The Five Seasons Kitchen

In 2015 Pierre Gagnaire, whose 11 restaurants worldwide boast two and three Michelin stars, was voted ‘Best Chef in the World’ by his peers and 2016 sees him mark 50 dazzlingly creative and successful years in the kitchen. To celebrate this outstanding career Grub Street is delighted to be publishing his new title La Cuisine des 5 Saisons in English. This beautiful book is about his recipes and his work as a chef and for the first time makes his dishes accessible for home cooks. Why is it called Five Seasons? Five seasons because for chef Gagnaire there are five not four seasons; Spring, he says must be divided into two seasons because you don't have the same produce in March and in June. Thus the recipes in this book follow the rhythm of the seasons and their bounty. In each chapter there are six menus with starter, main dish and dessert. The recipes come from Pierre Gagnaire's culinary repertory and these are the recipes which made him famous. Through the recipes one can see the strong worldwide influence in Pierre Gagnaire's cuisine, cooking with every kind of ingredient. His eponymous restaurant at 6 rue Balzac in Paris (in the 8th arrondissement) specializes in modern French cuisine, and has garnered three Michelin stars. He is an iconoclastic chef at the forefront of the fusion cuisine movement by introducing jarring juxtapositions of flavors, tastes, textures, and ingredients. On his website he gives his mission statement as ‘facing tomorrow but respectful of yesterday’. Gagnaire is also Head Chef of Sketch in London. In 2005 both restaurants were ranked in the S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants by industry magazine Restaurant, with Pierre Gagnaire ranking third for three consecutive years (2006, 2007, and 2008). In December 2009, Gagnaire made his United States debut with Twist, a new flagship restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental in Las Vegas, which has since received great critical praise and a Forbes Five-Star Award. He now also has restaurants in Hong Kong, Seoul, Dubai, Tokyo, Berlin, and Moscow.