Pierre Gagnaire

Pierre Gagnaire: a world-renowned culinary celebrity that must dutifully be discovered.
He has stayed loyal to the advantages and limitations that have defined his exhaustive professional journey–a career that has not been without its complications. That baggage, the experience and maturity, have converted him into a classic who reinvents himself at the same time as reinventing cuisine in general. A classic with a lofty imagination and staggering originality who captures unprecedented shapes and flavors. His constructions are impressive–bursting with elements, charged (and then some) with an immense, superhuman work that encloses each proposal. Every dish offers an infinity of ideas that end by converting themselves in two, three or four recipes expressed alongside each other in a single service. The complication of the articulations exceeds all limits of the imagination. The abundance of factors at play oftentimes produces the superiority of the whole over the sum of its parts, flavor over the details. In short, this is a unique cuisine that has marked a nontransferable style, one that delights in proposing new flavor combinations without altering the conventional structures at any time. And if in the past this frequently produced shocking sapid confrontations, now the contrasts are much more attenuated, far from any controversy.
His inexhaustible creative capacity remains manifest in the compulsive changes one finds on the menu. Independent of the proposals offered, the best choice is to opt for the tasting menu or leave the artist to do his work. In any case, the extremely sophisticated collection of culinary fireworks created here always manages to surprise. This is certainly the case for the Perthuis asparagus with paprika spring onion julienne; orange carrots, yellow and red; melted gruyere slices; almond cream with lime and crab juice thickened with cereals. Or the red mullet stuffed eggplant, tomato and beet with garlic sablé paste; red pepper bouillabaisse broth; woodcock toast with sardine and chopped cucumber with dry wine. Or the calamari declension, three filets: one natural, another colored with chlorophyll and a third blackened with the ink, served with tomato-asparagus gnocchi; tuna and foie gras cubes with summer shellfish (cockles, razor clams and mussels) and a ribbon of beet juice… the centers of saddle of lamb with turnips, radishes, mixed greens and cooking juices with Roquefort.
The plate of diverse cheeses expressed in three formulas was interesting and the assortment of desserts was colossal, with nine proposals, among which the shot glass of lemon and cucumber was genius.
With regard to the rest, the service is excellent, matching the boundless, even excessive effort made in the kitchen.