DISHING IT OUT: Celebrated French chef Alain Ducasse, an avid collector of the finest porcelain tableware and antique table linens, invited some chaos into his restaurants at Maison Baccarat in Paris, collaborating on an unconventional lunch Friday with Russian architect and furniture designer Harry Nuriev, who never met an aluminum barbecue tray he didn’t like.
Famed for his DIY aesthetic and “silvering” technique, Nuriev set up a makeshift grocery store amid the main ballroom’s Rococo splendor, laying out a table that resembled a checkout conveyor belt, this one ferrying big jars of pickled vegetables, bundles of carrots, tins of olive oil, and a strawberry sponge cake too pretty to eat.
Related Articles
The walls were lined with grocery shelves laden with ingredients nicked from Ducasse’s kitchen, with a few bottles of Heinz ketchup thrown in to broadcast the theme, which was chaos.
You May Also Like
The dishes were unconventional, to say the least, starting with a stalk of raw asparagus carved to resemble a pencil that one could dip into a silver petri dish of flowers floating on olive oil butter. (It tasted better than it sounds.)
Guests also tucked into blobs of purple potato topped with bonito flakes, listed as “zombie tuna” on the silvery menu; jars of vegan foie gras to smear on torn chunks of baguette, and ultimately raspberries and avocado dipped in dark chocolate.
Nuriev’s miniature poodle Mishka perked up when chefs began feeding strips of raw duck into a big industrial grinder. The minced meat was scooped into serving dishes and then cooked with hot bullion that waiters poured out of silver tea pots.
Lunch conversation naturally drifted toward food, with Sarah Andelman sharing a new restaurant discovery in Stockholm with Nuriev, who duly began following its Instagram account.
“You can’t understand culture without knowing the food,” Nuriev said. “I’ve touched every single industry already in this beautiful country, and I’ve been happy to experiment with different creative environments, but food is something that I couldn’t do without Mr. Alain Ducasse.”
Nuriev, who has designed chandeliers and glassware for Baccarat, and provided a graffiti wall at the Maison Baccarat, is reputed to be a good cook. “I do simple things,” he said, biting into a seaweed madeleine from a tray and smiling conspiratorially: “It has garlic.”
Unconventional indeed.