Interview with Pascal Barbot of L'Astrance by Bruce Palling

If you ask haut-foodies who their favourite chef is, they usually reply either Pascal Barbot or Alain Passard. Barbot is the most unconventional three-star Michelin chef in France. L’Astrance, his tiny restaurant in the Sixteenth, seats 25 diners and is only open four days a week, serving a no choice set menu. He is probably the most internationally aware famous French chef, having worked in the South Pacific and Australia for several years before returning to Paris more than a decade ago. The French have a genius in dealing with bureaucracy - every French male has to do compulsory military service, with the very well-connected ending up doing alternative service as Press attaché in the French Embassy in Malaysia  or Senegal. For talented characters like Pascal, they also find themselves gainfully employed - in his case as head chef to the Admiral of the French Pacific Fleet, rather than some fly-blown parade ground in North Africa. Perhaps because of that tropical interlude, Pascal shuns the use of salt and pepper in favour of spices that he has picked up during his travels. He also finds sauces redundant. Instead, he often utilises Asian ingredients, which is the polar opposite to most other Three Stars.

 I spoke to him at the Flemish Primitives Food Festival in Belgium, where he was one of the main attractions, along with Magnus Nilsson of Faviken and Michel Bras. It was a well run conference but despite this was quite frustrating. 

The problem was that it took place over the weekend and Monday, mainly because chefs can get away during this time with less impact on their business. However, Ostend is not exactly brimming with interesting restaurants or close to other ones, so there were no opportunities to get away and find out what the local cuisine was like. The beachfront too, was one of the most depressing ones I have seen anywhere and this from someone who has been to Albania during its nadir.

There is also a limit as to how much you can take in when all of the action takes place on a stage and you merely watch like a voyeur from the sidelines. Nonetheless, Pascal was a charming person to interview. He is quite animated and full of energy and enthusiasm and speaks with utter conviction.

I was born in Vichy, in the middle of France. I came from a very simple, modest family – my mother worked in a factory. Until I was 14 years old, no one in my family worked in a restaurant or as a butcher or pastry chef, so I had no idea of what it was like to work in a restaurant. It was at that age I wanted to cook and become a chef. I really don’t know what inspired me – my parents had a garden with fresh raspberries, strawberries, beans, and rabbits from the farm, so perhaps it was from experiencing good produce, but I really don’t know. So, I don’t have one of those “Grandmother influences” or any other strange story. I just wanted to be a chef and that was that.

Well, at the age of 14, I went to a cooking school as an apprentice for two years rotating between school and a restaurant. I didn’t go straight into a restaurant because I didn’t know any to choose. Then I did a number of stages, firstly at a one star in Clermont St Ferrand, then another place near where Michel Bras came from I worked at a Moulin in the Auvergne we used smoked bacon and cabbage, so I basically learned how to cook classic French food. At this point, a chef was leaving for London to open Les Saveurs in Mayfair so I said OK, but I didn’t mind whether or not it was London or Paris – it was all the same to me as long as it was a major restaurant in a big city. It was a great experience as Joël Antunes (who has just opened a new bistro in London) used to work in Bangkok before, so I was introduced to a whole lot of new ingredients like scallops, oysters, and langoustines. I learned a lot, using crayfish from Scotland, excellent fish and of course, other ingredients like foie gras and truffles from the Rungis market in Paris. It was the first chic restaurant I had ever worked in and of course I was very happy.

I had to spend two years in the French military doing my national service and spent one year in New Caledonia and all over the South Pacific with the French Navy. I was the head chef of the Admiral of the Fleet, so this was very important for my development as a chef because at the same time I was improving my classic French dishes, I was also using entirely new products like mango, coconuts, and palm sugar. I suppose these would be considered exotic in France but for me in the South Pacific, they were just my normal daily ingredients. When that was over, I went back to Paris and spent five years at L’Arpège first as a commis, chef de partie and then as a sous chef, from 1993 until 1998.

