I had a grandmother
who was an excellent cook.
Her cooking smelled so good. Her cooking was generous.
My grandmother always talked about the song of the fire.
And I can still hear the whistle of the oven.
When the grease first sizzles in the bottom of the pan...
she knew it was done perfectly.
She had an eye...
that would dance just like the flame.
Those are some of the beautiful images that I often see when I think of her.
My grandmother gave me a delicate sense for cooking,
and this school of fire
has stayed with me my whole life.
I have the recipes but...
I have never been able to make them as well as she did.
Sometimes I think that she kept a secret.
Or maybe I have never had the hand for it.
I will be very honest.
I have a sentence that explains it all.
A very short sentence.
When I was 14...
I decided to be a chef.
I have never changed my mind.
- The arrival is at what time? - 11:30.
- It still hasn't arrived? - No, it has not arrived.
Is he on his way?
He should be here soon, Chef!
- Tomatoes arrive at what time? - It won't be long.
Once they are here, take them downstairs. I'll make a tart.
There's a ceremony at Arpège.
The arrival of the vegetables.
Every morning, magnificent crates arrive at Arpège.
They come in monstrous quantities.
Superb.
Have you seen the parsley, Tony? We can make parsley cream, no?
He has a unique menu at Arpège.
Each day, he cooks solely with what arrives from the garden.
He looks at the produce and wonders what he can do with it.
When you see Alain Passard considering a turnip, celery, or a sunchoke,
it's like he's falling in love.
As soon as he touches something, it's extraordinary.
There is something striking
about Alain's restaurant, Arpège.
He has created a small world that everyone wants to experience.
Since he grows his own vegetables,
he has created a place where he is nearly self-sufficient.
He invented the idea of vegetables from the garden to the table.
Alain Passard put vegetables at the center of the world of Arpège.
All of your life, you thought that the onion, the beet, celery
were supporting actors or even extras.
And suddenly, the guest star is the lead actor.
You eat a dish.
You can never again see cuisine in the same way.
At Arpège, we work instinctively.
Dishes may change every day, even at each service.
Nothing is written in the recipes.
Everything is made using only what arrives from the gardens.
This is the magic of Arpège.
At Arpège, there aren't any kitchen notebooks.
I've never written down a recipe.
We don't record anything. We don't write anything down.
That forces us to keep looking.
Next year, I don't want to make the same recipes that I did this year.
I want things to continue to evolve because, without that, there's nothing.
It's complicated. It's not easy.
But...
what delicious food we feast on!
What a pleasure!
I have chills every day because sometimes I'm afraid.
Am I going to find that recipe?
In the space of a few seconds,
will something happen before our very eyes?
Is something going to happen within these few seconds?
When you close your eyes at night, what's important?
You've spent the day taking risks.
You've made some people very happy.
Each day, that's my challenge.
Our gardeners are artists.
We don't talk enough about that.
The sunchokes look great.
- Why are these in the dirt? - Come on, we collect...
We collect two, three times a week.
- Ah, oui? - Oui.
I have never seen them as quiet as they are this year.
Today, my gardeners are also my companions...
my life partners.
They are the reason that every day I have the best vegetables.
They are the ones who allow me to be creative.
Because the produce is at the root of it all.
You have to come see the peach trees.
- It's over ten years old. - That's crazy.
- This happened yesterday. - Huh?
Yesterday, we collected all we found on the ground.
It is a treasure, eh?
Oh...
You can make a nice tarte tatin with that.
Mmm.
It's on us, gardeners and cooks, to find the space
to optimize the quality of the vegetables.
At Arpège, we have two gardens
that each have different soil.
It is very sandy in the Sarthe garden, and there is clay in the Eure garden.
We always try to plant vegetables
that suit the different types of soil.
We will try a turnip in both gardens
planted on the same day, harvested the same day.
When I am ready to taste...
I have two different turnips.
The story is simple. It's like a human mystery.
The quality of a vegetable depends on how it feels.
Is the climate right for it?
Is the altitude right for it?
Everything is important.
It must be happy, like a human.
My gardens are a source of inspiration.
They are fantastic for creativity.
I had the most fantastic luck as a kid.
I was born into a very artistic family,
a family where the hand was everywhere.
My grandmother was a cook.
My dad was a musician.
My mom was passionate about sewing.
And my grandfather was a sculptor.
He worked with wood.
So, of course, really early in my life...
this family environment trained my senses...
and gave me my great desire to work with my hands.
I put into practice everything I saw as a child.
I mimicked the gestures.
You sense his concentration through the calm, focused gestures.
When you see Alain Passard working,
you feel that he works the dough like fabric.
He looks at the dough like it was on display
and he asks himself what he can do with it,
how can he respect it with regard to its form.
He always talks about "the gesture." I've seen him do incredible things.
He was holding a dish and he wanted to put coarse salt on it.
He put the plate right there.
Then he would take coarse salt...
He's someone who is a bit excessive. It's part of his charisma.
