15th February 2011
Interview with Raymond Blanc
Raymond Blanc has featured in 32 editions of the Guide, both at Les Quat'Saisons, and then at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, and this year was awarded The Good Food Guide’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his unerring commitment to consistency, quality and seasonal produce. He explains how his childhood in rural France played a crucial part in his approach to cooking.
What is the best dish on your menu?
‘The one that is in season!’
What food trends are you spotting at the moment?
Chefs are connecting with their region, ethics and sense of place. We are working with the farmer, and next we will be eating less meat and more seeds and pulses.
How do you relax when out of the kitchen?
I read, enjoy music, good films or documentaries. I play tennis.
Is there anything in the restaurant industry that you would like to change?
The long hours. I like to create an environment conducive to learning.
Reconnecting to our food culture – use less produce from intensive farming.
What is your favourite restaurant and why?
The one that will provide a huge welcome, comfortable surroundings and with food that is simply out of this world, whether it is rustic or three Michelin standard.
What do you wish you had known when you started out as a chef?
What I know now! But more specifically to have been given more skills at building a business – I learnt the hard way.
Where do you see cooking/food/restaurants in 60 years’ time?
All restaurants will have a corporate responsibility, spread across environmental issues and ethical values. We need to eat more healthily and more responsibly.
What is your earliest culinary memory?
My childhood was probably a cliché of French rural life. It established the foundation and structure of my approach as much to cuisine as to people. At the age of seven, my father took me to the garden, made me take a handful of earth, look at it, smell it, taste it! And of course, I was very much involved in all the toiling in the garden, whilst my friends were playing football. Then the vegetables would be picked, topped and tailed and cooked by Maman Blanc and much of it bottled for the winter. This was a true cottage industry. From the age of seven, I was also a hunter-gatherer across the woods and fields of Franche-Comté. All was for the taking: mushrooms, chanterelles, wild asparagus, escargots, frogs. All that we picked would be handed to Maman Blanc for a simple creative act of cooking and the rest sold on the side of the road. This was the foundation of my philosophy and my cooking and also made me a rich man by the age of ten!
What would be your perfect birthday meal?
My sixtieth birthday, where four of my best friends, chefs: Gary Jones, Bruno Loubet, Michael Caines and Clive Fretwell cooked a special menu for me... I had to wait 60 years for it.