The most copied chef in the world isn’t necessarily one you’ve heard of. But when a chef talks about using fresh, locally foraged ingredients you can be pretty sure the influence is Michel Bras of the eponymous restaurant now run by his son Sebastien.
Based in Laguiole, the restaurant is a three-hour journey from the nearest city and relies on seasonal produce from the Bras garden and ingredients indigenous to the mountains and plateau of the Massif Central in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France.
The restaurant the food elite claim to be the best in the world for 2010, Noma in Copenhagen, is noted for its use of only local ingredients (which means no chocolate or olive oil). It is also noted to be under the influence of Bras. The same goes for Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain, which uses flowers and vegetables and currently ranks as the world’s fifth best restaurant.
Closer to home, many top restaurants pay homage to Bras in some way: including Peter Gilmore at Quay in Sydney; Embrasse (the name itself being a homage to Bras) in Carlton; Circa, the Prince in St Kilda; and the Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld, regional Victoria.
In short, if flowers or seasonal vegetables are on the plate, think Bras. There are two main dishes for which Bras is noted. One is a rich, wintery dish called aligot; an elastic emulsion of mashed potato and cheese. The other is far more innovative – a lighter, gorgeous looking and tasting mix of some 40 different ingredients, known as gargouillou of young vegetables.
When he was in Sydney last, Sebastien gave some insight into the region from which he hails through a translator. “It’s a region known for cheese and charcuterie and not vegetables,” he says. “It’s a region that’s used to eating a lot of fat.”
“To offer a dish with vegetables wasn’t so easy. Year after year he [Michel, his father] had to work hard to keep gargouillou on the menu.”
Gargouillou is not the type of dish that even the most dedicated home cook – or chef for that matter – can easily recreate without being dedicated to gardening, foraging or hunting down difficult-to-find ingredients. In fact, it takes a dictionary of plants and vegetables for the common cook to even read the recipe.
Gargouillou does reflect the region with its use of local flowers and vegetables and has evolved over the 20 years since it was first served.
Bras describes it as a “liberated marriage” of different shapes, colours and tastes. Perennial vegetables such as asparagus have their stalks cut at the base and are scraped and cooked simply in salted water before being refreshed in cold water.
Stems and hard stalks are removed from seasonal leafy vegetables and flowers such as wild beet, blond and red orache, malabar spinach, comfrey and parsley and are cooked either in salted water or butter.
Similar treatment is doled out to Swiss chard, borage, broccoli, cauliflower, watercress, clover and chickweed.
Bulbs including garlic, shallots and small onions are peeled and blanched in a broth flavoured with coriander seeds, orange zest, bay leaf and aromatic oil. The root vegetables – carrots, turnips, chervil, water parsnips, wild parsnips, parsley root, pink radishes, celeriac and Jerusalem artichoke are peeled and cut lengthwise and blanched.
The list goes on for – and you should get the dictionary ready – the preparation of crapaudine, black radishes, salsify, crosne and conopode, burdock, bell flowers and rampion.
It includes vegetables with pods – saint fiacre, fava, flageolets, snow peas, snap peas, lentils, chickpeas and okra; as well as fruits which include cucumber, squash, zucchini, tomatoes (red or yellow and green).
And that’s before the preparation of various flavoured oils and other flourishes dripped and scattered onto the plate – parsley oil, country herbs, sprouts and crystal leaves. Finally, a dish that seems fit for vegetarians and vegans is made in to something for the omnivorous with the final injection of flavour with country ham fried in a deep pan deglazed with vegetable stock and butter.
And then it’s time to pause before the arrangement of the 40 ingredients on the plate to make a work of beauty.
The shadow of Michel Bras is a large one for any chef to live under, more so for his son Sebastien who now runs the kitchen. From a young age he says he was exposed to the smells and tastes of his father’s kitchen.
He says that he enjoys a style of cooking that is true to the region but not one that can be easily transferred to Paris, New York or Sydney.
“The cuisine is unique to the restaurant and its location. Cooking is about the man behind it and the territory. The style of cooking in Laguiole is unique,” he says. Yet he draws on influences from around the world, including Japan, where Bras also runs the Toya restaurant in Hokkaido.
Sebastien’s innovation is influenced from his travels through South America, most notably his use of the potato in a crisp corrugated sandwich of salted caramel – fingerlickin’ good enough for Masterchef judge Matt Preston when Bras was last in town.