PARIS — After shaking up French gastronomy with his campaign to revive the popularity of sauces, Michelin-starred chef Yannick Alléno is bringing his patented extraction process to the world of chocolates.
Alléno, who runs prestigious restaurants including the Pavillon Ledoyen in Paris, has partnered with his pastry chef Aurélien Rivoire to launch chocolate brand Alléno & Rivoire, which opened its first boutique in Paris in December.
The two have brought techniques honed in the kitchen to their new venture. While the shells of their confections are made of conventional chocolate, the fillings break with tradition, in that they don’t use any cream or sugar, making for a treat that allowed one diabetic customer to taste chocolate for the first time in 20 years.
Related Articles
“We are on the cusp of zero sugar,” Alléno tells WWD, noting his chocolates contain around 7 percent sugar, compared to an industry average of 25 percent to 50 percent. “We’ve invented a new kind of chocolate, because the only thing you can change with chocolates is what’s inside.”
You May Also Like
Innovation is something of a passion for the chef, who launched his Modern Cuisine culinary movement in 2013, based on two key pillars: sauces and fermentation. Both are based on cooking food at the right temperature to bring flavors to the fore, while his extraction technique uses vacuum and cryo-extraction instead of heat.
“We just did an extraction of Jerusalem artichoke that we cooked for 72 days,” he says, clearly delighted. “If we combine that with chocolate, we’re going to obtain a sweet that has an incredible depth of taste.”
The method allows him to propose his Trèfle chocolates, shaped like a clover leaf, in surprising flavors, including a “Bouquet of wild herbs” made by infusing cocoa juice with lovage parsley, French marigold, verbena and basil.
He and Rivoire have created a technique for making candied fruit without saccharose. “The last treaty on candied fruit was written by Nostradamus in 1555. Since then, there’s been no evolution in candied fruit. It’s incredible,” Alléno remarks.
“Our candied fruit could not be more eco-friendly. Why? Because you capture the fruit when it reaches maturity, you apply an intelligent method of conservation, and after that, you can preserve it all year without using energy,” he adds.
Alléno sees himself as a natural-born disruptor. He says his research into sauces has added to the canon established by Auguste Escoffier when he wrote his definitive culinary guide in 1903.
“I don’t know if it’s pretentious to say this, but I’m a bit like Escoffier. I want reforms,” Alléno says, referring to the famed chef’s drive to modernize French cuisine. “Gastronomy needs to change course in order to move into the 21st century.”
Alléno heads an empire of 11 restaurants worldwide in locations including Monaco, Courchevel, Seoul, Marrakech and Dubai, with a combined 13 Michelin stars among them.
With many of his eateries closed for months during the coronavirus pandemic, an unprecedented situation for restaurateurs, he got to work on a self-published manifesto called “Tout doit changer!” (“Everything Must Change!”), which tackles everything from the well-being of kitchen and waiting staff to the customer experience.
He traces this bout of soul-searching back to his sexist gaffe at a 2019 conference organized by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, where he explained the absence of female chefs by saying that many women were busy looking after their children. “We men are lucky. It’s in women’s DNA to give birth,” he said at the time, triggering a hailstorm of protests from female chefs on social media.
“I spoke out of turn and I apologized publicly, and I continue to do so, because it was so clumsy of me,” he says now. “I still feel bad about it.”
He says the experience made him question his vision of the industry. “At the end of the day, I deserved my comeuppance, but it opened my eyes to things I had never thought about before, so I think it’s made me a better person,” he says.
Alléno had been dogged in the past by a reputation for being tough on his teams. These days, he positions himself as a leader for positive change. He argues that faced with a massive staff exodus during the pandemic, the restaurant trade has to shed its image as a school of hard knocks if it wants to attract young talents.
He’s setting the example with Alléno Paris, the 45-seat restaurant inside the historic Pavillon Ledoyen building on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées that in 2015 earned him his second three-star rating in the coveted Michelin Guide, only seven months after opening.
He admits that when he took over in 2014, the kitchen was a hellhole with temperatures that routinely reached 122 degrees Fahrenheit, rising to more than 140 degrees in summer. “It was a metal box with a stove in the middle,” he recalls. “You’d knock through a wall, and there were mice everywhere.”
In addition to renovating the premises, he’s implemented a number of innovative measures to lower stress levels, reduce food waste and improve the customer experience. Among them is the table concierge service, whereby guests are consulted before they arrive about their tastes and preferences, possible food allergies and special requests, in order to agree on a menu ahead of time.
“We have to do things differently,” he says. “It’s also an economic solution for the restaurant. Everyone says restaurants don’t make money. Well, yes, but maybe that’s because we need to change the methodology.”
He’s aware that his approach runs counter to the craze for tasting menus accompanied by elaborate rituals at the table. “We must focus on taste and not on spectacle,” he argues. “I think that experiential restaurants are losing steam.”
He recounts dining in New York City with his wife Laurence and arriving a little after the guests at the next table. “We could see in advance everything we were going to have. It’s a little bit like watching a movie and getting the sound before the image,” he says. “To me, that’s not what a great restaurant is about. A great restaurant is about extreme personalization and discretion.”
At Alléno Paris, tables are separated by screens embroidered by the Chanel-owned workshop Montex to ensure privacy.
Behind the scenes, the chef has introduced what he calls participatory planning, allowing staff to have input on their schedules in order to have a better work-life balance. There’s a mentorship program for trainees, and he’s hired seven people with disabilities, including a deaf pastry chef who communicates with the rest of the team via tablet.
Women are still a minority, accounting for 35 percent of the staff at Pavillon Ledoyen, even though they represent more than half of students at culinary schools like the Institut Paul Bocuse.
Alléno partly blames the high cost of living, which prohibits staffers from living close to their workplace, which he says can make it unsafe to return home late at night. He wants to introduce a 15 percent tax that would boost net pay for everyone from dishwashers to maitre d’s.
But he notes that overall, working conditions have become less physically demanding, making the job more accessible to a wide range of people. For instance, when he was head chef at the Meurice hotel, he worked with French carmaker Citroën to develop carbon serving platters to replace the heavy silver trays that busboys were lugging up and down stairs all day.
In an open letter in the daily newspaper Le Monde in December, Alléno called for a consultation between industry representatives, food producers, consumers, health experts and government officials to usher in more widespread reforms of the beleaguered restaurant sector. “Let’s not waste a unique opportunity to reinvent ourselves,” he pleaded.
The chef, who left school at 15, sees gastronomy as a terrific opportunity for social advancement. “You can come in through one door, and out through another,” he says. “Just because you start as a waiter doesn’t mean you’ll be a waiter your whole life.”
That’s why the 53-year-old plans to dedicate the remainder of his career to mentoring future generations. “I want to do good today, as much for my customers as for my staff and this profession,” he says.