Painting is my first supply of proposal
L’ Arpege (arpeggio) at the rue de Varenne in Paris has held three Michelin stars since 1996 and is regarded as one of the world’s best restaurants. Every day, Alain Passard chefs, for no greater than 40 people, a numerous array of remarkable meals mainly crafted from the vegetables in his two gardens. They are meals that seem like real artwork, from a chef who spends his time between his kitchen and a studio gallery next to it, surrounded with the aid of his collages and sculptures, signing some prints or his book “Collages and Recipes” for clients.
This spring and summer season (till July twenty-eighth), during the exhibition “Picasso and War,” the close Musee de l’Armee of the Invalides has invited the artist-chef for cooking demonstrations, where he will create food stimulated by the artwork. This isn’t his first exhibition: After a display at the Nissim de Camondo Museum in Paris in 2011, one may want to see 2017 Passard’s colleges and bronze sculptures exhibited within the history rooms of the Palais des Beaux-Arts of Lille in communicating with the most important Contemporary artists. Passard grew up in a circle of relatives focused on art and handicrafts: his father became a musician, his mother a couture clothier, his grandfather a sculptor, and his grandmother an awesome cook. Here, he explains why cooking is certainly a quality art.
When one eats at L’Arpege, it is both an unforgettable tasting experience and an astonishing visible show handling wonderful forms and hues…
I think vision is the primary of your senses piqued in an eating place, as you notice the meal before eating it. In the kitchen, I paint plenty of imaginative and prescient. I measure the balance of the objects and the doses in a recipe, often with the eye. If I even have three turnips, radishes, and three carrots in my casserole, I will compose my mixes of vegetables with my eyes to locate the proper visible because a meal has to please the eyes, too. I realize all the tastes of my ingredients perfectly, so I typically use my eyes to make the recipe. I will play with colors. For instance, if I have a mauve turnip, I will search for a red radish, a yellow carrot… I prepare dinner as if I were painting.
But you named your restaurant after a musical phrase, L’Arpege. Was it because your father turned into a musician?
Cuisine includes a chain of flavors you play with, like an arpeggio or a damaged cord. But delicacies deal with the five senses. We also often overlook speaking about the importance of hearing in delicacies—the fireplace track. The technique of cooking is a music rating. It seems like an alto; while it’s miles a celery root, it sounds more like a baritone. The feel of contact is essential for a path and the splendor of the gesture. The smell is critical: I regularly prepare dinner, sauces, and dressings with olfaction, as the taste is quickly saturated. And last but no longer least, the flavor. But imaginative and prescient is lively from the kitchen to the tasting, all alongside the meals chain. Dealing with all of the senses while cooking, I never use an oven! I need to see, smell, listen, touch, and flavor!
You frequently say you get your thoughts from your gardens in Le Mans and Evreux.
Nature is my idea. My two complementary gardens (special soils that mean diverse products) greatly educate me. Each season, a lawn has a few 20 flavors. For example, in March, some exclusive turnips, leeks, cabbages, carrots, parsnips, purple, white, and yellow beets: the lawn gives an evolutive coloration palette at some point of the year. If you cook dinner handiest with seasonal veggies, the tastes are assured of moving together, so you must play with colors in your kitchen. But don’t add tomato to your plate in iciness; it’ll visually spoil the meal, and the flavor will be nonsense. Sadly, that is the chance nowadays with confusing global food markets. In your meals that appear like paintings, it seems you change between multicolored compositions and monochromes, like this extraordinary onion gratin you served me…
Sometimes, shade is my most effective guide. I go to the lawn with coloration in my thoughts. I will best pick out greens with a touch of magenta, mauve, and violet for the purple. I will pick my family’s merchandise in step with their color and then create my meal. Later, I will do a university after the meal that I will title as an example: “Purple emotion with parmesan.”
When did you start your collages, which will now be exhibited at your gallery’s partitions, “L’Arriere-cuisine” (Back Kitchen)?
It was twenty years ago in Japan. I changed into a very jetlagged person and couldn’t sleep. I started to make collages with magazines based on some of my recipes. But sometimes, it’s for the opposite: I first compose a meal on paper as a university, after which I once attempt to cook dinner. I’ve already made some two hundred collages that we edited. A stained-glass one is now on the front door of the eating place.
