Recipes of Funny Little Creatures Alain Passard
Critic on the Road
The Garden, Both Muse and Oracle at L'Arpège
Alain Passard outside of L'Arpège in Paris, which opened in 1986. Mr. Passard's experiment with vegetables has grown into something important, and the only way to understand how far his studies have taken him is to eat at L'Arpège itself.
Credit... Alex Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times-
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Alain Passard outside of L'Arpège in Paris, which opened in 1986. Mr. Passard's experiment with vegetables has grown into something important, and the only way to understand how far his studies have taken him is to eat at L'Arpège itself.
Credit... Alex Cretey-Systermans for The New York Times
PARIS — Dinner started with a plate of leafy radishes followed by a small cabbage turnover, and ended with a garlic crème brûlée whose burned-sugar shell had been liberally spritzed with lemon confit. In between came a dozen courses made from turnips, carrots, peas, beets, cauliflower and potatoes. Two see-through bands of lardo on grilled white asparagus and, down at the bottom of vegetable minestrone, some bits of chorizo that would have fit into a gum wrapper were the only visible signs of animal flesh.
My employer paid $375 for my dinner. While I can't call it a bargain, I can say without pausing to think that I would skip espresso for two months until I had enough money to try Alain Passard's vegetable tasting menu at L'Arpège again.
There are tasting menus that leave you glutted and blunted. This one made me feel more awake. I don't just mean that I didn't need to be carried out to the Rue de Varenne on a stretcher at the end of the night, although that was nice, too. Mr. Passard's cooking pulled me in like a conversation with a smart, literate, funny friend. When he sent out a mirrored bowl of quartered baby turnips, sautéed in butter, with firm, barely sweetened rhubarb, I leaned forward — wait, what? — then sat up. The carrots and peas and so on tasted as bright and vivid as any I've had, but there was something more. If vegetables can have feelings, these did. They tasted happy.
The emotional valence of the turnip and its friends is a hot topic in cooking these days. Many chefs have been saying lately that their imaginations are no longer fired by pork chops and chicken wings, that the most exciting frontiers in cuisine are growing in the garden. Vegetables are both medium and message in the arty, sculpture-park assemblages by chefs including Dominique Crenn and Christopher Kostow in Northern California and John Fraser and Shaun Hergatt in New York City, to name just a few. In the rising cult of the vegetable, L'Arpège is seen as an example, an inspiration and an early adopter.
If you have been following global restaurant news, you've probably read that France stopped mattering after nouvelle cuisine flared down. By 2000 the culinary zeitgeist had decamped, fluttering over Spain for a while before winging its way north to sprinkle magical lichen powder around Scandinavia. Recently, it's been sighted in South America. According to this narrative, France may be fun for a no-reservations meal in a hipster bistro whose chef goes camping with David Chang, but it's certainly not one of the countries that call the shots anymore.
I'm sorry to say this, but that narrative is a lie dreamed up by people who want to put France in its place.
The most dramatic example of a restaurant that won't fit into that story is L'Arpège. While chefs in other countries were racing into the future, Alain Passard was tortoising around his three farms, learning about soil amendments and natural predators, picking vegetables in the morning so they could ride the high-speed train into Paris in time for lunch.
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Now that this seems like useful stuff to know again, chefs are starting to pay tribute. In David Kinch's recent book "Manresa," named for his restaurant in Los Gatos, Calif., he devoted a chapter to Mr. Passard.
"Passard, who recognized the importance of a cook's relationship to the land and those who work it long before it became fashionable, is now rightly considered a visionary by the best chefs in the world," Mr. Kinch wrote. "His philosophy helped change the course of gastronomy by inspiring chefs to reflect their immediate natural environment in their dishes."
Mr. Kinch had the latest in perhaps a dozen meals at L'Arpège last month. "It's a better restaurant now than it ever has been," he said. "There's been an evolution in his understanding of vegetables. He seems to have reached another level in his cooking, right now."
