The legendary chef and restaurateur on where to eat well in Paris, his early adoption of molecular gastronomy and the life message he tries to impart
One of the first things I remember eating was earth.
My father was a keen gardener and one day when I was about six – it was raining, as we say, comme vache qui pisse – he took a clump of soil and said, “Raymond, look at it, smell it, then eat it.” You didn’t disobey Papa, so I ate it. It sucked all the saliva out of my mouth and you could taste mustiness, acid, all the trace elements of the earth. I said I understood why I should look at it to see what would grow well in the soil, but why eat it? And he said, “Raymond, that was a joke!”
Food and the garden were the heart of our working-class home. It was post-war, so the sense of community and family was strong, and every Sunday we’d have around 14 people at the table. As kids we had to sit down until the very end of the meal in this smoke-filled room – everyone smoked back then. The dessert, îles flottantes or apple tart, almost made it worth the wait.
My papa gave me a wonderful hand-drawn map when I was 10. My region, Jura, has one of the largest forests in Europe and I was a hunter gatherer from a young age. The map showed where to fish for trout, pick apples, find nuts, where mushrooms grew. My mum would cook some of the mushrooms, preserve some and the rest I would sell to chefs. Sadly, I lost this precious map at some point in my life.
My first mentor was my mother, then it was Professor Nicholas Kurti. I’d bought dozens of books on molecular cooking and never got anywhere, but when I heard him speak in Oxford, he translated chemistry into the simplest language. He said we can go to the moon, but we don’t understand what’s happening in a soufflé. He helped me enormously and became a friend. And I became the first young chef to embrace molecular gastronomy.
I’m self-taught and proud to be so. Not having classic French culinary training allowed me to enjoy a freedom and indulge my curiosity. I strived to attain simplicity, complexity, harmony, conflict – it was a fascinating period of my life. Escoffier was a great modern chef a hundred years ago, but things have moved on. Many of the principles are good and classic training is still valid – it’s a grounding in hygiene, organisation, how you create flavours, and from there you move into a modern world.
A French dish I couldn’t live without? It would have to be escargots. But I would also miss the first asparagus, just after they push their heads through t
