ArpègeWicker chairs, an oak cart, a rose on the plate

Growing vegetables the way a grand cru is grown

Rue de Varenne, Paris 7e, France — A tasting menu built only on plants.

The kitchen cooks plants and nothing else. Vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers, with honey from the restaurant's own hives, make up the whole skeleton of the menu; there is no meat and no fish. Behind the kitchen are two gardens working with no chemical inputs at all, and the gardener brings the harvest into the city each day, so the menu follows what came in. The chef's line sits at the top of the official site: I want to make vegetables into a grand cru. It explains a great deal, including why a lunch can list nothing but tomato, leek, beetroot and aubergine, and why the same tomato comes to the table in several colours.

The two gardens sit in Normandy and in the Sarthe, one around an old house and one behind a hedge. The soils differ, clay in one and sand in the other, so watering and feeding are calculated separately and each plot keeps its own account of what it can grow.

Alain Passard came up through the rotisserie, cooking poultry low and slow for years before moving the kitchen onto vegetables. The room he works in now is on rue de Varenne: pale walls, oak carts, wicker arches, wicker chairs in green and beige, a hand-painted rose at the rim of every plate. Further in there is a small vaulted room, wooden ribs holding a barrel ceiling, the curved walls painted all over with flowers and plants.

Two rooms

The street-side room is tall, with narrow windows and white voile curtains dropped halfway. The walls are a very pale lilac-grey, the ceiling is wood, the openings between rooms are cut as wicker arches, and an oak cart stands beside a table on wheels sawn from solid rounds. Cloths fall to the floor, and every chair is wicker, green alternating with beige, the backs bent into a half circle.

Plates are white porcelain with a rose painted at the rim, and no two are quite the same colour. Further in, a second room runs under a barrel vault carried on timber ribs, the curved walls painted with flowers, leaves and fruit. A round table sits in the middle with wicker chairs around it, and a small door with gilded detail closes the far end.

The menu follows the harvest

The official site keeps three things apart: the carte, the lunch menu and the dinner menu. The lunch one is called Cuisine Terroir, and it carries no meat from the first course to the last, with a note at the end that it may shift with what the gardeners bring in that day. The note is printed rather than implied.

The change is not improvised. The gardens have their own team, picking and delivering by the day, and the kitchen cooks what arrives that morning. The chef has said that aubergine is handled one way in summer and turnip another in winter: the same hands doing different work in a different season. That is also why the lunch menu carries a note about shifting rather than a fixed list.