Quentin, chef, Les Domaines de Chabran
“I don’t write the menu until I have seen the market. Wednesday decides the week.”
I trained at the hotel school in La Rochelle. What I found in the Alpilles is the thing I care about most: the producer, the one with a name, down the road from the kitchen.
“I cook in the houses, not in a restaurant, and that changes everything.”
No pass, no service for forty covers: one table, the people around it, and what the market gave that morning. Some evenings it is a short menu, some evenings one dish, because that is what the day wanted. Pastry is my weakness, so dessert is never an afterthought. The kitchen stays open and people wander in; children come to taste; someone asks how the aïoli is made, and we make it together. That is the part I like best: not the plate, the moment before it, when the house smells of what is coming.
Jean-Pierre, gardener — the next voice
“A garden should look as if nobody works in it. That takes a great deal of work.”