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There's a master firing the kitchen
By David Maguire |
May 24, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THEY closed the doors on the signature restaurant Jade on 36 at Pudong Shangri-La for 48 hours last week so 50 diners could feast each night on the special menu of a scion of one of France's legendary culinary families.
Running the kitchen in his Shanghai debut was Claude Troisgros who was born into a restaurant family that helped drive a revolution in French cuisine in the mid-20th century. So revered are his father and uncle and their contemporaries that they are as close to royalty as the French republic will allow.
Claude is a son of Jean Troisgros who, with his brother Pierre, is celebrated with other legends Paul Bocuse, Michel Guerard, Roger Verget and Raymond Oliver for developing in the 1960s and 70s nouvelle cuisine Francais, a style of cooking that continues as the basis for Western fine dining everywhere.
These chefs and a handful of others drove a transformation in French cooking from the orthodoxy of Escoffier's haute cuisine style, rejecting complicated meals, cutting cooking times, reducing heavy sauces, introducing shorter menus and daring to try inventive combinations.
Claude is the third generation of this esteemed family and has sustained in his adopted country Brazil the tradition for inventiveness, excellence and adventure in cooking that was passed on from his grandparents and parents in the kitchen of the family restaurant.
"My grandmother was very crazy for her time in the 1930s when our restaurant at Roanne near Lyon opened by the railway station. For example, she served something unheard of, fish with banana, which I am doing here in Shanghai," the ebullient chef in his early 50s said last week.
"It was an era of classical French cooking and she was doing it with bananas, a very tropical treatment for French food.
"What's more, my grandfather was drinking white wine with it, which was more crazy because it was then sacrilege to have white wine with fish."
Claude's father and uncle started to work in the kitchen with his grandmother and began to change the thinking about French food, working more with fresh ingredients, seasonal vegetables and regional products.
"My grandfather said to them, 'you know, we are to be a restaurant, to serve customers from the beginning to the end of the courses, to stop serving from the tray and present food on the plate.' And they created their own style and a new movement in France called 'nouvelle cuisine'," he said.
The grandparents and families of the two brothers with their five children lived on the top of the restaurant which continues today as La Maison Troisgros and is run by his brother Michel.
"Every day we lived with the customers, the purveyors, everybody you can think about in the food and cooking business. We grew up with that, with this new style, the nouvelle cuisine, and all the big chefs and it got inside us," he said.
Taught by these two masters in the citadel where novelle cuisine was crafted, Claude has carved out his own niche in the former colonial tropics of Brazil. Sent originally by his father from the family's Michelin three-star seat for two years to help establish a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, he never returned.
Over 30 years, he created an empire of his own, with restaurants, a daily TV cooking show and his own wine label from Cazes in Roussillon. But no matter how far he is from Roanne, it will always be his pedigree and the basis of his style.
"I come from a rich and strong heritage which people have worked a lot to develop and sustain. But today I make my own way in Brazil and when somebody says my name Troisgrois they know it is very strong with tradition.
"Everybody knows about Claude, that he's in Brazil making this type of food based on the family tradition.
"I was born inside the nouvelle cuisine tradition but now I do it with a tropical Brazilian touch."
His signature restaurant in Rio de Janeiro is called "L'Olympe," named after his Italian mother.
"It's very special and I use a lot of Brazilian product in my cuisine, the first chef in the 1980s to do so," he said.
"It's not a fusion cuisine. It's very French in basis but we use (the likes of) passion fruit, a lot of local spices, produce and incredible fish from the Amazon River. This week I am doing a dish with a sauce made from acai, a black coconut from the Amazon."
That touch was evident in the unique dinner he presented at Jade on 36: an entr??e using Shanghai scallops, the biggest he has seen in 35 years; a shrimp risotto with truffle from China; his grandmother's specialty, a local garoupa with banana; Australian lamb rib eye with the acai sauce; and one of his signature dishes for the past 30 years, a very puffy souffl?? with passion fruit coulis.
And at his side in the kitchen was son Thomas, 27, the fourth generation of Troisgros to continue the culinary lineage.
The unique dinner presaged the return to Jade on 36 of the highest traditions of French cuisine in a revamped menu under new chef de cuisine, Fabrice Giraud, a veteran of several European Michelin-starred restaurants.
