes your day. That’s the point. I make some of my dishes with three gestures, I erase as much as possible. But you have to find the right gestures, I start with fifteen and get to three. It’s the work, the experience that leads us to them. Great dressmakers also make very few gestures. Then, it’s just makeup. A few days ago, I gave carte blanche to one of my chefs and he made a magnificent dish. At the last moment, he ruined it with an extra element that ruined everything. The school of gestures is fundamental, we always have our hand too present. It’s easier to add than to erase yourself behind your plate.”
“COCO CHANEL said: ‘WHEN YOU LEAVE THE HOUSE, LOOK IN A MIRROR , AND TAKE OFF ONE ACCESSORIES’ …
WHEN I STARTED , I TRIED TO ADD MORE AND MORE, TODAY I’M LOOKING FOR THE ESSENCE OF THE DISH.”
ASSAF GRANIT
Studio spirit
We know the history of culinary brigades – established, not invented, by Escoffier – and their sinister tyrannical connotations. Here, especially with Alain Passard, we are offered another approach: “In my kitchens, we are more in a haute couture atelier than in an old-fashioned brigade. A kitchen should be a studio. We need to value this approach to highlight precision, accuracy, the exchange of glances; I observe hands a lot. When I hire someone, I always observe the way they pick something up, the way they put it down, the way they drop the fleur de sel; you immediately see the agility of their fingers, their flexibility.”
On the other side, at L’Astrance, we can see an identical sensitivity: “It is the chef’s job to establish a link between all the functions, the sauce chef, the pastry chef, etc., just like in a haute couture atelier where several functions and several specialties contribute to each other, with the common goal of offering the best to the client”. Excellence in excellent service, a certain sensitive genius for achieving the sublime: there is no doubt that these mantras also resonate in the most beautiful couture ateliers…