Following on the gentleman in the post immediately below.
From Esquire, May 16:
Alain Ducasse has 34 restaurants, 21 Michelin stars, a culinary school, and a chocolate factory. Now what? We try to extract life advice from one of the world’s most successful chefs.
A few weeks ago, Alain Ducasse, wizened keeper of all French culinary tradition, met me in a walnut-walled 19th-century Bordeaux apothecary. There he sat, slightly slumped, his hair snowy white, his eyes peering over his glasses beneath wild eyebrows. Beside him was Emmanuelle Perrier, his communications director and longtime translator. I wish we had been in France, but it was Thursday and I had to pick up my kids from school in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The incessant honking of horns was a distant but audible reminder that we were actually in midtown Manhattan. The room—dubbed L’Officine—is on the second floor of Ducasse’s New York bistro, Benoit, housed in the former home of La Côte Basque. In typical Ducassian fashion, the chef had the apothecary disassembled and shipped by boat to New York when he opened Benoit in 2008. But it makes sense to meet here. For one, it’s quiet. For another, Ducasse is like the Wayne Coyne of the culinary world, a chef so French he seems to travel in a bubble of the Fifth Republic.
That the chef isn’t as well known in America—though he’s still well known—belies the scope of his global influence. Ducasse Enterprises employs hundreds of people. He has 34 restaurants, many in France, ranging from bistros to haute cuisine to country inns. He’s huge in Japan, a god in Qatar, a deity in China, but has only two outposts—including Benoit—in America. (The other, Rivea, is in the Delano Las Vegas.) The man has amassed 21 Michelin stars. He has an ice cream factory and a chocolate factory and a school in the suburbs of Paris. And an ambitious headquarters called Le Maison du Peuple—the House of the People—is slated to open later this year in Clichy. Much of this is related in his new book, Good Taste: A Life of Food and Passion. The slim volume is less a memoir than an extended curriculum vitae.
But he seems, for his part, pretty disinterested in America. For instance, he doesn’t speak the language. So unless one speaks French or, alternatively, doesn’t feel shame in trying, all questions posed to Ducasse are actually directed to Perrier in English, translated for the chef, and answered in French, which Perrier then translates into English. Ducasse talks quickly and quietly and frequently overlaps with what Perrier is saying. Because Perrier answers in the third person, an almost divine aura is conferred on Ducasse. The whole effect is that he’s some sort of sage and she an oracle. One learns a lot, but questions are rarely answered....
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