Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  In August 1984, Ducasse was the lone survivor of a plane crash in the French Alps. In the aftermath, he underwent multiple operations, spent months in the hospital, and emerged with a gimp that still hinders him. The accident and the long convalescence left a psychological mark just as profound. “Another person was born in that hospital,” Ducasse’s friend and fellow chef Jacques Maximin told me as we talked one morning in Paris. “I went to see him there, and it wasn’t the same man. Before the accident, his ambition was just to be a big chef, to win three stars. But it was clear to me, in the hospital, that he was now after something more and that there was now an urgency that hadn’t been there before. He was going to live his life with a vengeance.”

  Ducasse returned to La Terrasse, but he didn’t stay long enough to earn a third star there. In 1987, he was hired as chef at Louis XV, the imposingly formal restaurant in Monte Carlo’s Hôtel de Paris. He wasn’t the first choice for the job: The hotel had tried to recruit several older, more established chefs but without success. Its determination to see Louis XV awarded three stars in a hurry (it didn’t have even a single star yet) was one stumbling block; another was the poor reputation of the local workforce (which, given the resort location, was probably no surprise). Ducasse took the job, and he audaciously promised that the restaurant would have its three stars within four years. He delivered, and with time to spare: Louis XV was awarded a third star in 1990. Craig Claiborne, the feared restaurant critic of the New York Times, had earlier hailed Ducasse as “worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of great French chefs”; with the third star, the thirty-three-year-old wunderkind was officially installed. By now, his cooking was anchored firmly in the Mediterranean and incorporated Italian influences alongside Provençal ones. “He uses as much olive oil as butter in his cooking,” wrote Claiborne, “and his repertory includes Provençal pumpkin soup with chicken quenelles along with zephyr-light ravioli filled with foie gras and an exceptionally well-made risotto with cheese, white truffles and cream. A firm believer in the freshest ingredients, Mr. Ducasse garners them from whatever source is at hand. In fall and winter, he buys his game from friends who hunt. His cheeses come from a small goat farm in the French town of Tende, just north of Monaco, and his fish are chosen from the morning hauls of nearby fishermen.”

  Ducasse remained in the Louis XV kitchen through the early 1990s, but just as Jacques Maximin had foreseen, he now had ambitions well beyond winning and keeping a third star. In 1995, he acquired La Bastide de Moustiers, a country inn located near the Gorges de Verdon in a rustic corner of Provence. He spruced it up, put one of his deputies in charge of the kitchen, and quickly turned the Bastide into one of the area’s premier destinations. The following year, legendary chef Joël Robuchon announced his retirement. Reluctant to see his eponymous three-star restaurant in Paris close down, Robuchon approached a handful of chefs about taking over the property, but all demurred. The reluctance was understandable: The fifty-one-year-old Robuchon was considered the finest chef of his era, and moving into his old kitchen was bound to invite unfavorable comparisons. For Ducasse, though, this was catnip. The more daunting the challenge, the greater his interest.

  In August 1996, Restaurant Alain Ducasse opened in the space previously occupied by Robuchon. Seven months later, it was awarded three stars. But Michelin, still under the direction of the imperious Bernard Naegellen and not yet comfortable with the idea of a chef operating a pair of three-star restaurants nearly six hundred miles apart, decided to express its concern by docking Louis XV a star. Point made, Michelin acquiesced the following year and awarded both restaurants its highest rating. Ducasse saw it as the triumph of the Bocuse-ian ideal. “Michelin has accepted that it’s possible for a chef to do something besides get fat behind his stove,” he tartly commented. (Ducasse would later move his Paris three-star from Robuchon’s old haunt to the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, where it remains.) In any case, he had already moved on. In 1998, he started a casual restaurant in Paris called Spoon, which specialized in fusion food, and he was now also looking overseas. He traveled periodically to the United States to keep abreast of culinary trends there, and by the late 1990s he was toying with the idea of an American beachhead.

