Going vegetarian? No - just going green - the rise of vegetables in haute cuisine by Bruce Palling

Vegetarianism received an unexpected boost recently with media accounts about how Alain Ducasse, the most famous haute cuisine chef on the planet, was eliminating red meat from his flagship restaurant at the Plaza Athénée Hotel in Paris. One British tabloid headline screamed, “Is this the end of haute cuisine?” and then listed the humble dishes that would now be served, such as black rice cooked in the oven with shellfish, calamari and octopus. Even the high-minded Guardian, beloved of readers with a social conscience, claimed that Ducasse was “ditching duck, veal, and steak”. Before depressed gourmets lead a stampede out of Paris in search of classic cuisine with flesh and fowl, it might be worth mentioning that this story is more fantasy than fact.

Rather than going against the grain with his new menu, Ducasse is instead shrewdly catching up with the growing trend in haute cuisine to take vegetables more seriously and occasionally highlight them at the expense of the more conventional trio of meats - beef, pork and lamb. Instead, Ducasse has decided to focus more on fish, vegetables and cereals, though every day there will still be at least two meat options on a separate menu.

Any diners who may fear that Ducasse has suddenly decided to wear a hair shirt in his kitchen, might be relieved to hear that the menu still boasts steamed langoustines served cold with Osciètre Caviar at €180 or turbot in Champagne sauce, watercress and turnips at a mere €135. (However, the Michelin Guide for 2015 downgraded the restaurant from three stars to two, so the inspectors can't have been impressed with this fundamental change in the menu).

Ducasse has always respected and celebrated vegetables, especially at his flagship Louis Quinze restaurant in Monaco, which has highlighted for more than two decades the unrivalled vegetables grown in the south of France. Perhaps the shift in emphasis on vegetables at the Plaza Athénée also has something to do with his need to differentiate it from his other restaurant in Paris, the three Michelin star Le Meurice.

The real Godfather of haute cuisine vegetables is Alain Passard of L’Arpège in Paris, who did renounce red meat in 2001 after the mad cow scandal in Britain and created some of the most stunning dishes imaginable merely using vegetables. His simple starter of tomato gazpacho and mustard ice cream ranks amongst the most intense and pleasurable dishes I have ever eaten. Passard told me that this apparently simple dish took him three months of exhausting research to create. Such perfection on the plate does not come cheap but because of his fame, he manages to run three separate kitchen gardens in Northern France, who send their produce early each morning courtesy of the French TGV fast train

service straight to his restaurant. But again, L’Arpège is not vegetarian restaurant – he still serves fish and game in every meal.

Yannick Alléno is another famous French chef who has decided to experiment with the taste of vegetables – in his case, by extracting sauces from them after sous-vide cooking techniques and extraction processes to intensify their flavour. He has just taken command of the renowned Three Michelin Star Restaurant Ledoyen, on the Champs-Elysées in Paris.

 “If you taste my food now, it is completely different than what I did before. The main difference is the extraction of vegetable flavours in my sauces. I am also working with fermentation of vegetables, which was not done for decades in France because it was one of the forbidden “ten commandments” of nouvelle cuisine.”

A year ago we were selling around a third of our protein-free menus but that has reduced a bit now and I have no idea why. As our farm improves and our produce gets even better, no doubt the number of protein free dishes will also increase. However, I can’t think of any world-class restaurants that are totally meat free.”

Rogan recently opened Fera, the flagship restaurant at Claridge’s in London, where he also serves a predominantly vegetable menu. Some critics claim that it is impossible to attain the culinary heights of France if you only use British vegetables, as French produce is superior. Rogan disputes this, except for some fruits or vegetables such as tomatoes, which thrive in a hotter climate. “I was going to set up a kitchen garden closer to London, but then I thought that our vegetables in the north are better than anything that can be grown in the south, which we believe in 100%. It is because they take longer to mature. A carrot that has two crops a year is obviously going to taste better than one that deliver three crops in the same time.  We grow the best potatoes, the best root vegetables and asparagus - right up there against anything else in the world. People can also relate more to vegetables these days. Obviously it is also a much healthier option."

Rene Redzepi, chef at Copenhagen’s Noma, which is number one on the World’s 50 Best restaurant awards, leads the charge on experimenting with the fermentation of vegetables. Redzepi was inspired to experiment with fermentation after a particular harsh winter just after they had opened in 2004. They had to store food picked in the summer and autumn, but they were running out of options. One farmer said he had some old carrots that had been stored for six months. "So we asked for them to be sent them over even though he said they were bad. Unfortunately he was right, they were unbelievably shitty carrots."

 But it got them wondering how it might be different if they tricked themselves into thinking that this terrible carrot was the most expensive ingredient they had in our kitchen. "So we roasted these carrots for ever in butter and it was extraordinary and was the best carrot I had ever had. It was transformed into a paste in the inside and the skin was deep and crunchy and leathery. That was our cue to start investigating different ways of cooking all vegetables.

Only this year we discovered a new way of preparing potatoes. If you have soft potatoes in storage they will sprout and through these old potatoes, came these tiny little baby potatoes which are nourished not by soil but the mother potatoes and they have an extraordinary deep earthy flavour.

Our way of training chefs is completely out of date and needs to be stepped up. Traditional cookery schools are more interested in teaching you the words for a boiled egg in five different languages."

Redzepi knows it is not going to be easy to convert people to his way of thinking: “It is so difficult to innovate with products that are still seen as a garnish - you need a totally different mind-set. Vegetables are going to be far more important and fermentation is a way of incorporating those rich umami flavours that everybody looks for when having a delicious meal. Don’t forget that fermentation creates coffee, chocolate, bread, wine, beer and soy sauce. It is a way of actually making sure that vegetables can be just as delicious as a wonderful cut of steak.”