Pierre Koffmann: an exclusive interview

the term ‘slow food’ can sometimes be misinterpreted but it really just means ‘good food’, ‘traditional food’. Hopefully the idea of local seasonal ingredients is here to stay. It starts with the farmers and realising what fantastic products you’ve got. Whereas in the past it was about who had the biggest onions, the biggest carrots, the biggest leeks, now people are beginning to realise it’s not about having the biggest but having the best. In Britain you have absolutely fantastic products; it’s an island so you have all the fish you want; you’ve got brilliant meat; the vegetables are not quite there yet, but it’s coming. Some of the produce is limited by the weather but what you’ve got is really nice. Nowadays people are going to the woods to pick English mushrooms where before nobody would do that; and of course products like scallops and langoustine are unique and lead the world. Before, everything was going to France so if you wanted to buy British langoustine you had to call France; they were going from Scotland to Paris and from Paris back to London! You enjoy reading cookbooks; do you have a favourite? My favourite cookbook is Escoffier. You’ve got everything you want in it. Sometimes you get people saying that something is their own recipe because they call it ‘fillet of sole with cucumber’ but if you go to Escoffier you find exactly the same recipe but it’s called ‘Dorian’ because at the time they gave the recipes girls’ names. As a young chef, you only need one book – Escoffier. Where do you like to eat out in the UK? There are many places; it depends on the occasion. We recently went to a fantastic pub in Milton Keynes called The Crooked Billet. There’s another fantastic place in London called Hereford Road; it’s a small restaurant with simple food – absolutely brilliant. La Petite Maison is another place we go, also Le Colombier and Brasserie Chavot. There’s a lot of choice; it’s not like when I came 40 years ago; now you have a big choice of restaurants, as big as any capital in the world. Which chefs in the UK are doing particularly exciting things at the moment? There are a few fantastic chefs. There is a beautiful restaurant – sadly I don’t go there often enough because it’s too far – which is Le Champignon Sauvage in Cheltenham. Eric Chavot is another brilliant chef; up in Scotland you have Tom Kitchin who is another great chef; the head chef of La Petite Maison, Raphael [Duntoye], is an amazing chef as well. There are a lot of great chefs around; they’re doing the things they like to eat and that’s the most important thing. The problem is you’ve got a lot of chefs that don’t enjoy eating and they just cook food that is fashionable; it’s okay but there’s a little something missing in the taste. I like to go places where the chefs cook what they like to eat. British cooking has come a long way since you first arrived; does it still have some way still to go? I think people need to stop following fashion quite so much. It’s like suddenly everyone is using beetroot. Before nobody was using beetroot; now everyone’s using it. A lot of people are looking at what’s happening in Peru or Brazil and they get a lot of publicity for it because people like to eat what’s fashionable but taste sometimes gets forgotten; it’s a bit of a case of the emperor’s new clothes. You are well-known for not being particularly worried about Michelin stars anymore; do you think too many chefs nowadays are too obsessed with chasing stars? Yes, but I can understand it; it’s quite a competitive business and you want to be the best but people don’t realise that being the best is having a full restaurant and happy customers. Everyone wants their name in the red guide because then they are part of an elite, but I’ve been there myself so I can’t really criticise anyone else. You love your traditional French dishes; are there any traditional British dishes that you particularly like? As I said before we went to The Crooked Billet pub recently and had traditional roast beef and it was fantastic; I was very happy; it was just how a pub should be – good quality food and a simple environment. A Frenchman enjoying roast beef? There are only two types of food – good food and bad food! I love Chinese food, Indian, anything as long as it is good. You originally came to Britain for the rugby; do you still go to Twickenham to watch England v France and how many times have you been? Many, many times, at one stage we used to go every year – one year in London, one year in Paris. The funny thing is that now we have many English rugby players coming to the restaurant like Martin Johnson and all that team and now we are friends – all those years ago we were enemies and now we are friends! Could you ever see yourself going back to Gascony and opening a restaurant, maybe having a small farm like your grandparents? No, I’m 65 years old now and I think my best years are behind me; I’m on the wrong side of the slide! England is my home now. We go to France three or four times a year and that is absolutely perfect for us.