For French Chef Pierre Gagnaire, Cooking Allows Him To Form Connections With People

One of the world’s best loved French chefs, Pierre Gagnaire, whose flagship restaurant in Paris has held three Michelin stars for more than a quarter century and who runs over two dozen establishments worldwide, discusses a career marked by commitment, suffering and success.

How did cooking change your life?

Imagine that you’re going to give meaning to your job by trying to put in emotion, kindness, tenderness, something that allows you to talk to people. I was a rather unsociable, quiet and shy child, so cooking spoke on my behalf, and for a long time, I experienced cooking as a form of therapy. I used to cook without caring about the environment; it was really to find something that was different, not to be different, but that corresponded to what I had in the pit of my stomach.

Why did you decide to open your own restaurant in Saint-Etienne in 1981? Was it an act of independence?

Obviously, but it was more than independence. I had decided that this job would be the way to build my life and to give meaning to my life, and I think that today, people don’t ask themselves these kinds of questions enough. I think that today, I’ve learned nothing from life, just one thing, so maybe the organization of a life like mine is a bit crazy because it’s almost, the same for my colleagues, almost like joining a religion. You have to give it your all, but even so, I think the idea of giving meaning to your life through work is to live well. So of course, you work a lot, there are worries and disappointments, sometimes people don’t understand you, sometimes there are confrontations, but at the end of the day, what’s important is if you have energy and the sincerity of the message. I’m not someone looking to be fashionable, I’m not looking for the limelight. I’m just looking for honesty in what I know.

What lessons did you take away from the failure of your first restaurant?

What did I learn? Not much. You have to learn beforehand, if possible. But it saved my life in fact because the way I was working, I need silence and time. When I was younger, I used to see these young chefs in the big capitals, Paris in particular, their restaurants were full all the time, and I used to think, when do they have time to think about cooking? And all those years served me well. Of course I suffered, of course I missed out on a lot of things, I missed out on my children’s lives, I didn’t do things I’d have liked to do, skiing, hiking in the desert, but this time constructed my work, and when I opened in Paris, we had really extraordinary success right away. I knew we’d won when we opened the telephone lines a week before, but afterwards, we had to work hard for almost 10 years to put everything back in place, and at the time, it was like we were making the film there, we were writing the real story, which used to be a rough draft, and these 18 years of silence, which cost me dearly, enabled me to give density and strength to my work as a chef.

Was your international expansion to London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Dubai, Las Vegas, Moscow, Berlin, Danang, Shanghai, and of course in France in Courchevel, La Baule, Gordes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux just a way to keep your flagship in Paris functioning smoothly?

A little, yes, but above all, it was also, and still is, a way of proving to myself that I can verbalize my cooking, I can explain it, whereas before, for years, I couldn’t explain it because I didn’t know where I was going, it was foggy. Every minute, almost, was important, so today it’s calmer.