E-Paper
HT Brunch Cover Story: French kiss
World-renowned chef Alain Ducasse hopes the newly-established campus of his cooking school in India will equip young chefs to create their own cuisines
Shaking hands with French master chef Alain Ducasse over coffee at his new India campus is humbling.
This man achieved a three-star Michelin rating for Le Louis XV in Monaco in 1990 when he was barely 33. This man today has over 20 restaurants in metropolises ranging from Las Vegas to Tokyo, has had 21 Michelin stars, established cooking schools in Paris, Manila, Săo Paulo and now India, and has coffee and chocolate brands in his arsenal, not to mention a couple of inns in Provence, France.
In 1984, the year he was awarded two stars in the Michelin Red Guide, he was the sole survivor of a plane that crashed due to bad weather, and had spent more than six hours hanging from a tree until he was rescued!
You’d think that with all that hard work—and let’s not forget that gigantic shock to the system caused by the air crash—this 65-year-old man sitting in front of me would be ready to retire. But no. Alain Ducasse is primed to do more—and more and more.
The India connect
Ducasse speaks to HT Brunch at the Indian School of Hospitality, Gurugram, where he has just launched his new campus of École Ducasse.
He arrived in Delhi on June 14, and ever since then, he says, he has been overwhelmed by Indian hospitality and its “kindness, generosity, respect and love”.
“The vision of our group is to become the leader of education in the hospitality industry, including gastronomy and pastry arts, and we believe in the growth and potential of India as it is the country of hospitality,” he says. “Luckily, we found a strong partner and here we are to be a part of the story in India.”
Ducasse’s idea to open a campus in India began at a Parisian restaurant called Spoon, Food and Wine, where the founding recipes traversed the spice route from India to the Levant—the Mediterranean region of West Asia.
“The Japanese chef at this restaurant had been mentored by an Indian chef called Homa on the Indian aspects of the menu,” says Ducasse. “Chef Homa had come to India during his own research and had been mentored by Chef Hemant Oberoi almost twelve years ago. That perhaps was the beginning of a long story that Indian and French cuisine will now have together. We are very proud to come to India and share our French tool box [techniques] to be applied by the students here. When they graduate, they will leave with the best practices to help them develop their own cuisine. They will also have the opportunity to come to France and we will mutually nurture each other.”
This is Ducasse’s first visit to India, and his first tourist stop was the Red Fort. Later, he went to Agra and was awed by the Taj Mahal.
“I wanted to experience some history and culture and that was a good start,” he says. Before going to bed, he had already sampled kebabs, the world-famous dal and all the works at ITC’s Bukhara. He had been keen to go there to understand the longevity of this over forty-year-old restaurant that serves up a bit of India’s past, before he met the students who would be part of his India campus.
Needless to add, the students also had their say in what he ate the following day—the samples of Indian cuisine they served him included a dosa and some lassi.
“Cuisine is the reflection of the culture, which is why we have local gastronomy in our curriculum as well, and by marrying our tool box to their culinary heritage, the students can create their own cultural identity,” Ducasse says.
He also had a meal at Indian Accent and loved the contemporary take on Indian cuisine. “India is a vast country and has so many varieties of cuisines,” he marvels. “For example, your dal alone is made in so many ways. I am loving this and I need to try so much more.”
The future of food
Ducasse has a kind persona and when he speaks, his soft French accent transports one directly to Castelsarrasin in south-western France, where he was raised and educated. He grew up fully aware that the best cooking depends on the freshest ingredients obtainable—and he learned this right in his own backyard, a 200-year-old farm, where he grew up watching things grow.
“I grew up eating my grandmother Jeanne’s delicacies prepared with fresh ingredients and can never forget the beautiful flavours of the roast chicken she cooked every Sunday,” he says. “Everything was seasonal, and that’s how the eating pattern mainly remains at home, even these days. Most vegetables are grown in my own kitchen garden and I pluck them as and when I need them. It can’t get fresher than that! Being the boy who did the chores for grandma in those days put me in a virtuous position to be able to link saplings to happy guests.”
Jeanne’s tutelage of the young Alain turned out to be a big blessing for the restaurant industry worldwide. It is hard to imagine it without the influence of Ducasse’s home grown philosophy today.
For example, Ducasse believes that if you associate yourself with soil, you will have utmost respect for any ingredient. He promotes pure and fresh regional and seasonal produce and local farmers, thus encouraging local self-sufficiency and the regional exchange of high-quality raw material.
“The future is drawing inspiration from the rhythms of the season and the exceptional, locally-sourced ingredients of one’s close network of small producers and artisans,” he explains.
Cooking is enjoyable for many people, but a true chef is the person who enjoys even the hardships of the profession. “For example, when you are sizzling onions for a long time and your hands hurt, but you still find pleasure in doing it, you are a good chef in the true sense of the word,” he smiles.
Having shown the world the basics behind good food, Ducasse now has his eyes set on other planets. He’s already created Michelin-quality food for astronauts going out into space, but his next project could be food on Mars!
“This has been my dream for a long time and it is kind of getting closer as the European Space Agency is definitely looking for ways to feed astronauts on Mars,” Duscasse says, his eyes sparkling.
From HT Brunch, July 9, 2022
Follow us on twitter.com/HTBrunch
Connect with us on facebook.com/hindustantimesbrunch
