Paris’s L’Arpege—one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants—just ditched meat, fish, dairy, and eggs.
While this week’s news that Eleven Madison Park will reintroduce meat and seafood has dominated headlines, another major development in vegan haute cuisine has flown largely under the radar: French chef Alain Passard has taken his famed three-Michelin-star Paris restaurant, L’Arpège, entirely plant-based.
On July 21, Passard announced on Instagram: “From now on, our plates will be composed solely of what the garden offers us: vegetables, fruits, flowers, herbs, and honey from our hives…as we begin a new story,” Passard wrote in the post.
It’s a story that Passard has been composing for over 25 years. When the classically trained chef opened l’Arpège in 1986, his meat and seafood preparations helped earn the restaurant three Michelin stars by 1996, an honor it has maintained ever since. But in 1999, he turned his focus to vegetables, removing red meat and fish from the regular menu entirely in 2001. The following year, he expanded on his vision and planted a kitchen garden in the countryside to supply the restaurant with organically grown fruits and vegetables. (Today, the restaurant’s produce comes from two gardens that total over 17 acres.)
Although meat and seafood later returned in limited roles, vegetables remained the stars. This July’s decision to eliminate all animal products except honey marks a bold new chapter both for Passard and for French fine dining. He views the move as a natural evolution of his culinary journey.
Ever since he began shifting away from the use of meat and seafood on his menus, Passard has applied his training as a master rôtisseur (a chef who specializes in roasting meats) to create an ultra-seasonal vegetable-centric cuisine that is all his own. Passard prepares the vegetables using techniques usually associated with meat or seafood: smoking potatoes, flambéing onions, and slow-roasting beets in a salt crust. His inventive pairings, such as melon with eggplant or asparagus with rhubarb, have become signatures. Moreover, he meticulously tests and retests his recipes so that they strike the right balance both on the palate and the plate. In a recent interview with Paris Match magazine, Passard compared the work of a chef to that of a painter or a fashion designer.
To prepare for the switch to a plant-based menu at L’Arpège, Passard and his brigade of young sous-chefs and commis chefs have been reducing the use of butter and dairy and fine-tuning plant-based sauces, ensuring the shift would feel seamless. Some ideas that have already made it onto the menu are a jewel-like beet sauce finished with fresh herbs and a 100% tomato gazpacho made by balancing the flavors of multiple heirloom varieties.
For more on Alain Passsard and the plant-based menu at L’Arpège, you can visit the restaurant’s website or follow the chef on Instagram, where many of the posts are translated into English.
