A biography for Alain Ducassehasn’t been written yet.
“Given the number of restaurants I have, I could easily travel all the time - but I try not to.”
“Failure is enriching. It's also important to accept that you'll make mistakes - it's how you build your expertise. The trick is to learn a positive lesson from all of life's negative moments.”
“The Mediterranean is in my DNA. I'm fine inland for about a week, but then I yearn for a limitless view of the sea, for the colours and smells of the Italian and French Riviera.”
“There are so many impassioned winemakers. I think there are more impassioned winemakers than chefs.”
“My son, Arzhel, is two, and he eats vegetables twice a day. We have a vegetable garden on our farm in the Southwest, and he gets two baskets, one over each arm, and says, 'Garden, Papa!' and then he eats what he picks.”
“Food is one part of the experience. And it has to be somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the dining experience. But the rest counts as well: The mood, the atmosphere, the music, the feeling, the design, the harmony between what you have on the plate and what surrounds the plate.”
“I do most of the cooking in my head.”
“I concentrate in my work on preserving and displaying the original flavor from each ingredient in a dish.”
“The planet's resources are rare; we must consume more ethically and equitably.”
“You take the best ingredients - the best cocoa beans - and you process them in the best traditional way, and you have the best chocolate.”
“In France, Christmas is a family holiday. You stay home. New Year's Eve is when you go out.”
“I have an obsession for quality. I work for my guests, not to obtain Michelin stars.”
“I prefer to be able to identify what I'm eating. I have to know.”
“In each restaurant, I develop a different culinary sensibility. In Paris, I'm more classic, because that's what customers like. In Monaco, it's classic Mediterranean haute cuisine. In London, it's a contemporary French restaurant that I've developed with a U.K. influence and my French know-how.”
“What they've found so far in the Amazon is 5 percent of what there is yet to discover to eat in the Amazon because it's completely unknown. I've eaten things I've never eaten before over there.”
“My grandmother did all the cooking at Christmas. We ate fattened chicken. We would feed it even more so it would be big and fat.”
“I don't like being disappointed by somebody I trust. Fortunately, it rarely happens.”
“When I started cooking the meal at home, after I had started cooking in restaurants, I usually would prepare bay scallops or lobster.”
“Everything that pushes up out of the earth I love. Everything under the earth, root vegetables, I love to cook.”
“When I was younger, I behaved a bit strangely sometimes - lost my temper, did silly things - but little by little, I've gotten better. As a chef, I think you need to do a lot of work on yourself and your temperament.”