Just like Steve McQueen. He's excessive, but what charisma.
In cuisine, in music, in sculpture, in painting, it's everything.
Either we like the gesture, either we like the hand, or we don't.
Me, I love it. It might be the sense I like the most.
Maybe even more than the sense of taste.
And this hand...
if we want it to be more beautiful,
we must work seven hours, eight hours, ten hours in the kitchen every day.
This makes the hand more precise,
more accurate and more elegant.
That's the trick.
What do you think?
We can put a little herb on top
to make the colors brighter.
Mmm.
- Is it good? - Yes.
When I was 14, I had the fantastic chance to be an apprentice
with one of the best chefs in France.
I was determined to enter this temple.
His teaching was of the highest quality, but extremely difficult.
It was the school of rigor.
Do it simply.
Each moment was always so intense. He was asking for so much concentration.
With everything.
We had to memorize everything.
Each gesture.
In the kitchen, there are simple gestures.
Slicing a shallot can be done 25 different ways.
However, there is that one gesture to which we can add that elegance,
that love.
At 14 years old, it is, uh...
not that simple.
Sometimes, his demands would make me forget the gestures.
That could be costly.
A burn. A cut.
Because when you are a kid...
you still don't have the hand.
A 14-year-old
doesn't have the precision of a 30-year-old cook.
It was painful for me because I felt that...
I wouldn't make it.
All those little gestures were my morning job.
Slicing the shallots, the parsley. And it had to be perfectly done.
But I persevered.
I studied for three years.
I learned the power of the job.
The magic of the job.
The pain of the job.
This great chef taught me all of it.
In 15 days, we'll pick the beets and put them in the sand.
Ah, oui, oui.
If not, the mice will eat them.
-11:00? Noon? I don't know. -11:00.
Lunch time.
In my life as a chef, I get tired with the usual.
I don't want to do the same thing every day.
I couldn't see myself making an apple pie the same traditional way forever,
just cutting apples into quarters.
I needed to find something else.
I had this idea of ribbon shaped like a rose
that you put inside the pie.
We have a pie like one we might have at our grandmother's.
But at the same time, we have an apple pie from the mind of Alain Passard.
He unrolls the entire apple like a ribbon and turns it into fabric.
He turns it into a rose.
This works on the apple's texture.
This preserves some crunch.
I've never seen in my life a pastry as fine.
In fact, it's a design. There is something new to it.
I am never happier
than when I put my fingers on a new gesture
or a new flavor.
It feels wonderful.
The feeling of the sublime essence of life.
Watch the peppers. Not so rough, because it stains them.
In 1978, there was a great chef in Paris
known for his originality,
for, uh, his creativity.
Everyone was saying
I needed to work for this great chef.
So, I wrote him. "Dear sir, I've heard a lot about your cuisine.
I would like to join your team."
He responded, "Perfect. We are waiting for you."
And I went to meet Alain Senderens.
His restaurant was L'Archestrate.
It was 1978. The restaurant had three stars.
He taught me to learn by simply observing him.
He taught me about his ideas for unusual flavors,
unlikely pairing of ingredients,
his different way of cooking.
I stayed with him three years, until 1980.
It was priceless. It was a richness, a treasure.
A marvelous treasure.
At the time, he told me one day, I would own this house
and that I would have three stars like my mentor.
I never believed him.
And then the years went by.
I worked at two other restaurants.
And in 1986, Senderens shut down L'Archestrate.
I decided to buy it.
And where L'Archestrate was located?
At 84 rue de Varennes.
I bought the house, his house,
where I learned to cook with him.
It is why I care so much about this place.
I would be so unhappy if I had any other restaurant.
Do you have mushrooms?
Yes, mushrooms and parmesan.
I received Michelin stars before Arpège.
When I started Arpège...
I received a star very quickly.
And the second came rapidly as well.
But the third star...
it's something different.
You really become a cook between 40 and 50 years old.
Before that, it's school and research and doubt.
In the 1990s, Arpège cooked meat.
It's wonderful that we practiced this type of carnivorous cuisine.
Those early years really taught me how to cook,
how to choose products, how to season things,
how to combine things,
how to pay attention to textures and flavors.
In 1996, we even received three Michelin stars
with this type of carnivorous cuisine.
Culinary-wise, I was born after my third star.
It pushes you...
It makes you want to go further, to evolve.
Besides the restaurant, it's a real responsibility
regarding French cuisine's position in the entire world.
You can't be like, "I received my third star.
Now I am comfortable and I can sit on my stars."
Non.
I stay up and look even further,
like there was a fourth star.
Always searching.
A three-star restaurant is very demanding
because they are always judged, just like artists.
Yes, he's handsome.
But the judgment is hard. Almost permanent.
Everything has to be perfect.
Everything has to be perfect all the time.
He needs to be very rigorous.
When a restaurant is given one, then two and three stars,
it has to be up to expectations. It's not easy to uphold that standard.
