Alain Ducasse
The most classic French dessert around the holidays is the Christmas log, with butter cream. Two flavors. Chocolate and coconut. My first job in the kitchen when I was a boy was to make these Christmas logs.Collection: Christmas
My grandmother did all the cooking at Christmas. We ate fattened chicken. We would feed it even more so it would be big and fat.Collection: Christmas
I travel the world, and I can see in Toronto the cooking is very personal. These people cook with their hearts.Collection: Travel
It is impossible to remain indifferent to Japanese culture. It is a different civilisation where all you have learnt must be forgotten. It is a great intellectual challenge and a gorgeous sensual experience.Collection: Experience
Food is one part of the experience. And it has to be somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the dining experience. But the rest counts as well: The mood, the atmosphere, the music, the feeling, the design, the harmony between what you have on the plate and what surrounds the plate.Collection: Design
If you don't treat an ingredient and its flavors with respect - if you drown it in oil, for instance - you'll spoil it.Collection: Respect
Failure is enriching. It's also important to accept that you'll make mistakes - it's how you build your expertise. The trick is to learn a positive lesson from all of life's negative moments.Collection: Failure
In France, Christmas is a family holiday. You stay home. New Year's Eve is when you go out.Collection: Christmas
Everywhere in the world there are tensions - economic, political, religious. So we need chocolate.
Chefs don't become chefs just to earn stars - that's not the goal.
My son, Arzhel, is two, and he eats vegetables twice a day. We have a vegetable garden on our farm in the Southwest, and he gets two baskets, one over each arm, and says, 'Garden, Papa!' and then he eats what he picks.
If my cuisine were to be defined by just one taste, it would be that of subtle, aromatic, extra-virgin olive oil.
The proportion of ingredients is important, but the final result is also a matter of how you put them together. Equilibrium is key.
I have an obsession for quality. I work for my guests, not to obtain Michelin stars.
Classical cooking and molecular gastronomy should remain separate. You can mix two styles and get fusion; any more, and you just get confusion.
I'm in love with the markets of the world. It's a photograph of a city, a culture.
My wife Gwenaelle prepares an 'energy shot' for me for breakfast. It's a mix of linseed, cereal, and raisins, with fresh fruit like kiwi. She also adds yogurt for added texture and some pollen and honey for an energy booster.
I don't like being a celebrity.
When I'm in Paris, my favorite market is the Marche Raspail on the Left Bank.
The planet's resources are rare; we must consume more ethically and equitably.
I live in Paris, yet Monaco, where I spend a lot of time, holds a very special place in my heart.
The world of wine is more creative than the world of cooking.
You need a good gardener and a good fisherman. The cook is not required.
At my home in the southwest of France, I grow oak, hazel, and lemon trees in my backyard.
I would never be able to lead the insane lifestyle I do, traveling all over the world, if I wasn't eating food that was simple and healthy.
I was brought up on a farm in Southwest France, eating farm-fresh produce three times a day. It was paradise on Earth, and it shaped my eating habits and my sense of taste.
I love any excuse to work with a mortar and pestle.
London is the most important city in the world for restaurants.
In Paris we have bistros, then we have fine dining. In London, you have a very contemporary scene with mixed influences.
I have restaurants, bookshops... but it's not an empire, more... a puzzle. If it were an empire, all my restaurants would be the same.
TV is a deformed vision, an excessive caricature. A chef has to stay an artisan, not become a star.
With cooking, there's always the tangible and the intangible: that which is in the domain of sentiment, of the individual.
You take the best ingredients - the best cocoa beans - and you process them in the best traditional way, and you have the best chocolate.
In France, I am the fifth artisan to produce his own chocolate, and the others have been doing it for a long time.
I love to pick tomatoes at the end of the day, when they're still warm from the sun.
The Asian airlines have the best wine programs.
There are so many impassioned winemakers. I think there are more impassioned winemakers than chefs.
Everything that pushes up out of the earth I love. Everything under the earth, root vegetables, I love to cook.
When I was younger, I behaved a bit strangely sometimes - lost my temper, did silly things - but little by little, I've gotten better. As a chef, I think you need to do a lot of work on yourself and your temperament.
I don't do the same food in Tokyo that I do in Vegas and vice versa. If I did that, two weeks later I would have no customers.
The real evolution is to learn something new every day - it's very important for chefs to share what they have discovered.
When I arrived, I didn't understand London customers perfectly, but we've developed the right style with the right price, and step by step, I'm in harmony with London.
In each restaurant, I develop a different culinary sensibility. In Paris, I'm more classic, because that's what customers like. In Monaco, it's classic Mediterranean haute cuisine. In London, it's a contemporary French restaurant that I've developed with a U.K. influence and my French know-how.
It's not easy to have success with restaurants in different cities, but I like the challenge.
The Mediterranean is in my DNA. I'm fine inland for about a week, but then I yearn for a limitless view of the sea, for the colours and smells of the Italian and French Riviera.
Gastronomy is my hobby. I'm simply the casting director. Once I've brought all the right people together, it is they who must work together to tell a story.
I'm anti-globalisation. There is nothing more enriching than to go out into the world and meet people different to you. We must fight the spread of a singular way of thinking and preserve cultural differences.
It's striking and unique in London how you know to create this alchemy between the concept, the food, the music, the staff. From the beginning to the end, with all these different elements, it tells a full story that you know very well how to develop and cultivate.
If I had the choice to travel to two places in Europe, it would be Paris and London.
When I started cooking the meal at home, after I had started cooking in restaurants, I usually would prepare bay scallops or lobster.