  New York was the obvious destination, and in 2000 Ducasse opened a restaurant in Manhattan’s Essex House Hotel. The timing was not ideal: The stock market was on the verge of a major correction, and heartburn on Wall Street inevitably meant indigestion for New York restaurateurs. It didn’t help that Ducasse decided to create a luxury palace serving extravagantly haute cuisine in a town that no longer seemed to want either. Classic French fare was now considered passé and so were the restaurants that offered it; by 2004, the iconic Lutèce, La Côte Basque, and La Caravelle would all be out of business, with La Grenouille the last dinosaur standing.

  Some unfavorable pre-opening publicity only steepened the odds against Alain Ducasse New York, or ADNY, as the restaurant would be known. New Yorkers were left with the impression that Ducasse was coming to teach them how to eat. Twenty years earlier, when the United States had still been a culinary backwater, this missionary impulse would have been warranted and maybe even welcomed. Now, it reeked of condescension and didn’t endear Ducasse to his new clientele. Nor did the one-hundred-sixty-dollar prix fixe, which struck even spendthrift New Yorkers as cheeky. (Michelin wasn’t happy, either: After Ducasse went transcontinental and opened in New York, the Guide registered its disapproval by again demoting Louis XV to two stars for a year.)

  The initial reviews of ADNY bespoke an almost incandescent rage. Many critics felt the food came nowhere near to justifying the prices, and were outraged by the over-the-top flourishes, such as the dozen ornate knives that diners were asked to pick from in order to cut their meat and the dozen designer pens that they could use to sign their bills. New York magazine’s Gael Greene was biting. “I’m not really amused being forced to choose my knife or my pen just so the house can show off how many it’s assembled,” she wrote. “I’m annoyed. It’s an intrusion and it’s vulgar. Were Ducasse to try that gimmick in Paris, I think they’d roll him through town to the guillotine … The food has no emotion. If the emperor is naked, we will drape him in a tablecloth to give him time to get his ermine back from the Laundromat. Open to anything? Yes, we are. But in the end, we’re not so easily fooled.”

  Unbowed, Ducasse decided in 2003 to double down his New York bet by opening a second restaurant, called Mix. This one had a more casual atmosphere and a menu that was a hybrid of French and American comfort foods. There was bouillabaisse alongside clam chowder, as well as macaroni and cheese and a French equivalent comprised of elbow noodles and chunks of ham bathed in butter and truffle jus. The reviews weren’t quite as hostile, but with Mix, too, critics detected condescension. William Grimes of the New York Times complained that the elaborate serving dishes and the complicated menu explanations created a “visual and conceptual clutter” and reflected a patronizing attitude toward American diners—a belief that they required a circus with their bread. “Someone needs to tell Mr. Ducasse that Americans, even if they do watch a lot of television and have short attention spans, do not need to be distracted every second that they are in a restaurant,” he wrote. “Mix is fun, but a little less fun might work just as well.”

  French critics were also turning on Ducasse, put off by his quest for mastery of the universe, which would soon take him to Africa and Asia. While François Simon, who years earlier had coauthored a cookbook with Ducasse but had since fallen out with him, was the most prominent detractor, he was hardly alone. The journalist Thierry Walton, who reviewed restaurants for French Elle under the pseudonym Léo Fourneau, was biting in his memoir, Bon Appétit, Messieurs! “In the game of ego,” Walton wrote, “Ducasse is the winner … He is a chameleon, adapting himself to his surroundings, reproducing but never inventing. Ducasse creates nothing.”

  More intriguingly, there were rumblings that Ducasse’s wanderlust wasn’t sitting well with Joël Robuchon.
It was one thing for Ducasse to successfully take over his old restaurant; it was quite another for him to try to become king and eclipse Robuchon’s reputation. When Robuchon came out of retirement in 2001, opening Robuchon a Galera in the casino-rich former Portuguese colony of Macao, it was seen as confirmation of the kitchen scuttlebutt. When Robuchon spent the next several years opening restaurants in cities around the world in which Ducasse was already present or on his way—including Monte Carlo, Ducasse’s base—it was taken as a declaration of war.

