Cultivating his art
“Here is the fifth course, Madame,” says the waiter as he presents a huge mound of grey Guérande salt to me on a platter. From his proud smile, I can tell this is the pièce de la résistance of this 12-course tasting menu. As he cuts away the crunchy salt, I imagine what could have been baked inside; might it be an exotic fish plucked from a crystal clear ocean? Or perhaps a joint of meat that will melt away the instant I put it in my mouth? After a few minutes, the content is slowly revealed.
“C’est un betrave,” says the waiter, with a delighted grin. A beetroot. Large and deep maroon in colour, it has knobbly skin and whiskers sprouting from the end. But before you share the superficial disappointment I initially experienced, you should know this is the beetroot of kings. The vegetable, having been dug from the soil yesterday, has been transported to L’Arpège, one of France’s best restaurants, baked for hours in the best salt in France and, after a few minutes in the kitchen, is presented to me on a simple white plate, sliced and drizzled with a sherry and balsamic syrup.
As I taste the sweet, smooth flesh, I cast my mind back a few months to my visit to the organic garden in Sarthe where it was grown.
Set in the grounds of the 19th-century Château du Gros Chesnay in Fillé-sur-Sarthe, near Le Mans, Alain Passard’s potager is based on the kitchen garden that fed the château’s original inhabitants. Although more than 100 years has passed since the garden was first used, little has changed in the way produce is grown – there are no chemicals, no mechanical machinery and only a horse and two donkeys are used to plough the land. What is different, however, is that these seemingly archaic gardening methods now play a part in a very modern way of eating - haute cuisine. It’s a fascinating contrast, one that could only be borne of an ambitious chef who was willing to try something different.
Having worked with meat and poultry for most of his career, Passard decided in 2001 that he would dedicate himself to perfecting the art of cooking vegetables and in so doing wiped 12 of his meat and poultry-based signature dishes off the menu and started the potager.
It was a brave move given that most of fine-dining society thought of vegetables as merely side-dishes, lacking a depth in taste. But by going back to basics and perfecting his raw ingredients, he has created something of a revolution and his Paris restaurant is one of France’s most expensive and well-regarded.
As I stand outside the long, white château in the warm morning sun waiting for the venerable chef to appear, I watch the potager come to life. The sound of horseshoes clopping against the driveway as the draught horse is led into the garden gently breaks the silence; several young gardeners appear from the outhouses and head off into the vegetable plots, ready for a long day’s work.
A few minutes later, Passard appears. Dressed in old gardening clothes, he cursorily greets me before striding off into the garden to show me around.
As he tours the garden with me in tow, he explains how it was first established in 2002. As he warms to his subject, he explains how his career choice is deeply rooted in his family life and why he considers his food an ‘art’.
“I think it’s important to create with your hands. In my family everyone enjoys working by hand. My father was a musician, my mother a dressmaker, my grandfather was a sculptor and my grandmother a cook – so you see, when I was a child I learned that to work with your hands was a form of expression,” he explains.
Originally from Brittany, 51-year-old Passard started his career in the Lyon D’Or one of the few Breton restaurants to be awarded a Michelin star at that time, and after working in several other top restaurants, received two Michelin stars before he turned 26 – the youngest chef in France to be awarded the accolade at that time. In 1986, he set up L’Arpege where he dedicated himself to refining his ‘art’. Although Passard has worked under some of France’s top chefs, it was his grandmother Louise Passard who perhaps had most influence – so much so that her portrait hangs in L’Arpege. “She taught me the art of cooking in terms of the right heat and the right cooking time. She was cooking in the 1960s, in the days when you had to control the wood fire and flames. These days you programme your oven with a button and a timer, but in her days my grandmother had to stay nearby and control the heat by opening and closing the doors,” he says.
His grandmother also taught him the importance of taste and as I watch him in a green house that is sheltering every kind of pepper imaginable, I begin to realise what he means. He plucks a small brown pepper (the likes of which I have never seen before) from the plant and breaks it apart to look at its texture, “There’s a sweetness and smoothness in the brown ones, they look like chocolate. The yellow pepper is very tender and they complement each other. Some bring softness, others have that feisty heat, others have texture, acidity, sweetness or bitterness.” I ask him which is his favourite but, like asking a parent to name his favourite child, he says: “You can’t prefer one over the other, they all have their own personality.”
The garden grows almost all the restaurant’s fruit, vegetable and herb produce and has hundreds of different varieties – including 100 different apple varieties, 60 different kinds of tomato – that all supply the four seasonal menus of the restaurant. If it doesn’t grow, it isn’t served, so the menu is constantly adapted to accommodate the supply of produce.
With fruits being flown into supermarkets around the world, seasonality – Passard believes – is something even the French are starting to ignore. “People don’t want to wait for anything these days,” he says, “They want to eat strawberries, tomatoes, courgettes and aubergines all year round. Where’s the pleasure in that? There is a natural logic to the rhythm of the seasons, it has to do with the soil and the weather. If you serve tomatoes all year round there’s no pleasure left, there’s no anticipation, no looking forward to the tomato season – which is from 15 July to 15 October. After that - no more tomatoes. To wait for the right season and to serve the vegetables at their best is important.”
