Food challenge: how to eat 9 Michelin stars of fine cuisine in 3 days

Tristan Rutherford roams the French Riviera and Monaco to sample the best dishes from 5 restaurants which between them have been awarded 9 stars by the famed gourmets’ guide

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Duck with onion compote at Mirazur. Photo: Mirazur

Published: 8:00pm, 28 Jan 2016Updated: 12:39pm, 1 Feb 2016

It’s going to be a difficult day at work. I’m lunching alone at Nice’s Michelin one-star restaurant, Flaveur. In front of me sits a fishy amuse-bouche fantasy. There’s parsnip mouse topped with tobiko (flying fish) eggs. There’s melt-on-the-tongue mackerel on a giant seaweed “chip”. Plus a luminous yellow cube of haddock on a mousse of citron caviar. And a perfect square of trout gravlax on a perfectly round coriander biscuit.

Interior of Flaveur in Nice. Photo: Rebecca Marshall

But that’s not the difficult part. My problem is that I have another Michelin-starred dégustation in Nice this evening. And another two-star tasting menu near Italy tomorrow. And another in Monaco the day after that.

My Michelin missionis to eat nine stars in three days as deadline dawns on a guidebook project. That I fail in this and manage “only” six stars isn’t through lack of trying.

Fortunately, I’m on the French Riviera. This coastal strip is one of the few places in the world outside London, Paris, New York and Hong Kong where such a dining challenge is possible. My real fear is fitting in up to 6,000 calories per day. I have no choice but to press on.

Dashi custard and chioggia beetroot with wasabi sorbet, borage and tatsoi greens, served with veal loin and soy sauce at Flaveur. Photo: Rebecca Marshall

Back at Flaveur, the restaurant’s young head chefs, brothers Gaël and Mickaël Tourteaux, serve me another new invention every 20 minutes. There’s a three-layer carpaccio – petal-thin raw chestnuts above field mushrooms above beef brisket, perched on a bone marrow risotto. Then a seasonal taste of venison with umami-rich plum and black garlic dumplings, a juniper mousse that smacks of a Christmas gin and tonic. Elder brother Gaël Tourteaux joins me for dessert: a pear, cardamom and nutmeg display of ice creams, jellies and biscuits, all coloured the same stone grey like a winter garden.

Where did he learn to do this? “There’s simply a wealth of Michelin-starred restaurants on the French Riviera,” says Tourteaux. “I learnt my skills in Le Chantecler. My younger brother Mickaël practised at the Moulin de Mougins [a nearby legendary two-star where superchef Alain Ducasse learnt his trade].”