Ducasse and Cerutti first teamed up in the early 1980s at La Terrasse. In 1983, Cerutti left for a stint at the Hôtel Negresco, in his native Nice, and then went to Italy to work at the Florentine restaurant Enoteca Pinchiorri. For a French chef, this was an unusual, even heretical thing to do. Ducasse was flirting with scandal merely by putting pastas on his menu; the idea that a French chef would go to Italy to try to improve his cooking was akin to a world-class skier going to the Sahara Desert to work on his turns. But Cerutti didn’t care. He had a measure of Italian lineage and was eager to explore this part of his heritage. More importantly, he didn’t consider himself a French chef; in his mind, he was a Mediterranean chef, and as such he felt a stint in Italy was imperative.
Cerutti fell in love with Italian food, especially its simplicity. “Three olives, five capers, some garlic—that was all they used,” he recalled. “They were parsimonious with the ingredients; they let things just be. The French are incapable of that—they always have to do something to it.” A thin, soft-spoken man with a vague resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman, Cerutti might have made a career in Italy had the owner of the Enoteca not decided to Frenchify his menu in order to earn a third Michelin star. Cerutti didn’t like the change and returned home. As it happened, Ducasse had just been hired as head chef at Louis XV; phone calls were exchanged, a deal was struck, and Cerutti became his deputy in the Monte Carlo kitchen.
Two decades later, they were still together, but their long association hadn’t been continuous or necessarily always blissful. In 1990, Cerutti left Ducasse to open his own place in Nice; he had barely settled into his new life when Ducasse, eyeing Robuchon’s restaurant in Paris, cajoled him into returning to Monte Carlo. Cerutti was rewarded for his sacrifice by being the guy in charge of the kitchen when Michelin took away Louis XV’s third star for the first time, and again when Michelin punished Ducasse for going to New York. Nonetheless, Cerutti stayed on board; it was said that Ducasse was paying a lot of money to keep him happy—perhaps even helping to support the extended Cerutti family.
Driving to Monte Carlo with Cerutti after an early-morning visit to an outdoor market in Nice (like the Ducasse of old, Cerutti did a lot of his own shopping), I got the distinct impression that he was no longer interested in suffering for his boss’s ambition. As we made our way along the Lower Corniche, the sun burning through the haze over the Mediterranean, I asked about the collaborative process with Ducasse. Cerutti quickly made clear that he was the Decider; Ducasse merely stopped by every few weeks for lunch or dinner in the “aquarium” (the office in the kitchen), and that was about the extent of his involvement. So even if the kitchen was short-staffed or swamped, he wouldn’t pitch in? “If he touched anything, he’d cut himself.” Ducasse was strictly a chef d’entreprise now. But his name was still on the door; wasn’t that frustrating? Cerutti shrugged. “People who know food know that it’s my food.”
That afternoon, I met with Ducasse in the aquarium. He had a large public relations apparatus, and one of his flacks was there to greet me. While we waited for Ducasse to arrive, she had the kitchen put out some cookies—not for me, but for him. “He always needs something to nibble on,” she explained. I killed time by asking if she knew where her boss resided. “He has an apartment in Paris and a house in the Basque country, I think,” she said. “But it’s hard to say exactly where he lives.” Moments later, Ducasse swept into the room in his trademark blue suit, minus a tie and minus a shave, too. He was trim, with receding gray hair, a gruff voice, and a slightly skeptical smile, and as he imperiously stretched himself across the small banquette, positioning himself at an angle with his back resting against the side wall, his demeanor did call to mind a Mafia don.
We first talked about his experience with Chapel and what he had taken away from Mionnay. “It was the perfectionism—the rigor of the techniques, the excellence of the dishes,” he said. “The biggest thing was the importance Chapel placed on the quality of the ingredients and the need to preserve their integrity, to preserve their original taste. The food was extremely sophisticated, but it also had this fundamental simplicity.” I noted that he had grown close to Bocuse and asked what he thought Bocuse’s legacy was. “The médiasation of cuisine; he increased the visibility of French cuisine and the visibility of cuisine generally.”
