Famous chef takes to the Seine
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 21 Michelin stars – more than any other chef alive – will be dishing up lobster and duck foie gras on an electric boat on the River Seine from September 10.
“It’s accessible, contemporary French high gastronomy – on a boat,” he told AFP on the 130-seat Ducasse Sur Seine, which will trundle along the river as diners tuck in.
It is perhaps cruel that the 38m boat docks just in front of the French capital’s most famous monument, given that Ducasse went to court 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 restaurant, where he cooked for US President Donald Trump 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.
“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.”
Lunch on board the glasswalled boat, an idea Ducasse first dreamed up five years ago, will start at €100 (R1 770), and dinner from €150. Both will feature a 1½-hour loop past monuments including the Louvre and Notre Dame cathedral, timed at night to bring diners back for the sparkling of the Eiffel Tower’s lights upon the hour.
Some critics complain that Ducasse is rarely in the kitchen. The boat will be no different: he has charged his former souschef Francis Fauvel with the food preparation.
The menu will be “a celebration of the seasons and local products” and with less of the meat and heavy sauces traditionally associated with fine French cooking.
“We decided to take out the sugar, the salt and the fat to be in sync with a society that’s changing,” he said.
Aside from local sourcing, Ducasse boasts of his electric boat’s green credentials and how silently it cuts through the river. “The direction the world is going in is not to pollute, not to make noise,” he said.
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