La Tête d'Ail

He wishes to put this knowledge – acquired at the cost of burns, cuts and long hours spent in the kitchen over the years – to the test. Whilst this cuisine draws on home-cooking traditions, he approaches it with the techniques he has learnt throughout his professional career, both here and elsewhere. It draws its inspiration first and foremost from his mother’s cooking: a cuisine of the moment – quick, lively and instinctive; a cuisine of the rush, prepared at mealtimes in the midst of a working day. Next comes that of his grandmother Odette: peaceful, unpretentious, scented with the aromas of the garrigue depending on what she had gathered, or imbued with the scents of the hunt. Finally, there is the cuisine of Suzanne Quaglia at Le Patalain in 1993. The memory of scaling red mullet, polishing copper pots, preparing veal liver caillettes, peeling those onions, and trimming those artichokes over and over again… The memory, too, of a team of passionate young professionals, of the smell of pieds paquets simmering away, of the juices and stock… Even today, that memory remains with the great and celebrated Provençal chefs whom the young apprentice he once was so greatly admired.