Boat cuisine: super chef Ducasse takes to the water
PARIS: Still smarting from being kicked out of his Michelin-starred restaurant halfway up the Eiffel Tower, France’s most famous chef Alain Ducasse is pressing on instead with a new restaurant almost directly underneath it — and, he boasts, it floats.
Ducasse, who has won a total 21 Michelin stars — more than any other chef alive — will be dishing up lobster and duck foie gras onboard an electric boat on the River Seine from Sept 10.
“It’s accessible, contemporary French high gastronomy — on a boat,” he told AFP at a table for two onboard the 130-seat Ducasse Sur Seine, which will trundle along the river as diners tuck in.
“It’s surely the most extraordinary architectural and cultural trip you can have on a river anywhere in the world,” he said.
It is perhaps cruel that the 38-metre (125-foot) boat docks just in front of the French capital’s most famous monument, given that Ducasse went to court this month to challenge his eviction from its one-star Jules Verne restaurant.
He was said to be livid after fellow star chefs Frederic Anton and Thierry Marx won a 10-year tenure to run the Eiffel Tower’s gastronomic restaurant, where he cooked for US President Donald Trump during his visit last year.
Asked about the setback, Ducasse’s communications chief tried to stop him answering.
But the chef insisted on addressing a defeat which he is still struggling to digest.
From his boat, “I see the Eiffel Tower and more — I can see all the monuments of Paris,” he said pointedly. “The Eiffel Tower is in a fixed location. Another beautiful story is just beginning.”
Greener and healthier
In court, Ducasse’s lawyers argued that the 61-year-old was “the most-starred chef in the world” after the death this month of fellow culinary legend Joel Robuchon, and accused the consulting company used for the Eiffel Tower tendering process of a conflict of interest.
He has suffered setbacks before in a four-decade career that has spawned some 30 restaurants around the globe: his first New York venture Essex House flopped upon its launch in 2000 amid ridicule about its astronomical prices.
Lunch onboard the glass-walled boat, an idea Ducasse first dreamed up five years ago, will start at 100 euros ($117), and dinner from 150 euros.