12 Facts About Alain Passard

Alain Passard is a French chef and owner of the three michelin star restaurant L'Arpege in Paris.

Alain Passard began his career at Le Lion d'Or in Liffre from 1971 to 1975 under the Michelin-starred Breton Chef Michel Kerever.

In 1980, at Le Duc d'Enghien at the Enghien Casino, Alain Passard received two Michelin stars at the age of 26.

Alain Passard inspired Japanese chef Fumiko Kono, training her to become a chef and teaching that colors, shapes, odors, and taste must be rigorously selected so that artistry can emerge from the quality of the product.

Alain Passard renamed it L'Arpege, in tribute to his love for music, and gave it an Art Deco style interior.

In 2001, Alain Passard had grown uninspired by cooking meat, and introduced for the first time in a three-star restaurant, at least in France, menus that would put vegetables at the centre of the plate, effectively banning meat from his restaurant.

Alain Passard later reintroduced meat and fish, but in smaller doses.

Alain Passard has been planning his menu based on the seasons, sourcing natural and organically grown products from artisans and farmers, including his own: Alain Passard's desire to work with quality products led him to create three "kitchen gardens".

Alain Passard is a prolific visual artist working in the medium of collage, amongst other media.

In recognition of the unique visual qualities of his plates together with his collages, Passard collaborated with art historian Emily L Spratt to create a gastronomic algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to explore the relationship between sight and taste, and the interaction of all of the senses with the primary sense of vision, in the act of creativity itself.

Together they produced machine-generated images of collages in the style of Alain Passard based on the photographs of the Michelin plates, and experimented with portraiture in an attempt to produce an artwork inspired by the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

Alain Passard is the first chef to use AI to explore the visual qualities of his plates with an art historian and computer scientist.