Five minutes into an interview with Alain Passard, the chef can make you feel you really haven’t thought hard enough about food. “What is a tomato?” he asks, sitting at a table in a restaurant in Belfast dressed head to toe in white, down to gleaming white spats, part-chef, part-showman, part-philosopher. The 61-year-old three-star Michelin chef has come to Ox Restaurant to celebrate its fifth birthday.
Passard’s Paris restaurant L’Arpege was the inspiration and meeting place for chef Stephen Toman and maitre d’ Alain Kerloc’h – the two men behind Ox Belfast. I’m sitting with the two Alains (Passard and Kerloc’h), talking over the buzz from downstairs of the L’Arpege/Ox tasting menu. There will be no speeches or toasts, churchy whispers or reverential listing of ingredients. Instead, there will be shoulder massages (dispensed by Passard to male and female diners), jaw-droppingly beautiful food, shimmying, and belly laughs.
But first, what is a tomato? We’re not in fruit or vegetable territory – we’re talking about the ubiquity of the year-round food never absent from our fridges. Passard believes a tomato is an ingredient that has its time and place. “In the garden, everything has a mission or a role,” he explains. “What is the role of a tomato? What is a tomato? [I mumble things about freshness] . . . It’s water. In July, when it’s 30 degrees it’s perfect. A tomato is for hydration.”
When people ask for a tomato in the middle of winter it makes no sense, he says. “You want vegetables to warm you up. What do you heat yourself up with? In the garden what do you have in January? Turnips, celeriac, swedes to make hot dishes to warm yourself up.” There is a natural design to things. “The best cookery book is written by nature,” he says. Alain Kerloc’h translates this with a grin, and a “see I told you he was a poet”, aside.
The tomatoes that Passard will serve later this year come from one of his two Normandy gardens. They will have taken five months to grow, as opposed to the 50 days for commercially produced crops. He’s already looking forward to tasting the first one of the year. “There is no comparison – the taste, the smell, the texture,” he says. Tomatoes belong in July, August and September. “You have to understand that nature writes down everything. As human beings we have to follow what nature gives us.”
Charisma
It’s testament to Passard’s charisma that such high-church attitudes to ingredients sound reasonable rather than preachy. Passard bought his restaurant from his mentor Alain Senderens more than 30 years ago, changing the name from L’Archestrate to L’Arpege. An arpege is a chord spread out so each note is heard one after the other. Music and art inform his thinking. He is a saxophone player in his spare time, playing just for himself. In 2001, Passard took red meat off the menu and put his “grand cru” vegetables front and centre.
Was it a political gesture as it would be today?
It wasn’t. “For me it was an artistic gesture.” Aligning to the seasons and rhythms of a garden is “very close to painting, even fashion design. Every time the seasons change it changes everything else.” So instead of denial, it was about pleasure. When you haven’t seen a tomato for a year, the pleasure of rediscovering it is immense, Passard says. “Everything is like that,” renewing itself, leaving and returning, always changing.
Passard’s grandfather was a sculptor in Brittany. His grandmother on the other side of the family was a talented cook. Both his parents and his grandparents had their own gardens. Seasonal eating was laid down in his childhood. The joy of veg is also in how they look. “For me, it was my passion for colours.” Is music a sister art to cooking?
“Yes, it’s about the agility of the hands, the suppleness of the fingers. That’s important for cooking and in music.” They use an expression in L’Arpege, “pas faire la geste du trop” not to do too much, he says. “In music, it’s the same if you play too much of something. So it’s just enough but not too much.”
A chef also needs to like people, he says. So much of the enjoyment of a restaurant is in its conviviality.
Does Passard have any plans to hang up his apron and retire to play more saxophone? Alain Kerloc’h looks slightly horrified when I ask. “Ah no,” Passard says firmly. “Every day is the first day.” It brings the interview to the perfect close. But I’m going to ask one more question. “Truly?” I ask. “Every day?”
“Yes,” Passard says firmly. “No weariness. Never get bored.”
