Chef Yannick Alléno on his UK debut
We speak to celebrated chef Yannick Alléno about making his culinary debut in the UK this summer with Pavyllon London and his drive to modernise French cooking.
Chef Yannick Alléno on his UK debut
We speak to celebrated chef Yannick Alléno about making his culinary debut in the UK this summer with Pavyllon London and his drive to modernise French cooking.
Those of us who eagerly make a reservation at Yannick Alléno’s new restaurant Pavyllon London – his first in the UK – will inevitably do so with certain expectations. After all, chef Yannick is a culinary heavyweight, having amassed no fewer than fifteen Michelin stars across fourteen restaurants worldwide and having been credited with modernising French cooking with his pioneering techniques. We will expect an experience, and though Yannick will no doubt deliver one, he is reluctant to label Pavyllon as such – instead, he likens it to a luxury bistro where, whether you are working, dining solo, celebrating an occasion or catching up with friends, you’ll feel at home.
‘People can expect to have a good time,’ he smiles. ‘I don’t want to say it’s an experience restaurant, though. I want to have a simple place, a very comfortable place. We work for the neighbourhood – that’s what the restaurant is made for, it’s made for the neighbourhood. I want people laughing, drinking. If you are alone you can speak with the team, if you are with friends you can have seats at the counter to talk to the chefs or if you want to be quiet you can have a spot for that, a table in the corner to ensure no-one can disturb you. It will be, I hope, a fantastic place to go.’
With restaurants in cities including Paris, Dubai, Monaco and Seoul, it feels long overdue for Yannick to be opening his first venture in London, but he says, now fifty-two, he feels ready to tackle the market. ‘London is a very competitive place and there are so many good chefs in the city, so many good restaurants and they are all fantastic,’ he says. ‘It’s one of the best levels of food you can have in the world, so you have to be sure that you come with the right concept, with the right partner and at the right time – and that is now.’
So, with the stage set, the much-anticipated Pavyllon London will open in the Four Seasons Hotel London in Park Lane, and will, Yannick says, champion laid-back luxury. The room will be dominated by a counter facing the open kitchen, seating thirty-six people, while the design – led by renowned decorator and designer Chahan Minassian – will ‘marry the chic conviviality of Parisian apartments with the louche feel of a British club’, a press release promises. The menu will be shaped by French gastronomy and share similarities with Pavyllon Paris, but will draw inspiration from seasonal British produce. ‘You are lucky in Britain to have so much good produce, including fish, vegetables, lamb and so on,’ Yannick says. ‘So of course we will work in that direction to make a local restaurant, but the style of Pavyllon will be there.’
That style will be underpinned by the pillars that have shaped chef Yannick's cooking, including fermentation, sauces (the most important element of any plate, he believes, connecting diners’ journey between ingredients) and extraction, a technique he developed in 2013 and which he has since patented. Put simply, an ingredient is cooked sous vide for hours at temperatures between 50°C and 88°C (beyond that, he says, and the minerality is destroyed), to create a flavoursome liquid which is then cryo-extracted (put even more simply, reduced by freezing – the water crystallises and pushes out what is essentially pure flavour). Yannick blends several of these extracts together to create new sauces, a process he uses with vegetables, meat, fish and even desserts. ‘It changed my life and that’s why I had so many stars because I used that technique,’ he explains. ‘We can use Dover sole for example, at 68°C in natural oil for four hours.' That extraction, once concentrated, could be blended with another of celeriac (cooked at 83°C for 12 hours), for example, creating an intensely-flavoured sauce.
A glance at Pavyllon London's menu shows how these techniques will be celebrated – there are vegetable raviolis with spring extraction broth and perfumed oils, as well as Yannick's interpretation of the French classic, cheese soufflé, steamed with Comté and celery extraction. For the main affair, there'll be aiguillette of sea bass with a celery extraction sauce and Pavyllon’s surf and turf, blue lobster and wagyu beef mille-feuille choron sauce beaten with toasted sesame oil. And though we often associate French cooking with indulgence, at Pavyllon it will be balanced with Yannick’s philosophy that chefs have a responsibility to their guests’ health; his recipes strip back the usual amounts of sugar, fat and salt, and he has even developed chocolates with incredibly low sugar levels. ‘Health has to be important for all of us, we have a huge responsibility,’ he says. ‘When people come in, they really want to be sure that you use the best of the best when it comes to produce. Today, we have six million diabetics in France, and it’s the same everywhere.’
Chef Yannick's hunger to cook has been life-long. He grew up in a family of chefs (his parents ran small bistros in the suburbs of Paris) and his grandmother taught him the fundamentals as a child. When he was fifteen, he initially learnt his craft from Gabriel Biscay at the Royal Monceau in Paris, before working under Roland Durand, Martial Enguehard and Louis Grondard. He headed up the kitchens of Scribe, where he earned his first Michelin star, and Le Meurice, before leaving in 2014 to take on Pavillon Ledoyen on the Champs-Elysées. Today, it is home to three-star Alléno Paris, two-star L'Abysse (a sushi counter opened with Yasunari Okazaki) and one-star Pavyllon Paris, a more casual concept focused on seasonality (his many other restaurants include the three-star 1947 in Courchevel). It's a remarkable career, and the opening of Pavyllon London simply marks the start of a new culinary chapter, of which there will no doubt be many more. After all, Yannick sums up, 'gastronomy is my passion'.
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