He claimed, unconvincingly, that he didn’t see himself as Bocuse’s heir; Robuchon or Pierre Gagnaire could just as easily fill that role, he said. But surely he was a bigger celebrity? “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “You should go check Googlefight.” And weren’t he and Robuchon blood rivals now, chasing each other around the world? “C’est bullshit,” he said. There was no animosity: He and Robuchon were on the same team, pursuing the same objective—making French cuisine more popular. In fact, he was even planning to publish Robuchon’s next cookbook. But if their imagined enmity generated media interest in chefs and cuisine, it was all to the good as far as he was concerned. Ducasse talked quickly, and though he apparently didn’t speak much English, he sprinkled his conversation with English and Franglais expressions, such as mixité and wow effect, a phrase he used several times to describe, disparagingly, cooking he thought offered more sizzle than substance.
Ducasse told me he hadn’t set out to conquer the world; it was just that one mountain always led to another, and he liked to climb. When he was awarded three stars for the first time it was “good for five minutes.” The empire-building, he said, was a function of restlessness but also inquisitiveness. “If I weren’t a chef, I’d be a traveler or an architect. It’s necessary to have change. Every day, I want to learn something new, something that I didn’t know and couldn’t have imagined, to satisfy my curiosity,” he said. His mouth was his compass: He was tasting his way around the world. He illustrated the point for me by rhapsodizing for a few minutes about some yuba—tofu skin—that he’d had recently in Kyoto.
I asked if he missed cooking. “I cook in my head,” he said. I waited for a laugh, a smile—something to confirm that he was joking. But he was serious: He said that his travels gave him recipe ideas; he jotted them down and left it to his chefs to make it happen. It was best to think of him as the creative director for the Ducasse Group, identifying suitable locations for restaurants and conceptualizing them; after that, his lieutenants were in charge. “There’s lots of delegation; it’s a grande démocratie,” he said. “I find the place and the idea, then I give them the keys. I decide the editorial line—I’m the one with the global vision.” His use of the word global provided a good segue; I noted that some people viewed him as an avatar of globalization, doing for haute cuisine what Ray Kroc had done for hamburgers. “I am against globalization,” he insisted, his voice rising. “I am for global, I am for local—I am glocal. I am for a culture of difference. I never do the same restaurant twice; I don’t want to copy.” Each of his restaurants was tailored to its location and relied as much as possible on local ingredients. Eating at Spoon in Paris was different than eating at Spoon in London.
Dumping a little more oil in the pan, I brought up Spain and the fact that many people believed it had eclipsed France. At the mention of la nueva cocina, Ducasse rolled his eyes. Then, quickly regaining his magnanimity, he said he adored Ferran Adrià and the rest of the Spanish armada but didn’t think they posed any real challenge to French supremacy. “Tell me, where’s the competition? How many Spanish chefs are overseas? My competition is Robuchon, Gagnaire, Guy Savoy, the Pourcel brothers, JeanGeorges [Vongerichten].” In other words, influence was a function of ubiquity. I wasn’t going to argue the point, and he didn’t give me the chance; he quickly dismissed the entire subject as another media concoction. “It’s good for cuisine if the journalists think there is a war. It gives them a reason to talk about us. It would be terrible if they didn’t talk about us.”
We finished the interview, and Ducasse walked me to the door. As we stood in the entryway to Louis XV, three colorfully dressed, zaftig women came out. Ducasse ga
ve them a warm greeting and ducked into the restaurant to personally retrieve their goodie bags. (Female guests were sent home with a brioche and cookies or chocolates.) After seeing them off, he turned back to me and said, “The woman in the floral dress was one of Chapel’s most loyal clients.”
In 2005, Mix in New York closed after just twenty-three months in business. That same year, ADNY was awarded three stars in the inaugural Michelin Guide to New York, and amazingly, Michelin didn’t shaft Cerutti this time. But three stars no longer assured success in France, and they seemed to matter even less in New York. The restaurant continued to struggle, and in 2007, Ducasse decided to shutter it—a poignant commentary on the diminished power of Michelin and a big setback for him. Ducasse wasn’t giving up on New York, though; he was just regrouping, and in 2007, he announced he would be opening two new restaurants there—an upscale, wine-oriented establishment called Adour, in the St. Regis Hotel, and a New York branch of Benoit.
A few weeks after our meeting in Monte Carlo, Ducasse was in New York to do a tasting of the menu at Adour. It was an opportunity for two of the hotel’s executives to acquaint themselves with the food and for Ducasse, who’d already done several run-throughs on his own, to see how the kitchen, under the direction of Tony Ensault, a longtime protégé, was coming along. I was invited to take part in the tasting, which started at four P.M., the time the construction crew quit for the night. The four of us were shown to a table in an alcove of Adour’s dining room, which was littered with construction equipment—ladders, electric cables, painting platforms, dumpsters. Our little nook had been cleared of all debris and set with a beautifully arranged, white-linen table. As soon as we sat down, Ducasse removed his blazer, placed a notebook at his side and, like a marksman fidgeting with his rifle, began intently fingering his fork. Each of us was given a menu listing the twelve dishes we would be served and the two wines that would accompany each course. With the menu we were given Champagne cocktails. Ducasse immediately found a fault. “It’s not cold enough,” he told the sommelier. He betrayed no anger; he was merely providing instruction, and the young sommelier nodded vigorously.