And so the tradition that started in that Roanne kitchen nearly 80 years ago is in good hands, even in Shanghai.
Running the kitchen in his Shanghai debut was Claude Troisgros who was born into a restaurant family that helped drive a revolution in French cuisine in the mid-20th century. So revered are his father and uncle and their contemporaries that they are as close to royalty as the French republic will allow.
Claude is a son of Jean Troisgros who, with his brother Pierre, is celebrated with other legends Paul Bocuse, Michel Guerard, Roger Verget and Raymond Oliver for developing in the 1960s and 70s nouvelle cuisine Francais, a style of cooking that continues as the basis for Western fine dining everywhere.
These chefs and a handful of others drove a transformation in French cooking from the orthodoxy of Escoffier's haute cuisine style, rejecting complicated meals, cutting cooking times, reducing heavy sauces, introducing shorter menus and daring to try inventive combinations.
Claude is the third generation of this esteemed family and has sustained in his adopted country Brazil the tradition for inventiveness, excellence and adventure in cooking that was passed on from his grandparents and parents in the kitchen of the family restaurant.
"My grandmother was very crazy for her time in the 1930s when our restaurant at Roanne near Lyon opened by the railway station. For example, she served something unheard of, fish with banana, which I am doing here in Shanghai," the ebullient chef in his early 50s said last week.
"It was an era of classical French cooking and she was doing it with bananas, a very tropical treatment for French food.
"What's more, my grandfather was drinking white wine with it, which was more crazy because it was then sacrilege to have white wine with fish."
Claude's father and uncle started to work in the kitchen with his grandmother and began to change the thinking about French food, working more with fresh ingredients, seasonal vegetables and regional products.
"My grandfather said to them, 'you know, we are to be a restaurant, to serve customers from the beginning to the end of the courses, to stop serving from the tray and present food on the plate.' And they created their own style and a new movement in France called 'nouvelle cuisine'," he said.
The grandparents and families of the two brothers with their five children lived on the top of the restaurant which continues today as La Maison Troisgros and is run by his brother Michel.
"Every day we lived with the customers, the purveyors, everybody you can think about in the food and cooking business. We grew up with that, with this new style, the nouvelle cuisine, and all the big chefs and it got inside us," he said.
Taught by these two masters in the citadel where novelle cuisine was crafted, Claude has carved out his own niche in the former colonial tropics of Brazil. Sent originally by his father from the family's Michelin three-star seat for two years to help establish a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, he never returned.
Over 30 years, he created an empire of his own, with restaurants, a daily TV cooking show and his own wine label from Cazes in Roussillon. But no matter how far he is from Roanne, it will always be his pedigree and the basis of his style.
"I come from a rich and strong heritage which people have worked a lot to develop and sustain. But today I make my own way in Brazil and when somebody says my name Troisgrois they know it is very strong with tradition.
"Everybody knows about Claude, that he's in Brazil making this type of food based on the family tradition.
"I was born inside the nouvelle cuisine tradition but now I do it with a tropical Brazilian touch."
His signature restaurant in Rio de Janeiro is called "L'Olympe," named after his Italian mother.
"It's very special and I use a lot of Brazilian product in my cuisine, the first chef in the 1980s to do so," he said.
"It's not a fusion cuisine. It's very French in basis but we use (the likes of) passion fruit, a lot of local spices, produce and incredible fish from the Amazon River. This week I am doing a dish with a sauce made from acai, a black coconut from the Amazon."
That touch was evident in the unique dinner he presented at Jade on 36: an entr??e using Shanghai scallops, the biggest he has seen in 35 years; a shrimp risotto with truffle from China; his grandmother's specialty, a local garoupa with banana; Australian lamb rib eye with the acai sauce; and one of his signature dishes for the past 30 years, a very puffy souffl?? with passion fruit coulis.
And at his side in the kitchen was son Thomas, 27, the fourth generation of Troisgros to continue the culinary lineage.
The unique dinner presaged the return to Jade on 36 of the highest traditions of French cuisine in a revamped menu under new chef de cuisine, Fabrice Giraud, a veteran of several European Michelin-starred restaurants.
And so the tradition that started in that Roanne kitchen nearly 80 years ago is in good hands, even in Shanghai.
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