As he tastes, smells and feels the produce, I can see his Michelin-star mind thinking about how he might use this in a menu. Presentation is just as important as taste and as he wanders around the garden it is aesthetics he is considering. “You can create a dish just by using colours, so that the dish is pleasing to the eye. It will be attractive if you try to co-ordinate the colours. I pick different plants and I look at them together.” He says. “Do I like what I see? I try to provoke a reaction in me just by looking at the components of the dish.” He takes a sprig of thyme and places it next to the coloured peppers, “See? When I add some herbs, it looks beautiful.”
In order to make the very best of the produce he grows, however, he pays attention to absolutely everything.
“As a chef, I use my palate, my nose, my ear, but here in the garden the key is to observe. You look and see if the vegetables are happy where you’ve put them, you can tell straight away. If you see one or two insects on a plant, that’s normal. If you see 100, it’s not. You ask yourself, why aren’t they being eaten by natural predators? Observation takes time and you must learn to watch. People don’t know how to do that nowadays,” he says as he picks up a very sad and withered plant. “Look, the tarragon has died, that’s strange.”
Natural methods of pest control are used; nesting boxes have been put up to encourage certain birds and a pond has been built to encourage frogs to keep the numbers of slugs down. Cross-pollination is enhanced by the bees kept in the four hives and the honey is used at the restaurant.
Passard’s right hand man in the garden is 33-year-old Sylvain Picard, the head gardener. Burly and suntanned from his hours in the garden, Picard works closely with Passard to study the produce and decide how it should be grown. The soil plays a key part and their dedication to maintaining its quality means they do not use any mechanical machinery.
In a large muddy plot, the shire horse, Devine – a 20-year-old Percheronne breed – is being hurried along by two young men. “Allez, allez, encore, ça marche, hop hop,” they call. It looks like thirsty work and the old battered plough they’re using looks older than they do, but it’s doing a better job than a tractor as Picard explains.
“These horse-drawn tools are very efficient. Modern machinery hasn’t really improved on them. The equipment is quite light. We are only working the top layer of the soil. A depth of 15cm or so, what we call the ‘couche vegetale’. There is no need to go deeper. Big farm machinery is very heavy and they break the soil. Here, as we only have our own strength, we can only use equipment we can carry, so we buy traditional equipment. Modern machines are made for tractors, so they’re too heavy.”
In the summer months, the gardeners – a team of three, plus two extra seasonal workers – work as late as 8.30pm to keep everything going. It’s a very tough job, but Picard and his team are well aware it is no ordinary garden. “This garden is very particular. It exists because we are working for Alain. The diversity of what we grow, and the amount of work needed to tend it all are only possible because of the fame of the restaurant and the money generated by the restaurant.”
With such a lofty reputation, I expected L’Arpege to be grander than it is. Tucked away on Paris’s Left Bank, among various government buildings and on the same road as the Prime Minister’s residence, the restaurant is tiny. With just 12 tables to enhance the exclusivity, the restaurant’s décor is simple and clean. The focus, as Passard explains to me, is the food and so everything is there to enhance it, rather than distract from it. The musical theme suggested by the restaurant’s name (‘arpeggio’ to English-speakers) is inspired by Passard’s second love and is carried through to the décor, with stave patterns on the plates and windows.
The kitchen is the antithesis of the serene dining room. The team of young chefs and kitchen assistants are squeezed into the exceptionally tiny work area and are sautéing, chopping and blending to create a cacophony of sounds.
A huge tub sits on the counter filled with an amazing array of vegetables – smaller than usual, with imperfections that would surely disqualify them from any supermarket shelf. Yet they are so fresh that they were still in the ground this morning.
Twenty-five-year-old sous-chef Anthony Beldroega reiterates the message that if it isn’t at the potager, it won’t be on the menu. He clearly loves working at L’Arpège, but admits that his ambition is to open his own restaurant with ‘maximum organic produce’. Passard’s previous protégé, Pascal Barbot, has since gone on to open his own two-Michelin star restaurant Astrance to great acclaim and Beldroega clearly hopes he will follow in his success.
It’s a rainy November day when we sit down to lunch but within a few mouthfuls I am instantly transported back to the summer’s day we were in the garden. Each dish is beautifully dainty and the blend of flavours is intense. The vegetable-only dishes are intermittently punctuated with fish courses with produce from the very best suppliers.
Each course brings with it a specially selected wine, and as each dish appears I am amazed that each can pack in so much flavour given that it is late autumn. After several savoury courses, I wonder what dessert might have in store, given that fewer fruits are available at this time of year. The waitress presents the first of two desserts – Jerusalem artichoke soufflé with Tahiti vanilla and a chocolate heart. Light as a feather, the soufflé has a wonderful warm flavour and the chocolate centre is a rich treat.
Vegetables come into the next dessert too – one light green macaroon is flavoured with rocket, the other is orange and carrot and, with a steaming espresso to complement them, they are the perfect sweet-savoury end to the meal.
L'Arpège, 84, rue de Varenne, 75007 Paris
Tel : (Fr)1 47 05 09 06
www.alain-passard.com