If anyone is up for a smell test, it would be Jordi Roca. The pastry chef of Spanish restaurant El Cellar de Can Roca not only wears Terre d’Hermes as his cologne of choice, he also manifests it as plated dessert: a chocolate covered patchouli ice cream with a hazelnut mousse and orange sauce that somehow “tastes” like the perfume.
“Scent,” writes Patrick Suskind in his novel “Perfume,” “is the brother of breath.” It is the first sense we use after taking in that initial inhale as a newborn, but no chef has approached it with such dedication as Roca. He’s earned three Michelin stars and his restaurant placed fifth on the list for the San Pellegrino’s World’s Best Restaurants in 2009. It was coincidentally in Grasse, the setting for Suskind’s story, where I got hold of the three bottles of perfume. One is a best-seller from France’s oldest perfumerie, Galimard. Another is a fragrance I mixed up myself in a touristy perfume lab. And the last is a concoction my husband made as a gift for me.
Without knowing which scent was which, the challenge to the chef, who was in Hong Kong as part of the Mandarin Oriental’s visiting chef program, was to get into our minds and our stomachs, using nothing but his nose. What is the personality of the maker behind each perfume? And what dessert would he create for each of them? Grown men would crumble at this kind of off-the-grid experimentation, but Jordi has seen teams of scent-makers at Givaudan (the world’s largest fragrance manufacturer) graft the DNA of flowers and fruits while they are still connected at the stem, so as to capture the “living” aromas. He confronts each scent without hesitation, in the same way I’ve seen Le Nez (French for “the nose,” a title given to the head perfumer) do so. Eyes looking to the distance so as not to distract his sense of smell. Deep breaths followed by shorter ones, and pauses in between, to let the bouquet bloom fully. An exhale, and his verdict:
Sample 1: Notes of melon, green apple, citrus, and lemon thyme; a gentle, soft-spoken and delicate person; suitable for a velvety mousse dessert.
Sample 2: More complex with notes of orange blossom, honey, cardamom, and a peppery kick; a fresh, spontaneous and outgoing personality; suitable for an icy sorbet dessert.
Sample 3: “The kind of dessert I’d most likely eat,” says the chef, with notes of red fruits, blackberry, caramel, vanilla, and exotic passion fruit; someone friendly, a “calinosa” (the Spanish word best translates to a “huggable person”); suitable for a hot and cold dessert of pan-fried fruits over ice cream.
Here’s the answer key: 1-me; 2-Galimard; 3-my husband. The chef picked the perfume I made as the one from Galimard (a triumph for a first time perfumer). And I’ll never peel away the layers behind his insights to figure out whether he thinks my husband is a “huggable person” or if my husband wants me to be more “huggable” by wearing his perfume. What is for certain though is that the mind of Jordi Roca interprets aromas culinar-ily. He understands that it’s not about the actual formula that goes into the perfume mixture, but the characteristics of fruit and floral that they bring out. There are no berries in red wine, yet it often registers such on the palette. And although we don’t breath in sugar, there’s an undeniable sweetness to the scent of a rose.
The chef’s inspiration—scents—is something that is the unseen, indescribable, and unforgettable. Yet the beauty of what he creates delights your eyes, soothes your taste buds, speaks to your soul, and touches your heart. If only words on paper could emit this level of sensory overload. So far, scratch-n-sniff doesn’t even come close.
Stay updated on the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong’s visiting chef’s series for more chefs like Jordi.