  But Ducasse plunged ahead. No longer content merely to be a chef and restaurateur, he was now attempting to establish himself as the next great codifier of French cuisine—the literary heir to Carême and Escoffier. In 1999, he started his own publishing business and released Le Grand Livre de Cuisine, a thousand-page, seven-hundred-recipe cookbook that evoked the desired comparisons with Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire. An encyclopedic dessert book soon followed, along with a voluminous text on bistro and brasserie fare. Ducasse was also becoming an educator. In 1999, he opened Alain Ducasse Formation, a cooking school on the outskirts of Paris catering to professionals. Success was instant, and the enrollment, curriculum, and facilities all expanded rapidly. Four years later, Ducasse launched a widely publicized program called Fou de France, which brought young chefs from around the country to Paris for two-week stints at the Plaza Athénée. It was an opportunity for them to test their recipes on jaded Parisians, but it was also a way for Ducasse to underscore his own importance. He was now aiming to be the next godfather, and in receiving his favor, these chefs would be, in a sense, made men.

  As if all this weren’t enough, the Ducasse group was also turning into a culinary preservation society. In 2002, Ducasse took over Aux Lyonnais, a century-old bistro near the Paris Bourse specializing in the traditional cuisine of Lyon, France’s other gastronomic hub. He gave the restaurant some needed repairs while leaving the essential look—the wood façade, the laced curtains, the zinc bar, the tiled walls—untouched, put one of his chefs in the kitchen, and quickly made it one of the city’s most spirited and popular eateries. He later did the same thing with Rech, an old seafood restaurant in the seventeenth arrondissement, and would also take charge of Le Jules Verne, the landmark restaurant on the second level of the Eiffel Tower.

  From a food perspective, his most important acquisition came in 2005, when he signed the deed to Benoit, arguably the most beautiful bistro in Paris and almost surely the best, with a long-held Michelin star to prove it. The restaurant, festooned in shiny brass, big mirrors, potted palms, and red velvet, had been opened in 1912 by Benoit Martray and had remained in the family. But after many years at the helm, Michel Petit, Martray’s grandson, wanted to retire, and with no one to succeed him, he decided to sell to Ducasse. On the day the deal was to close, the imposingly tall (and badly misnamed) Petit walked through the door with the restaurant’s keys draped around his neck like a noose and burst into tears. Ducasse told him to keep the keys and that he was welcome to eat at the restaurant any time he wished. Soon thereafter, Petit bought an apartment around the corner and began having lunch at Benoit every Tuesday.

  In 1994, seven years after getting the job at Louis XV in part because other chefs didn’t want to deal with the local workforce, Ducasse decided that the restaurant needed a shot of northern efficiency after all. The goal was to overhaul the wine service, and the dining room in general. He began pursuing Gérard Margeon, a talented young sommelier working as the wine steward at the Méridien Montparnasse hotel in Paris. The first time Margeon heard from Ducasse was during lunch service there. The conversation began: “Hello, this is Alain Ducasse. Can you come to Monaco?” Margeon politely declined; he was content in Paris and had no desire to relocate. He didn’t yet know that once Ducasse had it in his mind to hire someone, no amount of rejection would dislodge the thought. Ducasse kept calling, and after much back-and-forth, Margeon finally agreed to pay a visit to Monte Carlo—not because he had any intention of taking the job but simply because he was now desperate to be rid of Ducasse. As soon as he stepped off the plane in Nice, the seduction began: He was escorted to a waiting helicopter and whisked off to the Hôtel de Paris, where he spent the weekend with Ducasse. Eventually, his resistance crumbled and he agreed to take the job. By then, he had come to understand that Ducasse was one of those bosses who inspired and exhausted in equal measure. As he told his wife on the morning he started at Louis XV, “You either work for Ducasse for one day, or you stay with him a long time.”