The chef Dan Barber, who researched Mr. Passard's career for his recent book, "The Third Plate," points out that L'Arpège's devotion to vegetables expands on ideas pioneered by the nouvelle cuisine generation. What Mr. Passard contributed was "this idea of bucking what's expected," which Mr. Barber called "a throughline in his career." Today, he said, Mr. Passard's iconoclasm has given him a freedom that many of his peers envy.
"I don't know a chef who wouldn't want to cook like that, an improvisational vegetable experience," Mr. Barber said.
After L'Arpège opened in 1986, Mr. Passard's slow-motion method for cooking meat to an unrivaled juiciness in pans that were barely hot enough to melt chocolate made him one of the leading chefs in France. Then, in 2001, he announced that he was done with red meat and seafood. Customers at his restaurant, perhaps the most expensive in Paris, would dine mostly on leaves, roots and stems.
Alain Ducasse and Charlie Trotter had served elaborate vegetable tastings, but they didn't bet the farm on the idea. Mr. Passard did, in more ways than one.
At his three farms in various regions of France, the agriculture goes beyond organic. The soil is turned over by horse-drawn plow at one, and ponds have been dug so bug-eating frogs can do the work of insecticides.
Mr. Passard's break was not dogmatic or final. Roasted lamb and lobsters cut lengthwise into four equal quadrants, another early innovation, have reclaimed their slots on the menu. Even so, the vegetable experiment has grown into something important, and the only way to understand how far it has taken him is to eat at L'Arpège. There is no Arpège Bistro or natural-wine bar, no Passard Pizzeria at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
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A big yellow caution flag flies from any write-up of a single meal. In this case, the flag is bigger and yellower than usual. Even googly-eyed fans admit that meals at L'Arpège are not always transcendent, that the Art Deco dining room can look a bit weary, that the level of cooking and service can thud to the ground while the prices remain above the clouds. I saw hints of a more gravity-bound Arpège when, 10 minutes after I'd eaten wafer-light miniature tarts of beets and turnips, the same course arrived again. There was more redundancy when two vegetable medleys were served back to back.
So with one hand I'll wave that yellow flag but with the other I'll type out this message: For its lightness, brightness, beauty and elegance, my single meal at L'Arpège was in an eye-opening class by itself. Apart from the radishes and the extraordinary mesclun salad dabbed with a vinaigrette of fresh-ground hazelnuts, heat was applied to most of the vegetables I ate, but they tasted more fresh and unmediated than if they had been raw.
The green garlic soup under white peaks of ham-infused whipped cream, the vegetable ravioli in their glassine-thin wrappers bobbing in a precise, utterly clear vegetable consommé, the young yellow carrots and sweet peas in a beautifully done vol-au-vent shell surrounded by a fresh, milky white onion sauce: The cooking was so unfussy and purposeful that it was almost transparent.
How does he do it? Don't ask the chef unless you collect aphorisms. I wondered aloud in a later phone interview about the idea for that turnip and rhubarb sauté, and Mr. Passard told me, through an interpreter: "I did not create that dish. Nature created that dish."
It's worth noting, too, that he gets his effects without rare, bragging-rights species that look as if they came from the far side of the moon.
"It's tough to get a good tomato, a good carrot," he said. "It's best to focus your effort on the quality of known products rather than trying to go around and offer things nobody has ever heard of."
That insistence that the ordinary can be luxurious is going to be part of Mr. Passard's legacy, along with some of his other ideas: farming as a logical extension of cooking; time and place not just as passing inspiration but as the whole point; the fresh creativity made possible by ditching old achievements and starting over; and finally the example, almost unknown these days, of a renowned chef who, at 57, still cooks in his restaurant almost every day.
If all that time in the kitchen weighs on him, it didn't show when Mr. Passard entered the dining room. When he reached my table and asked where I was from ("Ah, New York! I have never been there."), he seemed to have springs in his shoes as he bounced lightly on his toes like a bandleader. He looked free.
84, rue de Varenne, Seventh Arrondissement, Paris; 011-33-1-47-05-09-06; www.alain-passard.com .
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/dining/the-garden-both-muse-and-oracle-at-larpege.html
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