Food & beverage


temperature for several hours to create an intensely flavoured liquid that is then extracted to concentrate the sauce even further.


Not only does this pack a real punch when it comes to taste, but this unique cooking method results in significantly lighter, healthier dishes as the intense natural flavour from the extraction process means chefs no longer need to add the generous dollops of butter and cream favoured in traditional French cooking.


Not one to rest on his laurels, Alléno went back to the lab incorporating fermentation techniques to further intensify the flavour and blending different extractions together to create ever more complex sauces. Ultimately, he credits 80% of the success of each plate of food he serves in his restaurants as resting solely with the sauce.


“If you lose sauces,” he stresses, fixing me with his impenetrable stare, “you lose your own language. You have to understand that the sauce is the verb of French cuisine.”


Extraction technique


Head chef Benjamin Ferra Y Castell with executive chef Yannick Alléno.


Having firmly cemented his reputation, he opened his first eponymous restaurant, Alléno Paris, at the Pavillon Ledoyen, to overwhelmingly positive reviews; seven months after opening he had been awarded three Michelin stars once again. What makes his food so special? The secret, he tells me, is in the sauce. His obsession with this element of cuisine began over a decade ago with a terrine. “You know terrine, the pâté?” he says. “I had cooked a venison and there was a spoonful of jelly left that would usually go in the trash. When you taste it it’s like ‘Wow – crazy’… I called my lab and said, ‘I want that’.”


“If you lose sauces, you lose your own language. You have to understand that the sauce is the verb of French cuisine.”


Secret sauce


And so, Alléno enlisted Dr Bruno Goussault (widely recognised as the founder of sous vide cooking) and embarked on a quest to make the perfect sauce. Over 500 tastings later, they finally cracked it and, in 2013, patented the extraction technique.


How does it work? The unique method involves cooking an ingredient sous vide (vacuum sealed in a precisely regulated water bath) at a specific


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Next, he plans to use his revolutionary extraction technique to craft guilt-free chocolates eschewing dairy, butter and sugar while somehow, he promises me, still delivering on flavour. His biggest fear, he admits, is the restaurants he visits across the globe where “everything tastes the same… the same Wagyu beef… the same fatty, salty things. It has a real cost on your health”. For now, though, his attention is firmly on his new venture. As the lunchtime service approaches, the kitchen is getting louder, the chefs moving with a greater sense of urgency – there’s a buzz and excitement in the air that only comes with a newly opened restaurant.


“I have one of the best teams in the world,” Alléno tells me, catching my glance. He looks around the dining room, taking it all in as he gets up to leave. “For me, there’s nothing better than this… it’s what I love to do.” It’s this passion and inventiveness that sets him apart from even the planet’s top chefs. And, while he insists he isn’t thinking about stars, I can’t help but feel it won’t be long until London’s Michelin inspectors come knocking.


In fact, not long after this very interview took place, there was an announcement: “Pavyllon London, the debut London restaurant from multi-Michelin-starred chef Yannick Alléno set within Four Seasons Hotel London at Park Lane, has been awarded its first Michelin star in the 2024 Great Britain & Ireland Guide just six months after opening.” ●


This article originally appeared on www.elitetraveler.com. Hotel Management International / www.hmi-online.com


Four Seasons/Roche Communications


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