Francis Mallmann On Art, Ambiance, And Making Love To Life

A meal by Francis Mallmann begins far before the first course. While the embers of his beloved fire crackle and heat, anticipation ignites. In the lead-up to that first bite, it is your sight he seeks to excite. Dinner is an artfully directed scene. And while the world-renowned chef doesn’t consider cooking an art, an Edgar Allen Poe poem or a Luchino Visconti film and a Francis Mallmann restaurant seem more similar than they are different.

They exist as a conduit to a grander narrative—a poem with prose, a restaurant with recipes. To Mallmann, food is merely a means to bind us together in a singular moment in time. Each meal sends a message about a proposed way of life. One that asks us to look deeply into the unspoken beauty around us. His dishes are served without a template, puzzle, or process to be solved. It’s not about a culinary feat. It’s about you, and me, and the titillating conversation his flames might spark between us.

On this dewy morning in Patagonia, Francis Mallmann has been up since dawn. While I had prepared for a conversation on the art of his cooking, what ensued was a tête-à-tête on the grandeurs of life itself. Here, the celebrated chef shares how romance, art, and the essence of hope have guided him as a child of the 60s counterculture movement to a culinary icon.

Natalie Stoclet: What does creativity mean to you?

Francis Mallmann: Creativity, to me, is more related to life than cooking. The way you wake up every day is so important. The way you get out of bed. That’s where creativity starts. If all of that is good, and you’re happy, then during the day, you can be creative.

NS: How do you like to wake up in the morning?

FM: I wake up at dawn every day. Those are my hours of peace when I do the things I love and I’m on my own. I paint, write, and play the guitar. It doesn’t matter where you wake up; what matters is your feeling toward life. It’s the amount of hope that you have for your dreams.

NS: You write, direct films, and paint—how are those creative processes similar to cooking?

FM: I’ve never been a good student. My university has been movies. Almost everything I know I learned in the movies. I look into a scene and try to understand the beauty around it besides the human action. For me, it has been my academy. I chose a path of learning that has been different from what everybody wanted for me, but I’m proud of it. I have applied it to all aspects of my life, including cooking.

NS: Many directors and authors say good writing is about editing. Do you feel that way about cooking?

FM: The majority of filmmaking is editing. In my style of cooking, editing is not so important. I believe in the natural gestures of cooking. I always tell my chefs that whenever they place something on a plate, they can’t touch it again. It’s not about beauty. We like beauty, and we understand it, but you have to find beauty in the first go. I don’t believe in touching food too much. We don’t have a plan of how we’re going to finish or decorate a plate. I believe in the essence of and respect for the produce.

NS: You once said: “When I opened my first restaurant, it wasn’t only about the cooking; it was almost more about the flowers, the candles, the celebration, the joy.” How important is presentation to you?

FM: I think that’s very related to my love for film. I feel that the scene is almost more important than the taste. With a scene, you touch a person from the very beginning before they sit down. Interior design, to me, is very related to repetition. I want you to see the same gesture repeated in a chair, in a piece of furniture, in the textiles. I create a language that repeats itself. Edgar Allen Poe wrote this poem called The Raven, where he used the same phrase after every verse because that makes someone feel at home. I use the same approach in the interior design of my restaurants. There needs to be a common thread.

NS: Are great chefs also great artists?

FM: I think that cooking is a craft. I don’t think it’s an art. Art is a more intellectual thing, and I don’t think eating or cooking is intellectual. It’s something that is touched by everything—by life, history, the idiosyncrasy between countries—but I don’t think it’s an art. I think it’s arrogant to think cooking is an art. Cooking is about sitting at a table, eating with friends, lovers, and children, and sharing things. If the food is excellent, it’s better, but the important thing is the conversation. The beauty of eating is sharing. If you cooked thinking of it as art, you would be bored to death. It’s not related to the true heart of cooking for me.

NS: What is the true heart of cooking?

