Have you ever thought of getting a larger place? 'It's possible to be flexible when you're only serving 25 people. At L'Astrance, we don't have a set menu. We cook what we feel like cooking. When chefs open their own restaurants, they dream of cooking what they want each night. I have everything a chef dreams of. If I'm in the mood to cook lobster, I cook lobster. If we go to the market and see nice cepes, we cook cepes. If the mackerel looks good, we make mackerel. We buy it and cook it - the customers can't choose their dishes. It's like cooking at home. When you go to a friend's house for dinner, they don't give you a menu. I cook as if I were cooking for me. I'm a guest in my own kitchen. With only 25 guests, I can manage that but if we were serving 50 to 60, it'd be difficult. We'd have to make everything the same and it's more difficult to manage.'
Why do you close three days a week? 'Our philosophy is that when Christophe [Rohat, the maitre d'] and I are not in the restaurant, we close it. It's so we can do things outside the restaurant and have a normal family life. I have a staff of 12 to 14 - very small, very atypical. We have six cooks, or eight, if we have stagiaires [interns]. With the restaurant open four days a week, we have the same staff every night we're open. This is good for consistency. But just because we're not open doesn't mean I'm not working. I teach at culinary schools such as [Ecole Superieure de Cuisine Francaise] Ferrandi and [Institut] Paul Bocuse, and I sometimes give private cooking classes to friends.'
Many of your dishes are both salty and sweet, why is that? '[Georges Auguste] Escoffier codified French cuisine, which is good. Other cuisines also have rules, including Chinese. It's nice to have rules but it's not enough. If you go outside the codes, it's much more interesting - you can experiment. Do we really have to make something that's salty or sweet? Why can't it be in the middle? When you go past the codes, you can do what you want.'
What do you eat for comfort? 'I love salads, vegetables and fruit. I love all the different textures. This doesn't come from my time at L'Arpege [whose chef, Alain Passard, is famed for vegetables]. I left there in 1998 and they started concentrating on vegetables in 2002. I travel a lot and in India, they have the best vegetarian food in the world. They cook the ingredients in so many different ways - it's so interesting. Chinese cuisine is good with vegetables, too. But in France, I can't understand why vegetables are always the garnish, never the focus of the dish. Why can't it be the main part of the dish? Why does it have to be secondary?'