The Table
The deadline came before the cooking. When Alain Ducasse took over the kitchen of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte-Carlo, Prince Rainier III and the Société des Bains de Mer, which owns the hotel, set him a single condition: three Michelin stars within four years, or the venture had failed. He opened Le Louis XV in May 1987, aged 33, with that clock already running.
The stars came in 1990, about 33 months after the first service, and well inside the four years he had been given. It was the first time any restaurant housed in a hotel had been awarded three. The guide that reserved its top rank for free-standing temples of French cooking gave it to a room off a hotel lobby, under gilt and a painted ceiling built for a different century.
A hotel restaurant was supposed to be a convenience for the guest. Ducasse set out to make one the reason you booked the room in the first place.
What he served there owed little to the old Parisian grammar. It read the coast outside the window instead: vegetables off the Riviera markets, fish landed that morning, olive oil where another chef would have reached for butter. He put the garden and the sea near the centre of the plate at a point when protein still sat squarely in the middle of fine dining, and the shift was quietly radical.
The record since has not run in a straight line, which is part of what makes the room worth watching. Le Louis XV lost a star in 1997 and won it back the following year, then lost the third again in 2001 and regained it in 2003. Three stars is a verdict renewed each season, never a trophy fixed to the wall, and the most storied kitchens are the ones that have had to earn it twice.
We came back to Monte-Carlo this week for two tables. One was Le Louis XV. The other was Blue Bay, the two-star room a short walk away where Marcel Ravin cooks a line that runs from the Caribbean through the Mediterranean. Read side by side they chart how far the principality's dining has moved in thirty-six years, and how much of that distance began in a single gilded room above the Place du Casino.
I was in Tokyo, and the Michelin guide called my office in Monaco. I said, thank you very much. Bye bye.
Alain Ducasse, on learning of the 1990 award (to Spear's)