FM: Cooking withholds a beautiful silent language. I want to go into the void of cooking. That is where you find gestures of simplicity and respect for the produce. An excellent fish just needs a little bit of salt and a little bit of olive oil. When there are too many things on a plate, there’s something unclear to me. I want a potato and a fish. People say that’s so silly. But it has to be perfect. Because when you cook things very simply, there’s nothing to hide behind. It’s very difficult to do. Elegance in life is a simple gesture. It is a reduction of your aim to achieve many things, but you take them to this very clean place, whether in cooking or dressing or in doing the interior of a house. It’s not about spending too much or too little; it’s this language of your life that you’re showing.

NS: How often do you spend at home nowadays?

FM: I‘ve been a nomad since a young age. My father was a bit like that too. So I have many homes. In Uruguay, where I live in Garzón, this little phantom town, I have five homes, and I go through them every day. They all have different books and paintings, and it’s not that they’re mansions; some of them are very small. I wake up in one, do my sewing in another, then move to another. I spend my day moving through them. I’m always dreaming about my homes in France, Chile, and Mendoza, because I love them and the things inside them. Every time I walk into them, I’m surprised by their beauty. Homes are a very important part of my life.

NS: How do you find the time to cultivate all of your homes and passions?

FM: I think there’s time for everything. I have 13 restaurants. I work very hard. When I travel, I always travel with some textiles. I make the hotels I stay in feel like home; I put my love into them. I spend a lot of time in my room when I travel. I walk the streets and go to museums, but I love to camp out in a hotel and change things around.

NS: What do you consider when designing your hotels or restaurants?

FM: When I look at the history of my life, what has almost always happened is that my homes become my restaurants. I love them so much, and I want to share them. Like my homes, I adapt my restaurants constantly. They have to be alive. They’re never finished. There’s always another layer of something to add.

NS: How do you choose the textiles, art, and music in your restaurants?

FM: I’m a collector of textiles. Textiles, to me, are like the most beautiful kiss. I use them like books. I have libraries of them. I also take notes of things that inspire me. Sometimes a little gesture of something I see in a landscape becomes the theme for a restaurant or a new hotel. It’s similar to what I said earlier about creativity depending on how you wake up in the morning. You don’t have to be shouting for happiness. You’re sitting in bed, you wake up, you get out, and you think, I’m so lucky to have another day to make love to life.

NS: How does one make love to life?

FM: For me, life is a romance. People relate romance to being in love with someone or the romance of a friendship. I think that romance is how you do your little tray for breakfast to take to bed when you’re on your own. That is romance. The way you walk in the forest and the way stop to look at something or take a photograph. To be aware of life is so important. There’s so much to see. I think we are taught to live in a way that we see everything, but we don’t really look into it. We just look at a mountain and say that it was beautiful, but the car goes on, and we forget about it. You obviously can’t stop to look at every mountain, but we can try and go into things more deeply when something captures our attention.

NS: Tell me more about the importance of solitude to you and your cooking.

FM: You must have a good time with yourself. I can take a trip on my own, and I’ll be perfectly happy no matter what. Once you live like that, then you can share things in a very different way with others. If you don’t like to be on your own or you don’t understand yourself in solitude, it’s very hard to advance yourself in life, I think. That love of silence and solitude was given to me as a child raised in Patagonia in the mountains. It has been my biggest asset in life. I always go back to it in moments of adversity or happiness.

NS: How has that solitude informed your life as an adult?

FM: One of my best gifts is to be 66 years old now and find that every day is more beautiful. Growing up and being older is incredibly nice. I think that achievement in life comes from hope. Inside this hat I’m wearing, I sewed in the word “Esperanza” or “Hope” because I find that it is one of the most beautiful things in life. The idea that you haven’t gotten what you want, but you believe that you will. I feel that growing up is very related to that; you keep adding these little layers that make you who you are.

NS: What are your hopes for the future?

FM: My hope for the future lies within our youth. They are so stubborn about the future. Children today have many ambitions, and their ambitions are very different from ours. We were taught to collect things. Homes, paintings, money, cars, as well as studying and thoughts and all that. They see a bigger picture. These kids will one day be in command, and we will have a very different world. I see them coming. I feel them through social media. They write to me, and I’m very proud of that.