Pierre Gagnaire. Photo: Mark Read
A profile of the bonkers superstar chef Pierre Gagnaire for Spear’s magazine
With Pierre Gagnaire, one senses, food is merely a conduit to higher things. ‘Jazz is a world music and is like cuisine in its multiform appearance reflecting the rhythms of life itself,’ he muses on his sprawling, largely impenetrable website. ‘The painter takes his own personal language,’ declaims the chef, ‘and uses that to express things which seemed inexpressible… The presentation of a dish teaches me new rules of harmony and through this exercise, I find a form of peace.’
He seems to prefer to see himself not as cook but as creator, an artist rather than a mere artisan. People with extensive experience of high-end restaurants often claim that the best — certainly the boldest — way to experience Gagnaire’s is to spurn the menu altogether, allowing the chef to ‘create’ according to his whims and fancy. This ‘can make the difference between an extraordinary experience and a disappointing one’, claims one well-known blogger.
The Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner has written that Gagnaire off-menu is ‘a puff of nothing, bland and unmoving, a set of paintings with ingredients used only for their colour rather than their flavour’. But Gagnaire takes himself so seriously he even offers a protracted reading list, with publishers, the better for us to understand the man and his work.
Such self-importance can be rather off-putting, especially when the ‘creations’ don’t justify it — though in my experience of Gagnaire’s cooking they happily do. If the world of the superstar chef is at times an unpleasant one — endless plane journeys, meetings, interviews, handshakes, posing in kitchens, gurning for cameras — then Gagnaire suffers more than most. He has about a dozen restaurants around the world: in Courchevel, Paris, Moscow, Seoul, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and those famed gastronomic paradises, Dubai and Las Vegas. The fawning customers and, latterly, commercial success have provided Gagnaire with levels of self-belief remarkable even for a celebrity chef.
