Alain Ducasse: the chef who sent food into space

Celebrated French chef Alain Ducasse, whose restaurants hold 19 Michelin stars, talks about the art of cooking - and how he develops food fit for astronauts

Alain Ducasse, the godfather of French gastronomy, poses in his restaurant at the Plaza Athenee hotel in Paris on September 2, 2014
'Writing the menu isalways the last thing we do': Alain Ducasse, the godfather of French gastronomy, in his restaurant at the Plaza Athenee hotel in Paris Credit: Photo: AFP

Alain Ducasse is one chef who can honestly claim that his food is out of this world. Not because his restaurants hold a constellation of 19 Michelin stars, but because his food has gone into space.

Astronauts orbiting earth aboard the International Space Station have been tucking into Ducasse-devised delicacies such as spiced baby chicken and tuna in lemon sauce. Other dishes, like potato and tomato millefeuilles and spirulina gnocchis, have been designed with ingredients that could actually be cultivated in space, crucial for marathon missions to the planets.

Spirulina, a health food based on a somewhat bilious-looking greeny blue algae, is one of nine crops that the European Space Agency envisions being farmed either aboard spacecraft or in greenhouses on say, Mars. Among the other extra-terrestrial ingredients are onions, rice and spinach. Disappointingly rocket is not one.

Alain Ducasse

Alain Ducasse, right, tastes a sauce in the Hotel de Paris Louis XV restaurant in Monaco (AP)

Whatever such projects say about space cuisine, they say a lot about Alain Ducasse. In Britain we are barely aware of the Ducasse phenomenon. In France he has become a culinary Napoleon. For 25 years, since he won his first three Michelin star accolade at the age of 33, he has dominated, first French cuisine and now the global restaurant scene. The fact that he has now come as close as anyone to opening Douglas Adams’s ‘Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ should come as no surprise.

On earth he has 24 restaurants in eight countries, including two in London - Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester and Rivea in the Bulgari Hotel. More London restaurants are planned. He has published shelves of cookery books, runs a couple of Parisian cookery schools, owns three inns and presides over a group of more than 500 hotels and restaurants in 16 countries. Commercially he makes Gordon Ramsay look like an apprentice, a commis chef.

For Ducasse space fare was a new challenge, the final food frontier. “We don’t make any money out of it but it’s very important to know if we can do it,” he told me. The brief was to develop meals without bacteria (“we can’t poison them”) and with neither crumbs nor moisture that would float around when weightless. They also have to be certificated by every nation with a space programme, a bureaucratic achievement that gives Ducasse as much satisfaction as coming us with the recipes.

Above all, the meals have to have flavour. Bland food is one aspect of space travel that astronauts rate worse than fatigue. Ducasse’s dishes, of which there now about 30, are intended “for special occasions.” Alain Ducasse spots a marketing gambit quicker than he can sniff an iffy oyster.

Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester restaurant

Gastronomic delight: Alain Ducasse's restaurant at the Dorchester

We met in Provence on the terrace of La Bastide de Moustiers, the first of his country house hotels, which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. The building, 400-years-old and built of oatmeal coloured limestone, was originally a shepherd’s house. When Ducasse first saw it he planned to make it his country home. But then he became preoccupied with opening his first restaurant in Paris so he turned it into a bijou country hotel, now with 13 rooms. He said, “I wanted to keep the spirit of the house. If no guests came it could easily become a house again.”

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La Bastide is the antithesis of the extravagant metropolitan restaurants for which he is famed. It sits in 11 acres of paddocks and gardens in the uplands of Haute Provence, in the village of Moustiers-Sainte-Marie. The squiggly road from the coastal autoroute climbs through a lumpy landscape of rough pasture, woodland and fields upholstered with bolsters of lavender. It’s terrain that seems to be rehearsing for the mountains to the north. Behind La Bastide, Mont Denier, an advance guard of the Alps, springs up in a sheer 2900ft (900m) cliff of old grey rock.

Just to the east the turquoise River Verdon slashes through the massif in one of Europe’s deepest canyons. Monte Carlo, Paris, New York, Tokyo, London and the rest all seem worlds away from Moustiers-Sainte-Marie. Monsieur Ducasse offered a diffident smile. “La Bastide makes it even more difficult for people to find me,” he said. “You can find me in a beautiful palace in Monaco and you can find me here in the Provence countryside. It is very important for me to keep a link with the land.”

la Bastide, Alain Ducasse's hotel

Favourite spot: La Bastide, which Ducasse originally intended to turn into his country home

Alain Ducasse was born 58 years ago on a farm in south west France. Two things steered him towards the kitchen. One was the enticing smell of his grandmother’s cooking, and the other the satisfaction that almost everything the family ate they had grown. His mother, sensing his ambition did not lie in the family farm, tried to head him off at the kitchen pass by finding him the most menial jobs in nasty local restaurants. She failed. He trained with some of France’s most celebrated chefs and by the time he stumbled upon La Bastide, he had had his own first restaurant, Le Louis XV in L’Hôtel de Paris in Monaco, for six years. What has changed since those days? “Food is now a leisure activity. Going to a restaurant now is like going to a theatre. It’s the major evolution of the last 20 years,” he said. Food was still the most important element of a restaurant, but “food alone is not enough.” He is renowned for personally choosing all the accoutrements of his restaurants, and the decor. Jérémy Barbet, manager of La Bastide, recalls how on one of his relatively infrequent visits, Ducasse immediately noticed that a small clay figurine had been moved.

In 1984 Ducasse nearly died. A light aircraft in which he was a passenger crashed in the Alps. He was the only survivor. Ironically, he had only just recovered from a motorcycle accident. “I thought, I am going to kill myself so I sold the motor cycle. Three months later came the air crash.” It was three years before he could walk unaided. Lying in hospital feeling ‘useless’, and with the spectre of permanent disability, gave his career new impetus. He thought constantly about menus and food and came to realise that he could have a restaurant without the need to be there in person. I asked if he cooked today. Occasionally, he said, for friends at his country home in the Basque country. “But not restaurant food. I don’t have any commis! My wife is a very bad commis.” And recipes? “I don’t write recipes, but I have ideas. Recipes are a bit like exercises in music. I am a composer.”

The most successful recipe Alain Ducasse has ever devised has been the one that converted haute cuisine into a global business. His current challenge is his first restaurant in Beijing, due to open at the end of the year. It will have taken three years to plan, a year longer than normal. “It’s a country we don’t know and the people are very particular about what they eat,” he said. “But we are 85 per cent there.” Finding the building, in this case a traditional Chinese house, deciding on the decor, uniforms, tableware, name, atmosphere and then adding a French touch are what take the time, he explained. “Writing the menu is always the last thing we do because that is what we do, that’s our DNA.”

La Bastide de Moustiers, a member of Châteaux & Hôtels Collection, offers superior double rooms from €215 per night based on two sharing. For bookings and further information visit chateauxhotels.com or call +33 (0)4 927 04747