From thestaffcanteen.com
Born and trained in France, with classic cookery techniques, Alexis worked under the likes of Dominque Le Stanc and Alain Ducasse early on, before moving to London in 1998.
His restaurant Roussillon quickly caught attention and was awarded a Michelin star in 2000.
Alexis had always been keen to include well-thought-out vegetarian options on his menus, including when opening Gauthier Soho in 2010.
But after turning vegan around a decade ago, he set about the mission to also remove animal products from across his menu at his restaurant.
“What inspired me to turn my traditional French restaurant into a plant-based gastronomic restaurant? There were a lot of factors that came into consideration,” Alexis explained.
“First was people outside my restaurant complaining about me using foie gras and me listening to them and starting to wonder as a chef what impact I was having on the world of animals on this planet.
“And from that I decided to first remove foie gras. That was in 2013, I think. Then I started to look into the relationship between chefs and animals and I read a fantastic French book about spaceism. When I closed the book, I said with what I know, what I've read and really what I know about animal consciousness, I'm not going to touch, I'm not going to eat and I'm not going to profit from the death of animals anymore, for the rest of my life.
“So it was from one day to the other.”
He continued: “But obviously there was a problem because I was running a very successful central London French restaurant, where thousands of people were coming every year to enjoy racks of lamb, fillet of beef, scallops, sweetbreads. We were doing patisserie with cream and eggs, of course. And because we were at a traditional French restaurant, there was lots of butter.
“So I decided to embark on the rewriting of our recipes and over the next two to three years, I transformed an entirely French restaurant with animals to a fully plant-based restaurant.
“There was a transitional time. So it did not happen overnight, obviously, because it would have been too much of a shock for the restaurant, not only for the chefs, but also for our customers and financially.
“But over a few seasons, we rewrote a new repertoire of plant-based dishes.”
EARLY DOUBTS
While Alexis was fully convinced of the radical change, he admits many people took some persuading it was the right path to go down.
“When we came from Roussillon in Pimlico to Soho and opened Gauthier Soho, those customers followed me.
“Obviously when I changed, I had to tell my regular customers. I think we had probably accumulated maybe 15,000 regular customers, those who come religiously for their wedding anniversary or for their birthday.
“Most of the customers, I would say 99%, accepted what we were doing. They were a bit sad some of them not to have dishes like truffle for risotto or beef with morelles anymore. They accepted it, but left.
“We lost 95% of our customers. So if you think about that, we lost 15,000 regular customers, but we gained a million new customers, because what we were doing was so powerful. We attracted a lot of attention and suddenly people who were not interested in what we're doing were interested in coming.
“I did not think about it, but on the economical side of things, it was probably the best move ever.”
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He added: “Personally, the transition was overnight. What was difficult for me was, as a vegan individual, to come into the restaurant because I was still cooking animals.
“The tough time was the two to three years of transition.
“My head chef, who is also my business partner, was like what the hell are you doing? Do you want to bankrupt the restaurant? Why would we change?
“But with my name above the door and knowing what I knew about animal consciousness, I did not want to carry on profiting from the death of animals.
“So I had to convince everyone around me. That was a lonely journey sometimes.”
STAR-STUDDED BEGINNINGS
Gauthier Soho is set in a unique location of a London townhouse, across three floors, which includes private dining rooms. At capacity, there can be up to 55 diners in the space, with the journey beginning by ringing the doorbell to be let in.
Visitors come from across the globe to try the food, with a big selling point being Alexis's invention of a vegan caviar, which is now widely distributed to customers.
It is a far cry from Alexis’s early plans for a career in hospitality.
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“When I was a teenager, I had a desire to become a hotelier,” he explained.
“I was fascinated by the big, high-end hotels in France.
“So I went to hotel school in Avignon, where I come from. When I graduated, one of my teachers said to be a great hotelier, you first need to be a great chef.
“He found me a job at Le Negresco in Nice, which is a huge, very rococo hotel that encapsulates the luxury the South of France hotelier world.
“So here I am, 1991, I enter the two-Michelin star kitchen of the Negresco under Dominique Le Stanc and I absolutely loved it.
“I met a lot of wonderful chefs with whom I felt we had the same kind of connection and love for cuisine. I decided that that was the world for me.
“Then I went to work with Alain Ducasse in Monaco. Even though it was from two to three Michelin stars, it was like entering a different world because regardless of what you knew, when you enter the kitchen, it didn't matter.
“With Alain Ducasse, he will teach you from scratch.”
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VEGANISM TO CHANGE
A spell as a private chef in California followed, before the move to London, which has since seen him feature on TV in shows such as MasterChef.
So having run restaurants in England for almost three decades, what does Alexis hope the future looks like?
He said: “What the future holds for us here at Gauthier Soho is to carry on doing what we are doing, which is interpreting the season in a plant-based way.
“Continuing to try to see whether a new combination of flavours work and creating some amazing dishes with my team and looking into really developing this repertoire of gastronomy, which hopefully we can carry on for the next 100 years here at Gauthier Soho and being really the place where people can come for French plant-based gastronomy.
“In general, I think the only way is more people eating less animals. And I can see that.
“Everybody I talk to tells me 'of course we are now eating less' and I think it's just going to carry on progressing.
“I think a 100% plant-based world is going to be quite a while away.
“But with the ingenuity of the human being and maybe with the alternative animal products we can have, I can see a world in perhaps one or two generations where you can be a vegan, yet eat animals.
“I think the philosophical interpretation of the definition of vegan is going to move and change. I can see that happening, which gives me a lot of hope for the future.”
https://www.thestaffcanteen.com/menu-watch/alexis-gauthier-soho-vegan-interview#/
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