Old habits die hard, especially in French gastronomy. Stray too far from the usual hunks of chicken, beef and fish, and you are deemed to have entered the realm of “peasant food” or perhaps of no food at all.
So changing the record takes someone special — or two of them. In Paris a fortnight ago, Alain Ducasse and Daniel Humm, chefs with many Michelin stars between them, teamed up to serve four nights of a plant-based menu that would convince even traditionally minded diners. Their collaboration travels to New York later this month.
The experience is a window into the possible future of fine dining. The menu comprises four amuse bouches and nine courses, with the option of five matching wines. From delicate sage leaves to radish clarified in coconut, it proves just how many flavours and textures can be summoned up from plants.
Mostly the secret is an incredible amount of sweat and tears (no blood, obviously). Even a humble tangerine can, when it is sourced from “the best citrus man in France”, de-pithed with a jeweller’s precision and served on silver, demand new appreciation.
Humm’s journey to this point is the product of the pandemic. Born in Switzerland and brought up by hippie parents, he transformed New York’s Eleven Madison Park into one of the world’s top restaurants. Then, during Covid-19, he had a crisis of purpose. Cooking the same sauces for the same cuts of meat seemed tired and unsustainable. So he turned Eleven Madison Park vegan (with a few exceptions for the private rooms).
The reinvention started badly: “certain dishes are as subtle as a dirty martini,” moaned a New York Times reviewer in 2021, unhappy at the attempt to replicate meat dishes. But redemption quickly followed, via three Michelin stars.
Ducasse’s story has been a slower burn. One of the world’s very top chefs (his restaurants have been awarded a combined 21 Michelin stars), he has not thrown the meat from the kitchen: his menu for a gala dinner celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Palace of Versailles last year included poultry and fish. But he has for decades championed vegetables. He was one of the first to go to the new Eleven Madison Park. There is a 20-year age gap between him and Humm, but even for innovative chefs, there is safety in numbers at times — or at least they welcome the company.
The palace hotel Le Meurice, set on the Rue de Rivoli, modelled on the Salon de la Paix at Versailles and now part of the Dorchester Collection, is not a natural place for experimentation. The dining room is imposing, with chandeliers, marble and frescoes.
But modernity impinges: the wood fire has been substituted for a TV screen with flames in order to protect the culinary aromas. And the lull in visitors after Paris Fashion Week gave some leeway for change. If the Rue de Rivoli can be turned over largely to cyclists and pedestrians, so Le Meurice can make way temporarily for vegetables.
The menu is an assortment of dishes by Eleven Madison Park and Le Meurice Alain Ducasse, which have exchanged a handful of front- and back-of-house staff while the collaboration takes place. A beetroot is rendered chewy, gooey even, accompanied by chilli. A potato is poached and served with slices of black truffle. Instead of butter, we had vegan butter, infused with squash and shaped like a butternut. The tonburi, seeds from Japan, softened and wrapped in collard greens, were a delight of their own, to the extent that the label “vegan caviar” seemed superfluous. The oyster mushroom, with ginger and lemongrass, hinted at the crispiness of chicken skin and the softness of flesh.
My dining partner suggested that the clientele at Le Meurice were not the one per cent — but the “0.01 per cent and they had a meal like this in Singapore on Tuesday”. Even so, some diners will no doubt choke on the €440 per head bill for what are, after all, just vegetables. But in the remarkably well mannered kitchen below us, the chefs have to work that bit harder with vegetables than they do with meat. That is perhaps especially true of Eleven Madison Park’s approach. Amaury Bouhours, Ducasse’s executive chef, called this “very geometric”, adding with a smile that, for him: “When it’s good, it’s beautiful, but when it’s beautiful, it’s not always good.”
Tasting menus are not for everyone; our dinner lasted the better part of four hours. And there were off-notes, including the barbecued green cabbage. A chestnut and quince tartlet with shaved bergamot lacked excitement. But the sense of experimentation was exciting and clear, and by the end of the meal it would have been hard to feel that one craved cream or meat.
As the dinner wound down, Humm toured the tables. He had the beaming, exhausted air of a victorious Olympian. “If I’d known how hard it would have been, there’s no way I would have done it,” he grinned about turning Eleven Madison Park vegan. He admits that he was initially too tied to replicating the previous menu: “Today we’re totally liberated.”
In the streets not far from central Paris, French farmers had been protesting. They are unlikely to be receptive to any efforts to steer away from meat production. (France is Europe’s largest producer of beef and second-biggest producer of poultry.) But change is happening, and this collaboration had at least convinced the 35-year old Bouhours, himself a star in the making. “I am young. The young chefs want to change the vision,” he told me. “A lot of the time, people say, ‘We are French, we are the best.’ No, not for me. If you stay with the same proposition all the time, gastronomy is finished.”
Henry Mance was a guest of Le Meurice Alain Ducasse
Alain Ducasse and Daniel Humm’s vegan dinner series will be at Eleven Madison Park, New York, from February 20 to 23 ($475 a head; $950 with wine pairings)
What is your favourite restaurant for plant-based fine dining? Tell us in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
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