TOUT SWEET

GILLES MARCHAL, the creative force behind La Maison du Chocolat, shares the confections of a chocoholic with JON WALL

GILLES MARCHAL may not have been destined from birth to become a chef, but boyhood memories of an enormous wooden dining table groaning with food and drink – including 500-gram boxes of caviar and bottles of Château Petrus – almost certainly played a part. Now creative director of Paris’ La Maison du Chocolat and already by his early forties a veteran of more than a quarter of a century in the pastry kitchen, his recollections of youth spent in the bountiful countryside of France’s north-eastern region of Lorraine resonate like an elegy to provincial village life.

“I was born in a country with strong links to food and gastronomy,” says Marchal during a recent visit to Hong Kong, where he worked with The Landmark Mandarin Oriental’s Richard Ekkebus to create a special chocolate-themed menu at the two-Michelinstarred Amber. “Lorraine is close to Alsace and Champagne, which is difficult, because these are two very prestigious neighbours, but it also has a lot to offer in terms of its own traditions, culture and products. And now that people are becoming more ‘precise’ in France, they’re beginning to discover that this region has plenty of beautiful things. There’s a deep-rooted food culture, and that, in turn, has been the cement for my own development as a chef.

“I come from a big family, six children on one side, nine children on the other, so I was used to family gatherings. In mid-August, mid-September, you have something in Lorraine that’s famous worldwide, the Mirabelle plum – la Mirabelle de Lorraine – and you have big family gatherings. I’d be climbing the trees, picking the plums, while other family members would be milking the cows, so there’s a tradition of festivities centred around food and nature.”

Indeed, when once asked by a French journalist who his favourite chef was, Marchal unhesitatingly responded that there were two: his grandmother and his mother. “I have a few early memories of cooking,” he says, “mostly with my grandmother. One is making a big chocolate mousse for 20 people on the wooden table, mixing the egg whites and the other ingredients. And after it was mixed, I remember dipping my finger into the mixture.” No surprise, then, that this self-same recipe forms the basis for the chocolate mousse La Maison du Chocolat now sells at its six boutiques around the world.

In a curious twist, Marchal’s father also worked for the French chocolate-maker Poulain, and the young Gilles visited the company’s factory at Blois in the Loire valley – a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory experience that he always brings up whenever children visit him in the kitchens of La Maison du Chocolat. This, he insists, is not some marketing flim-flam – and nor, to his credit, does he pretend it was a career-defining moment.

The latter, he says, “was what we call in French un concours de circonstances. When I was 11 years old we moved to another small village in Lorraine and I arrived during the school summer holidays. All my friends were in the old place and everyone had gone on holiday so I was on my own.

“There was what we call un itinérant, a baker moving from town to town with his little van, and he was called Jean-Louis Marchal, the same family name as ours. After talking now and again for three or four days, he asked if I wanted to help him. And that was when I really got the taste for baking and pastrycooking. He proposed that I’d start to work for him, but my parents said, ‘Certainly not, you have to begin at three o’clock in the morning, you’re still at school, it’s out of the question that you do that so young, so, no.’

“But I wanted to do it, and after I’d been mulling it over for a few days I finally decided. So I jumped from my bedroom window to the garage roof, and then down to the street. I’d been doing it for a few days until one day I was caught by a gendarme, who, for sure, brought this young, 11-year-old kid home.”

When his parents discovered that he’d been sneaking out in the small hours helping their namesake for several days, they relented, telling him that if he really wanted to become a pâtissier he had their blessing, but on the condition that he remain at school until he was at least 15 years old. “When I reached that age,” he says, “I wasn’t motivated and my marks had collapsed a bit, so I left and went to work.”

Starting, like so many top chefs, at the bottom, Marchal worked his way up through the pastry kitchen, earning diplomas in chocolate-, dessert and ice-cream-making, and eventually ending up as a pastry chef in such venerable institutions as Paris’ Hotel Bristol and the Plaza Athenée. That all-round experience proved invaluable for his move to La Maison du Chocolat.

“At a palace-hotel,” says Marchal, “you have to be quite good at everything. You may not be perfect, but you must be pretty complete and pretty good. When I applied to La Maison du Chocolat, they told me, ‘We don’t need a chocolate-maker, we don’t need a pastry chef, but we need someone who knows all the different sides and who can create. We want somebody with the broad vision.’

While the move may have brought new challenges, many had a familiar ring. “Making chocolate,” he says, “is very similar to making pastry. It’s very precise. When you make mille feuille, within two hours the taste changes, because it’s collapsing. Now my job is to be able to create a dessert that can last for one day in a shop. It has to be good, fresh and delicious throughout that day. And that’s a challenge.

“If you don’t make a mille feuille at the last moment, just before it’s about to be served, it’s impossible to make a good one.”

Marchal, whose craggy yet boyish features and dishevelled red-blond hair give him a passing resemblance to Boris Becker, says he doesn’t know whether that makes him a perfectionist, but he does insist that things are done properly and on time. “If there’s been structure and precision in its preparation,” he says, “there’s no surprise when you prepare a meal and everybody around the table likes it. Even when my grandmother baked a tart, she didn’t make it two days in advance but in the morning, for lunch or for dinner on the same day. And with this way of doing things, you use the best ingredients, you do it on time and you do it precisely.”

Being the creative director at La Maison du Chocolat doesn’t mean that Marchal actually makes the chocolate. There are, he explains, two main areas in the chocolate industry. “The first is the people who buy the beans and transform them into big tablets – bars of chocolate. They’re known as couverturiers – in other words, they make the chocolate ‘covers.’

“The second kind of people use this chocolat de couverture to transform it, to mix it with cream, with fresh ingredients, and create small, fine chocolates. La Maison du Chocolate is the second kind. It’s like in a restaurant like [Amber], when you’re a chef you’re selecting the finest ingredients from all around the world to make your creations. We do the same.”

Nonetheless, Marchal works closely with his couverturiers, and in particular the famed house of Valrhona, sometimes travelling across the world with them to plantations where he selects the beans he intends to use during the following year.

“Although Valrhona is an industrial processor of beans,” he says, “we work with them so they can create exactly the chocolate we want. In 2009, I went with them to Venezuela, where we saw one plantation where everything was burned, the people were roasting too much and it was absolutely not good. But next door at Chuao it was incredible – they produce just 15-20 tonnes [of cocoa] each year. It’s during this kind of trip that I can really understand what I want.”

This can either mean creating a blend of chocolates, a complicated assemblage that can take as long a two years to achieve the right balance, or using a single-plantation chocolate, such as Chuao.

Marchal clearly revels in these travels, revealing that he loves mixing with the locals, staying with them in their villages and constantly discovering new ingredients and culinary traditions. Indeed, his efforts with Ekkebus at Amber prove that there’s surprisingly very little – savoury or sweet – that doesn’t go with chocolate, though I wonder whether there’s any ingredient that’s so far stumped him.

“I don’t want to say that some ingredients don’t go with chocolate,” he says, “because if you really work on it you can always find the right balance, even though it’s difficult to reach. And then you don’t necessarily eat chocolate in the morning, or smoke a cigar or open a bottle of Petrus.

“I’ll give you the example of the lychee. The fruit is naturally so good that it’s very difficult to find a balance – and for the moment I haven’t found it. But given enough time, creativity and inspiration, everything is possible.”