  Fourteen years later, Margeon was still with Ducasse (and now overseeing a team of more than fifty sommeliers worldwide), as were many other recruits. Quite apart from his culinary achievements, Ducasse seemed to have an almost preternatural ability to find, motivate, and keep the people he needed. He could sniff out talent in all sorts of places. In 1998, just as he was laying claim to six stars, he was introduced at a bar in Paris to Laurent Plantier, a young French entrepreneur. At the time, Plantier was pursuing an MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had no particular interest in food. He’d never even heard of Ducasse. It didn’t matter: Ducasse, impressed by his MIT education and his experience in the United States and in need of a CEO for his rapidly expanding group, immediately began courting Plantier, and the thirty-year-old Marseille native, like Margeon before him, eventually caved. His MIT classmates were baffled by his decision to take a job with a chef. “I think they just figured it was a French thing, that French people were weird,” Plantier recalled.

  The new hire hinted at where the Ducasse organization was headed; by the early-2000s, the company was said to be pulling in $16 million in annual revenues and had come to resemble, in its size, reach, and culture, a global investment bank. In return for working hellish hours and effectively signing over their lives, Ducasse employees were paid well and were further rewarded with a rich array of benefits. Chief among these was the chance to work abroad: Like an international financier, a Ducasse chef could do a stint in Paris, relocate to New York, spend several years in Tokyo, and then return to Paris to start the rotation anew. In some cases, the company covered moving expenses and provided housing allowances. It also offered language training: It retained the services of a firm that gave language lessons by phone, and employees could call in from anywhere in the world to work on their English or Japanese. For an Ivy League—minted Wall Streeter, such perks were standard fare; in the food world, they were unheard of, and for a barely educated young chef from the French countryside, they represented the opportunity of a lifetime.

  It was partly for this reason that Ducasse commanded loyalty bordering on the fanatical. The Ducasse group was sometimes described as having an almost cultlike aspect, an impression reinforced by the Mao-like little red book of Ducasse aphorisms that was given to every new hire. Employees past and present spoke of Ducasse in awestruck terms. “He has this power—he knows people, he understands their character and the way they work, and he just knows where they belong,” Jean-Louis Nomicos told me, sounding more like a disciple describing a Zen master than a chef describing his old boss. Nomicos had worked for Ducasse in Juan-les-Pins and Monte Carlo, and when, in 2001, he was offered the chef’s position at Lasserre, a historic two-star in Paris, he sought Ducasse’s counsel and blessing before taking the job. He and other Ducasse protégés appeared to literally consider his judgment to be infallible. “He just knows” was the mantra.

  But by 2008, it was no longer clear that Ducasse was the most important person within his own organization. That distinction may have belonged instead to Franck Cerutti, who ran the Louis XV kitchen. With Ducasse no longer cooking, young chefs were sent to Monte Carlo to be schooled in the Ducasse ethos by Cerutti. Even Ducasse’s harshest critics conceded that the forty-eight-year-old Cerutti was a brilliant chef—arguably the finest in France (even if he technically didn’t work in France). François Simon described him as the “most Ducassian of [Ducasse’s] students, who cooks, in my eyes, the true cuisine of Ducasse.
” But Simon also believed that the balance of power in the relationship had shifted. The true cuisine of Ducasse had become the cuisine of Cerutti, and if Ducasse ever went back to the kitchen, Simon wrote, it would now be Cerutti’s food that he cooked.

  For my taste, Cerutti was the best. He coaxed astonishing flavor out of every ingredient that crossed his cutting board, but especially fish and vegetables. I’d never experienced more sustained exhilaration at the table than my meals at Louis XV. A dinner one night began with a crudité of local vegetables—so fresh they glistened—with a black olive dipping sauce. It moved on to a seafood salad composed of clams, octopus, squid, and the most succulent gamberoni (local jumbo prawns) imaginable, then a lusty risotto of cèpes with baby spinach. The main courses included Mediterranean sea bass dressed with tomatoes, capers, lemon zest, and aged vinegar; an ethereal ragoût of stockfish tripe and salted cod served with red peppers, olives, and slices of Perugina sausage; and roasted lamb, cooked to a perfect shade of pink and accompanied by a medley of stuffed vegetables. For dessert, there was honey ice cream with roasted figs followed by Le Louis XV, the restaurant’s signature chocolate-and-praline cake. Literally every bite had me tapping my feet in pleasure.