The best meal of my life was 2006-era Ducasse, when Christophe Moret was cooking at the Plaza Athénée, in Paris. This was nouvelle cuisine long matured: when sauces had lightened but still had heft; when Bresse chicken and Gariguette strawberries still made you swoon. When hospitality was so precise it included a fresh tablecloth for dessert and a silver tray of reading glasses at the ready (à la Taillevent). No Montblanc pens, sadly, because paying wasn’t the ceremony; everything else was. The vial of ginger consommé to ‘chase’ poached shrimp. Chicken livers served in a glass coupe. A crab head crowned with a foam made from its own innards. It convinced me I had to visit Ducasse’s other flagships.
So over the next decade, I did: to The Dorchester, in London, with Jocelyn Herland at the helm; then Le Meurice, where he moved after. By then, Ducasse’s obsession with clear but potent stocks had taken hold, as did the vegetable pots. The cooking became more cerebral, embracing bitter and floral notes. But not everything landed.
At their latest flagship in Macau —The Morpheus —Ducasse and his CDC Cedric Satabin scale back, striking a tenor that appeals to both bling-chasing casino prowlers gagging for caviar and jaded gastrotourists seeking something new.
A recent dinner here is referential but studied — and quietly showy. Beyond the classics — radishes dipped in warm butter, then chilled; a trio of dainty terrines — you’ll find three sauces with a faultless guinea fowl: an emulsion and two sets of jus (a consommé in a vial; and a headier double-boiled one), strawberries served macerated, confit, and plain; that vegetable pot, where manicured carrots, radishes, and courgettes are cooked separately, united in chicken lardo, then steamed in bouillon. The rum baba is as good as I remember. My favorite is Satabin’s take on vichysoisse, nested with jewel-sized cubes of potato crumb.
Yes, it all sounds a little safe. At times I longed for something more incongruent. No matter. That’s a Napeolon-era coupe you were sipping from, a maitre’d reminds you — as he ferries diners to the kitchen, where the magic of Ducasse is (very much) still alive.