Well, I spent two years in Sydney, running a restaurant owned by Tony Bilson, called Ampersand. This was my first job as a head chef and it completely changed my life – it taught me how to look at ingredients without any inhibitions or complexes. In Australia, you don’t care either where someone comes from or where the ingredients are from either. I don’t care about fusion food. Nobody cared where you came from or where the products originated. If wanted to use Greek Yoghurt on a French dish, that was fine as there were no rules or complexes about what you did. It was also because I had travelled a lot and seen different ways of using ingredients. It was very liberating. If I had a piece of pork and wanted to use ricotta or cabbage, it was up to me. However, I left after two years because it was 

becoming too big for me.

I also travelled a lot, from Australia to Indonesia and Mexico, if I wanted to use chilli in a Chinese way, I would – it didn’t matter that I was not Chinese. But this did not mean I didn’t respect the main product – that was always the goal - if I was cooking mackerel and cabbage I would strive to cook each item perfectly, but not necessarily from the same school of cuisine – after all, it was my life to travel a lot, so I could chose which style would be the best for that particular product, whether it was Mexican, Chinese or French. I loved Australia but two years was enough because in some ways the life was too easy – the beach, the products the lifestyle and many other famous chef would visit. One day, Christophe Rohat,a former maître’d from L’Arpègecontacted me as he wanted to start a new restaurant called Lapérouse and they needed a chef – would I be interested?

Christophe Rohat asked me if I would like to work with him at the historical restaurant Lapérouse, so we worked there but only for a few months as there were financial problems amongst the management, so we left together before we decided to start our own smaller place in the Sixteenth in 2000 called L’Astrance after a flower that grows in the Auvergne. We only wanted two or three people in the kitchen and 20 seats. It was product based, no real menu except for two or three starters and main courses. It is not just the food that makes a restaurant but also the service – I believe it is a fifty fifty ratio of importance. We must have done something right because we got our first Michelin Star in three months. Our second star was four years later and then the third came in 2007. We are not a typical Three Star though – we don’t have fancy cutlery or décor or even a menu. We are more like a small bistro than a grand restaurant.

                                                                          L'Astrance

No! We don’t have a PR, or chef de cuisine, anybody to hand out the menus – we only have a total staff of 14 people, including the stagiers (apprentices), dishwashers and not even one specialist pastry chef.

You cannot choose the dishes in my restaurant, which is very unusual for a Three Star. I love the freedom to be able to change at the last minute. And we are too small to offer a great deal of choice, but we have so many inconveniences to face, that this makes life far easier. We are only open four days a week and I never miss a service – I am always in the kitchen.

                                       framboise, jus de shiso pourpre et sorbet piment citronnelle
                                        raspberries, purple shiso juice, chili and lemongrass sherbet

Well, the French have always absorbed influences from abroad. Escoffier’s classic Canard a l’Orange did not originate in France but the Middle East via Spain. Caviar too, came from Russia after our chefs cooked with the Tsar. Potatoes and tomatoes too, came from elsewhere. So French cuisine has always absorbed influences from abroad for centuries.

No, not at all. Perhaps a few people are getting bored with the same things but it is good that there are new developments, such as Modernist Cuisine, or New Nordic Cuisine. We all need movement and change -it is nice. Whenever there is a revolution, such as nouvelle cuisine in the Seventies or Molecular Cuisine in the Nineties, there are inevitably good and bad things but after a few years, only the good things remain. Take the machine for cooking in waterbaths (sous-vide). It was new in the Sixties but nobody talks about it any more as it is taken for granted by everyone – just like Microwaves.

Alain Passard at L’Arpège but mostly, it is unknown chefs on the street. Whenever I travel, whether it is Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal or Brazil, I learn so much from street vendors. They cook amazing dishes from virtually nothing, so these are the people I truly respect. And India has the best vegetable dishes in the world -I would love to spend a while year there rather than just a month.

Well, I am thinking of perhaps finding a space with four or five more seats than present, but that is all. I would never want to run a chain of restaurants or even a very large one – it is hard enough to do what I do now without making more problems for myself.

ENDS

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