Yannick Alleno - c Roberto Frankenberg
Gastronomy has always had pride of place at Le Meurice, and private and social functions were a highlight of the Roaring Twenties. Today more than ever, the art of gourmet dining is at the heart of the art of living at Le Meurice. It is embodied above all by the talent and personality of Chef Yannick Alléno.
Few chefs have experienced such acclaim so young. After arriving at Le Meurice in 2003 at the age of 35, he was awarded his second star the following year. In 2007, at the age of 39, he was awarded a third star, celebrating his talent and joining the exclusive circle of three starred chefs.
In 2008, his peers voted him Chef of the Year, in recognition of his contribution to the excellence and reputation of French haute cuisine.
Yannick Alléno immediately surrounded himself with Camille Lesecq, pastry chef, and Nicolas Rebut, head sommelier. Both, like him, are young talents who cut their teeth in the palace world, and who will receive their greatest recognition at Le Meurice.
To be a palace chef, you have to be both a great soloist and a conductor. Yannick Alléno heads a 74-strong brigade.
Since his arrival, Yannick Alléno has been in charge of all the palace’s kitchens: breakfasts, banquets, the gourmet restaurant, Le Dalí restaurant, room service and the bar menu. Each place and each tasting moment bears his signature. It’s up to each place to transcribe the score according to the different settings and types of clientele.
Yannick Alléno loves Le Meurice: he loves its history and the legends inscribed in the splendor of the decor, he loves its very Parisian spirit, eternal and so contemporary. His cuisine is like him and like Le Meurice: demanding, elegant, audacious, true, personal, sumptuous and free.
Inspired by French terroir
Yannick Alléno loves Paris: “My cuisine is like my city, and my city is Paris”, he likes to repeat, recalling that it was in Paris, just a stone’s throw from Le Meurice, that the first Parisian restaurant was opened around 1765, in what is now the Rue du Louvre…
Yannick Alléno has been exploring the riches of Terroir Parisien® for several years, with one strong conviction: “There is a typically Parisian cuisine, at the origin of French gastronomy”. He is equally interested in popular and bourgeois cuisine, everyday and festive. He compiles old books and menus, and works with the best farmers, market gardeners, breeders, cress growers, beekeepers and other producers in the IIe de France.
For this terroir refers above all to products from the Paris Basin, such as mint from Milly-la-Forêt, cress from Montmorency, saffron from the Gâtinais, cabbage from Pontoise and honey from the beehives on the roofs of the Paris Opera.
But it’s not a question of reproducing yesterday’s cuisine exactly. Yannick Alléno is recreating his own Parisian history, using these magnificent and often little-known products to create original, tasty and surprising recipes. For example, watercress from the Alps is served alongside crayfish, while tiny Pontoise cabbage, with its astonishing violet color, is preserved in its own juice to enhance crispy sweetbreads. Sometimes it’s entire recipes that are once again given pride of place, executed with a touch that’s both highly personal and very contemporary, such as the sole normande once created by a restaurateur on rue Montorgueil, or the famous American-style lobster created by Peters.
With this approach, Yannick Alléno follows in the footsteps of the 19th-century masters who sought to codify French cuisine as a major expression of French culture and heritage. For Yannick Alléno, this heritage is above all a culture and a source of inspiration. He rewrites it in the light of his own vision of gastronomy today: “the integrated and conscious concern for dietetics applied to the best regional products, one that offends neither tastes nor suspicions, and burdens neither appetites nor budgets”.
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
