You took an odd route to becoming a chef. Why? 'The first job I dreamed of doing was professional diving, which is very difficult. I didn't like accounting, but my father forced me to get my degree in accountancy. In 1989, after I received my diploma, I started to learn cooking in a very small restaurant in Marseilles. I was 20, and it was quite late to start learning to cook because people normally start at 14. My goal was to learn in a Michelin-starred restaurant.'
What's your cooking philosophy? 'For food to be delicious, beautiful and balanced. It's the balance of flavour and textures; not to mix all the ingredients together to have one single blended taste. It's very important to be able to taste every single ingredient you have on the plate. There is a famous French dish called choucroute, and I work around it, separating all the ingredients and giving them texture and flavour, but it's not one blend, as it's normally done. In my version, which is paired with mustard ice cream, there's sour cabbage and deep- fried cabbage as well, to give a crispy texture to the layered potato and smoked lard.
You travel a lot. Is that reflected in your food? 'I love to travel and I'm influenced by the cooking of each country I visit. I don't copy the dishes I taste in the country; I try to analyse the dish and use specific flavours to bring a touch of where I visited to food. There will be a few aromas and flavours [in my food] that will make you remember a particular country. For example, on my last trip to Hong Kong I tried congee. When I brought this back to France, I tried to make congee with foie gras, using Thai rice, which is more perfumed and polished so it doesn't make the congee as thick. It's completely different from the one I tried in Hong Kong - it's topped with cubes of foie gras as well as dragon fruit, to give a bit of freshness to the dish.'
Why did you stop using sauces? 'When I started this, it was a time when sauce was associated with French cuisine and a very traditional way of cooking, where the sauces were quite heavy. I wanted to get away from that. I was in Japan and I got more exposure to jus [the natural cooking juices], and I started to change my cooking style. It makes the dish cleaner and healthier. A sauce can cover all the aromas and flavours of the ingredients. In France, it was tradition to dip bread in a sauce at the end of a meal. We don't do it anymore because we have better-quality ingredients and it's unnecessary to cover their flavour with sauce.'
