Ducasse: Best Restaurant in Paris?

I recently reviewed the 2007 edition of the Michelin Guide to Paris (click here to read the review.) I wasn't surprised to see the name of Alain Ducasse at the top of the list (purely alphabetically!) of the ten best Paris restaurants which this year have earned the coveted three Michelin stars.

Just how special is three Michelin stars? Well, I've been fortunate enough to sample Alain Ducasse's food twice, and let's just say that if the food fairy waved her magic wand and offered to treat me to a meal in any restaurant in the world, I would be on the Eurostar heading for Alain Ducasse at Plaza Athenee.

My first Alain Ducasse meal was at his previous restaurant at 59 avenue Raymond-Poincare, while I was researching the Paris title in the 'Time for Food' guidebook series which I created for Thomas Cook. I'll save the story of the creation of that series for another day's blog, but my stomach has been forever grateful for the idea.

At that first meal I can still remember the wonderful black truffle soup and his spectacular signature starter of langoustines with caviar. Before the meal I was privileged to meet the great man himself, who I was interviewing for The Independent newspaper. I recall him seeming to be nonchalant about how you achieve not just high standards but such consistency, in two places, day after day. He likened the kitchen staff to an army, and said that a recipe was a recipe, and if you followed it exactly, you got the exact same results every time.

On a later visit to Paris I was researching Dorling Kindersley's Top Ten Paris guide with my wife, Donna Dailey, and there was no doubt where I wanted to take her for the highlight of the visit, as a reward for all the street-pounding hard slog that goes into researching a guidebook. By now Alain Ducasse had moved into his new restaurant at the Hotel Plaza Athenee, a more stylish and modern place than his previous kitchen, but the food was, if possible, even better.

We were having the tasting menu, and I suggest that if you're ever eating at Alain Ducasse, you hang the expense and do the same. The langoustines and caviar were still on the menu, the kind of dish where on the first bite you squirm with pleasure from the perfect combination of two of the most delicious flavors on earth. Course after course the dishes kept on coming, but never so big that you felt over-indulged.

The final course was the dessert of Baba aux Rhum. Yes, rum baba, a dish that used to be on English menus when I was a kid. But it never tasted like this, nor was it ever served in the way that Alain Ducasse's waiters presented it. I won't spoil the theatrical surprise, but it was the perfect climax to the best meal I've ever eaten in my life. Gordon Ramsay? The two best meals I've ever eaten in Britain. But Alain Ducasse? The two best meals I've ever eaten anywhere in the world. In Paris, of course.

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Visit the Alain Ducasse website.

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