Ducasse and I shared one plate, the St. Regis executives shared the other. First up was an appetizer of raw, marinated hamachi and geoduck served with radish and green apple mustard. As soon as the plate was laid down, Ducasse attacked. Using his sauce spoon as a probe, he gently poked the fish, then carved out a healthy slab, slid it onto his spoon, carefully dabbed it in the mustard, and plopped it in his mouth. “It’s not cold enough; the fish needs to be colder,” he calmly announced. The hotel guys nodded in agreement while one of the waiters scurried back to the kitchen to relay the boss’s verdict. Ducasse sized up dishes with the same alacrity that he apparently sized up employees.
He had no qualms with the concepts; the only flaws were serving temperatures and seasonings. The foie gras didn’t have quite enough salt; “trop timide,” he said. The short ribs also needed more salt. For the most part, though, Ducasse seemed thoroughly satisfied with the quality of the preparations, and several made him swoon. A plate of day-boat scallops served with diced black truffles, salsify, spinach, and a shellfish jus sent him into ecstasy. “This is great pleasure,” he said excitedly, adding rather enigmatically that it wasn’t “food for the tourists.” While the dish was an involved one to make, he explained, it came to the table as a beacon of simplicity. This was truly great cooking—unlike the stuff produced by the Spaniards and their acolytes, which too often “lost the essence” of ingredients. “Who wants to eat marshmallow of pork with balsamic vinaigrette?” he said with a laugh.
Ducasse exuded gruff charm. He told us that he’d recently eaten at Grayz, the midtown restaurant of chef Gray Kunz, and had been dumbstruck by the number of plates they used. “The star there is the dishwasher,” he quipped. It somehow came out that the wife of one of the hotel executives was a native Italian but didn’t cook, which elicited faux indignation from Ducasse. “What’s the point of marrying an Italian if she doesn’t make pasta?” he asked. When he wasn’t eating or joking, Ducasse was trying to anticipate how New Yorkers would respond to the food. He seemed eager to project an air of supreme confidence—“There is nothing like this on any other menu in New York” he boasted of a plate of autumn vegetables served with a simple vegetable jus—but anxiety periodically broke through. “I think New York will like that,” he said quietly of one dessert, a vacherin served with mango marmalade, coconut, and a passion fruit emulsion. At times, he conveyed an earnest desire to impress American diners; at other times, he made fun of them. He joked about putting Caesar salad on the menu, and when I mentioned that Cerutti had complained about the ordering habits of Americans at Louis XV, Ducasse, in slow, mocking English, said, “I will have a lobster salad and beef, well-done.”
It was seven P.M. when the tasting wrapped up. After twelve dishes and two dozen glasses of wine, the hoteliers looked like men desperately seeking pillows. Ducasse announced that he had a reservation in an hour at Le Bernardin. “Are you serious?” one of them asked. “Oui,” said Ducasse, who seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “This was work; that’s dinner.”
A few weeks earlier, a press conference had been held at the Plaza Athénée to announce that Ducasse would be taking over France’s national pastry academy, the École Nationale Superior de la Pâtisserie. After mingling for a few minutes with the two dozen or so journalists in attendance, Ducasse stepped to the front of the room and read a prepared statement. He seemed strangely nervous; he read in a soft, halting voice, as if he were struggling with the words, and his eyes never left the paper. An assistant would later confide that Ducasse didn’t like to read aloud in public. Gérard Margeon had told me that he and Ducasse were “just two country boys” and that Ducasse had the spirit of a “noble paysan.” For all his bravado and seeming urbanity, was Ducasse a bumpkin at heart? With his rural upbringing and limited formal education, was he intimidated by having to read aloud to a bunch of hyper-educated journalists? And could it be that all those knives and pens in New York, far from being some cynical and cheesy ploy, had represented an earnest attempt to impress the city folk? Three months after I saw Ducasse at Adour, New York magazine ran a profile of the peripatetic chef which suggested that his problem was that he tried too hard to please. By then, I had come to pretty much the same conclusion.