He is constantly renewing things.
It entails choices.
He needs to pay attention and stay focused.
I understand why the restaurant is his whole life.
It is undercooked.
I set it for 50 minutes.
Add another 20 minutes.
One day, I was watching a ballet.
It was fantastic...
and full of grace.
An enormous amount of subtlety between men, women.
Fantastic images of bodies against bodies. An extraordinary ballet.
I was very touched by those images.
And I asked myself how, culinary-wise, with my cuisine...
I could translate this elegance, this grace.
I had the idea to take one half of a chicken and one half of a duck...
and to make them dance... together.
By sewing them together with a string...
and then cooking them.
I remember that, even at the time, I said to myself,
"That's crazy."
By virtue of sewing the chicken and the duck together,
he plays with this impossibility, this impossible marriage.
We feel like there is something that connects these two fleshes
that should never have met in the history of cooking.
Arpège had been roasting meat for 15 years.
People came to eat meat.
People came to Arpège for...
the prime rib...
the leg of lamb... the veal chops.
It was the place
where people came to enjoy a great plate of meat.
In 1998...
that book came to an end.
I had the feeling I'd read the last page.
Was it the idea of a dead animal?
Was it the blood?
Working with meat became very painful.
When your senses are deprived of nourishment,
that's when you should begin to worry.
I was in a period of rupture.
I needed rest.
What happened to my life as a cook?
I needed time to think.
What I knew was that animal flesh,
that was done.
And... then I left.
I realized I wanted to do something else, to change my job.
I didn't know what had happened to my life.
It was a very painful time.
It was an important year because I had gotten some rest, some distance.
This retrospection allowed me to have this idea.
A beet can be cooked in a crust of salt, like meat.
A stalk of celery can be smoked.
An onion can be flamb�ed.
A carrot can be grilled.
This school of fire that is more present with animal flesh,
I use it at the service of the vegetables.
I had never really talked to a leek, a turnip, or a carrot.
I thought that was a shame.
I was enthusiastic again. I wanted to create again.
I delighted in finding new combinations, but what made me the happiest
was that I had a new hand.
A new outlook.
I had new tastes.
I had new smells. I had new sounds...
the sounds of different cooking.
And for me, that was the most important thing.
I found pleasure in cooking again.
I wanted a menu that was only vegetables.
I was going to remove all the dishes that earned the three stars.
- We have pears? - Yes.
Eggplant, pear.
There was eggplant caviar, right?
In France, in a three-star restaurant,
to say that you're going to stop serving meat
is an insult to French culture.
It was, truly, a crime against the state inconceivable to the French mind.
It was... a little shocking for some.
It made people uncomfortable.
Tomatoes are ripe.
Neither my colleagues nor my clients
thought Arpège would survive.
A lot of people thought I would lose everything.
The restaurant, the clients, the stars.
But... I was determined.
I even went to see the Michelin guide...
to let them know what I was doing.
The director asked, "What are you going to do?"
I told him I wanted to work with vegetables.
I told him, "Listen, sir. I've made my choice.
Now you make yours."
I said goodbye and I left.
Alain Passard's conversion to vegetable cuisine
was insane bravery.
It was almost just like that.
A real game of Russian roulette, because he could have completely crashed.
It was badly perceived.
The restaurant started losing clients.
The critics were not kind.
BIG CHEF GOES WITH LITTLE VEGETABLES
ALAIN PASSARD CONVERTS TO RELIGION OF VEGETABLES
I had to learn again.
I was working day and night
to prove that we could do a vegetable cuisine.
It was the year 2000.
Everybody was waiting for the new Michelin guide.
"Arpège will lose its stars!"
"They are just doing carrots and turnips!"
And... we kept our stars.
And we still have them.
I have to admit that 15 years ago, I went a little too radical.
It was a little brutal for the clients.
I live in a country
that loves a little piece of fish, a little piece of duck.
But I found the right balance in the end.
We still serve mostly vegetables,
but I added a bit of poultry, shellfish and some fish.
Every time I go to a starred restaurant, I'm very critical.
I'm always comparing it, uh, to Alain's restaurant.
I tease him, "Guess what? I went to this or that restaurant."
And he goes...
Then I say, "No, you're the best."
They serve exceptional food in other three-star restaurants,
but I've not yet found something better than Alain's restaurant.
I think he truly changed everyone's vision.
Even the biggest meat eaters changed the way they eat.
They have a different vision for the vegetable.
When you see Alain Passard sit down at a table at the end of service,
he's like a child who has built his dream, which is Arpège.
You have the impression
that he's never going to retire because his life is Arpège.
My only ambition is
to love what I do more each day.
Just the idea of a job well done. No outside projects, needs, or dreams.
If this story exists today,
it's because I love my job more than anything.
This place, it's a space for myself. It's marvelous.
I find in it a phenomenal comfort.
I find love, happiness, a well-being.
I find things that I can't find anywhere else.
My gardens saved my life.