Biography
Alain Ducasse is an iconic chef with decades in the business, several restaurants under his belt, and an eponymous restaurant group with its hand in everything from actual restaurant operations to consultancy to cooking schools and beyond, Ducasse is a verifiable culinary force. He operates a number of restaurants including Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester which holds three stars (the top ranking) in the Michelin Guide. The name Alain Ducasse has become synonymous with fine dining.
He was born in Orthez, but educated on a farm in Castel-Sarrazin in southwestern France. He began his culinary journey in 1972 with an apprenticeship at the Pavillon Landais restaurant in Soustons. From there, Ducasse sweated his way through the ranks of several French kitchens, eventually landing at Moulin de Mougins where he began playing with the contours of the Provençale cuisine for which he is now so very, very well known.
Head chef positions followed, and soon enough Ducasse was earning his first Michelin stars as executive chef of La Terrasse in Juan-les-Pins in 1984. More stars would follow. As chef de cuisine for the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, Ducasse helped earn Louis XV three stars-making it the first hotel restaurant to earn three stars in the history of the guide.
Ducasse would maintain strong ties to the hotel world, opening his own inn in Provence in 1995 and opening his own restaurants in hotels from Paris to New York City's own Essex House Hotel.
Alain Ducasse's restaurants, cooking schools, cookbooks, and consulting activities had revenues of $15.9 million in 2002. Since that time, Ducasse has been expanding his reach. Alain Ducasse has also opened a cooking school for the general public in Paris and another for chefs (ADF), which also works for the European Space Agency to develop astronaut meals to be taken into space.
In 2005, Ducasse opened his first Asian restaurant in Tokyo, Japan.
With restaurants stretching from Tokyo to Las Vegas, a slew of important cookbooks, and legions of chefs training in his kitchens across the globe, Ducasse is slowly working his way towards a culinary version of world domination.
Nowadays this culinary mastermind is more CEO than chef as he oversees the day-to-day operations of his Alain Ducasse Group, an entrepreneurial outfit that includes his restaurants, inns, cooking schools, and consulting activities. In 2002 alone, the group brought in revenues of $15.9 million, and it is showing no signs of slowing down. Ducasse now has 14 restaurants in seven countries, including France, England, the United States, Lebanon, Japan, Mauritius, and Saint-Tropez, making him the first French chef to truly go global.
