Gastronomy looks beyond the pandemic to the French fine dining revolution

Chef Yannick Alléno offered a € 395 menu that included prawns and foie gras at a three-star Michelin restaurant near the Champs-Elysées.

But while France is preparing to reopen its restaurant to the outside service after being closed for six months next week, it will be serving burgers there for a number of prices.

A star chef like Alléno, a stable top-notch restaurant with more than a dozen Michelin stars from Courchevel to Marrakech, stresses that the strategy is changing. great restaurants because they want to recover from the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We need to encourage people to come here, arousing curiosity,” he said of Pavillon Ledoyen, a neoclassical building that houses many of its restaurants, including the three-star Alléno Paris.

Such temples of French gastronomy have long attracted wealthy foreign tourists, who will pay more than 1,000 euros for a meal for two while they live. the French art of living. With international travel severely reduced by pandemics, these customers are not expected for a while.

The new challenge is to attract locals, as well as retain staff, as many of them have left the sector and have significantly difficult working conditions. Many restaurants also have high debts to get out of the crisis after taking out state-guaranteed loans.

“I have a three-year struggle ahead of me,” Alleno said, adding that half of the 4 million euros spent to save the team’s money has been spent. “In three-star restaurants, there will be a lot of deaths.”

Its iconic restaurant generated more than three-quarters of the revenue of foreign diners, mostly from Asia and the U.S. Without them reopening is not valid, the doors will be closed until September. Alléno will be experimenting in a less formal location for the time being with the excellent restaurant XXI. While he organizes an innovation that seeks to drag him down the century.

“Everything needs to change,” he said, citing the title of the book he wrote at the close. There, he called for a renewal of the style of service (warmer, more personalized) and that of staff (more flexible and for families).

French haute cuisine It has spectacular 19th-century chefs such as Auguste Escoffier and Marie-Antoine Carême, who created it based on rich sauces-based cuisine and rigorous service (often theatrical). Over the decades it was considered the best in the world and became an essential part of French identity.

But its popularity has faded in recent decades, first thanks to the brilliance of molecular gastronomy and then the competition for light Nordic style. Like the French haute cuisine the lost land, became much more expensive, making it available to many.

“The pandemic has revealed that the business model of high-end restaurants in France does not work without tourism,” said Joerg Zipprick, founder of the La Liste group, which ranks the best restaurants in the world.

“It’s a fairly new development. That used to be the case. . . a local doctor or director would come to these places to celebrate a special occasion. Not anymore. “

Zipprick said that for the best chefs, many of whom spent the last year experimenting with shopping and meal kits, it depended on their willingness to adapt to success.

He announced that the diners would not want to return to experimental and experimental dishes, but would like to eat good food in the company of friends and relatives in a nice restaurant.

“There is no technical thing or food that needs a long explanation about the server fermentation process. People don’t want lunch to be a work of art, ”Zipprick said.

The last time French cuisine was reinvented was in the 1970s, when it was created by chefs like the brothers Paul Bocuse and Troisgros. new kitchen. The move, which was less prosperous and hearty than the previous great dining rooms, put fresh, high-quality ingredients in front of them and the service became less formal.

Alléno believes that the best restaurants should have the right time to have an experience to talk to customers in advance to have dinner, guests and their tastes.

The “concierge service” approach would allow for better menu planning, improving the customer experience and the restaurant’s economy.

“If I know I only have three people eating shrimp on a particular night, I don’t have to ask for six pounds just in case,” he said. “It really changes things for the kitchen.”

Others are becoming even more radical. New York’s three-star Eleven Madison Park in New York City no longer has meat and seafood to serve when it reopens next month, as the Swiss chef wants to show that it can be compatible with sustainable food and luxurious environmental awareness.

However, Éric Fréchon, the three-star Michelin-starred chef at the five-star Epicure restaurant at Le Bristol Paris, lowered expectations of radical change.

“Things will be back to normal,” Fréchon said, noting that the hotel’s restaurants had a large number of local customers. “People have lost experience haute cuisine they will be eager to return for so long. ”

Fréchon said he will keep some of the innovations from the coronavirus era, including a 1,390-euro “gastronomy and bedding” package that is marketed as a one-night stay for locals who dine in their local suite or hotel room.

“On New Year’s Eve we had 60 servers back and forth to the rooms, it was very difficult,” he said. “But it allowed us to reach new customers who wouldn’t dare come to a three-star restaurant. We need to save them now. “

Additional report by Domitille Alain in Paris