Ducasse was certainly not above reproach. The world of food and wine would have been none the poorer without either Spoon or Mix, and by opening Benoit outlets in New York and Tokyo, it could be argued that Ducasse had devalued the original in Paris. For all his good intentions, Ducasse’s first attempt to conquer New York had been a bust, and by 2008 he was grappling with a potential failure in London, where he had established a much-criticized luxury restaurant in the Dorchester Hotel. Far from affirming that unlimited horizons were available to talented, ambitious chefs such as himself, Ducasse had inadvertently demonstrated the near-impossibility of empirebuilding on a global scale: If a manager as skillful and diligent as he could suffer so many flameouts, what hope was there for other chefs trying to franchise themselves around the world?
It was also the case that the chef manqué approach, of which Ducasse was the most visible example, had not served French gastronomy especially well. It was an unquestionable factor in the diminished ingenuity, and perhaps also declining quality, of high-end French cooking during the 1990s and into the new millennium. True, the French were hardly the only ones to stray from the kitchen—top chefs in New York and London were doing the same thing—but the French had always been looked to for creative inspiration, and that position of intellectual leadership was being squandered. Contrary to Ducasse’s claim, influence was measured not by the number of restaurants that a chef operated, but by how widely his efforts were imitated and his insights embraced, and on this score, the Spaniards were drubbing the French.
Even so, much of the criticism aimed at Ducasse was unwarranted. Most of his restaurants were e
xcellent and maintained their quality even as he took on additional projects, a consistency that eluded other chefs with far-flung interests (in this way, too, Ducasse was the exception that proved the rule). Louis XV was brilliant, and while the Paris three-star didn’t rise to the same standard, it certainly merited its rating. Under Ducasse, Aux Lyonnais wasn’t just the best Lyonnais bistro in Paris; it was as good as any bistro in Lyon. And though it was a pity that an historic restaurant like Benoit ended up in the hands of a conglomerate, it was better that it be absorbed by Ducasse’s empire than by a less quality-conscious group (of which there were many). François Simon, no fan of Ducasse, thought the food at Benoit had become even better under his watch; that was debatable, but it definitely hadn’t slipped. And while Mix and Spoon were not Ducasse’s best efforts, they at least represented attempts to put something different on the plate.
To claim, as some did, that Ducasse had no interest in innovation and had not distinguished himself as a chef was wrong. While he never produced that one canonical dish that can confer immortality, he helped elevate Mediterranean cooking to a level of respect in France that it had never before enjoyed; olive oil acquired the stature of butter and cream, and it became possible to put things like ravioli and risotto on the menus of starred restaurants in Paris without scandalizing the guests. And certainly, no French chef did as much as Ducasse to raise the image of vegetables—to make them, by dint of serious, passionate treatment, as integral to haute cuisine as meat, fowl, and fish. It was no accident that Ducasse earned a third star at the age of thirty-three, and although he quit the kitchen not long thereafter, his legacy at the stove is a formidable one.
Now, in his role as gastronomic impresario, he was trying to preserve some of the glories of France’s culinary heritage while also attempting to give French cuisine renewed vitality. He was the head of a global enterprise, and profit was plainly a motive, but he was also serving a greater good. The food writer Emmanuel Rubin, a colleague of François Simon’s at Le Figaro, made this point by drawing a rapiersharp distinction between Ducasse and his erstwhile rival, Robuchon. “Ducasse cares about French cuisine,” said Rubin. “Robuchon cares about Robuchon.” Ducasse’s crowning achievement is the fact that he has cultivated a small army of exceptional chefs, provided platforms for their talents, and given them the creative and financial freedom to fully realize their abilities, which are no small gifts at a time when the economics of the restaurant business in France isn’t exactly favorable. And while Ducasse is no longer in the kitchen, he has inculcated his charges with the ideas that formed the cornerstone of his training—a reverence for good ingredients and a monomaniacal determination to express their flavors as purely and vividly as possible, the lesson that he learned from Chapel. “He is a businessman now, but he teaches us to be artisans and to cook with passion,” said Jean-Louis Nomicos. Although Ducasse’s career path had come to mirror Bocuse’s rather than Chapel’s, he didn’t betray his mentor’s legacy. Three decades after nouvelle cuisine’s heyday, Ducasse had achieved a synthesis of sorts: He was using Bocuse’s methods to transmit Chapel’s values.
Au Revoir to All That Page 20