Jean-Michel Diot lives for this, and this lives in him. And when his body balked at the billion tiny movements required of a chef every night, he found another way.
The renowned chef’s muscle memory is tuned to decades of côte de boeufs and the 200-year-old recipe he inherited for his (absolutely incredible) snails. His hands, altered by tartares. Any wrinkles that may come, blame the rare broken sauce.
“Cooking is my greatest passion,” says the bicyclist-thin, gray-haired Frenchman, translated through his wife and partner at his La Jolla restaurant, Bistro du Marché. “To learn this profession, one must be receptive to what nature offers us, master its techniques, and have a willingness to share knowledge with one another. Technique is reflected in gestures which can be repetitive, adapted to recipes, or acquired skills.”
Health hurdles come for us all, and Diot’s put a hitch in the precision he’d mastered in 2- and 3-star Michelin kitchens, mentored by some of cooking’s greatest names, like Fernand Point (considered the father of modern French cuisine) and Michel Guérard. Diot lost the sensitivity in his hands, that touch that made him famous when he and chef friends founded Park Bistro in NYC, the only French bistro to receive three stars from the New York Times.
It wobbled the precision that made his restaurant Les Halles equally renowned. (When he sold his share of Les Halles and moved to San Diego in 1997, his former partner hired a journeyman cook named Anthony Bourdain, who would write Kitchen Confidential in the house Diot built.)
“I had to adapt my practice in order to continue transmitting my knowledge, and ideas to my environment,” he says. “My kitchen team became my hands.”
So with meals at Bistro du Marché, he works through the hands of executive chef Amélie Gadoum, who perfectly executes a loup de mer in citrus beurre blanc, the delicate filet topped with crispy-thin potato medallions, so that it looks like scales. And through pastry chef Estefanía Crawford, whose “Floating Island” (a classic dumbly jettisoned) is a central cloud of poached meringue in caramel sauce, creme anglaise, and toasted almonds. A fairly dreamy thing without modern futzing.
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“This completely transformed my relationship to cooking from a gestural approach to a mental approach,” Diot says. “I wasn’t ready for this change, but I’ve always loved challenges. You just have to learn to make the best of what life offers you. Despite this struggle, my passion for this profession remains intact, just adaptable.”
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