“I liked school, but school did not like me…” Out to Lunch with chef Cyril Lignac

Cyril Lignac is living a double life. In France, the man’s a bonafide household name — the de facto chef-in-chief to the nation, who reads his recipes out on the radio each morning, like the shipping forecast with garlic; a hybrid of Jamie Oliver, Dermot O’Leary and your favourite older brother.

Actually, that last bit’s not quite right — when you meet Cyril, he invariably seems younger than you at any age; eyes alternating between wide-and-wondrous and creased in laughter; a playful curiosity and animation as he gesticulates to some passing crab.

A few weeks ago, when the chef inadvertently drove his car into the bus lane in Paris, the police pulled him over with lights flashing — only to say: “oh, it’s you Cyril!” once they rolled down the window — before waving him on his merry way. Emmanuel Macron gets less latitude. Cyril’s a national treasure in a nation that treasures chefs above all else.

In London, meanwhile, he is simply known as the man behind Bar des Prés, a handsome little-ish spot on Mayfair’s Albemarle Street which opened with quiet aplomb in the summer of 2021. Here, nobody stops him on the streets for autographs or sets their alarm clock to his voice, while the police would very happily slap a parking ticket on his horse should it stray into the wrong box junction. (Cyril is a keen equestrian, who’s main vice is polo down in his native South of France).

All that, however, may yet be about to change. The chef is chummy in British TV circles, having produced the French version of the Great British Bake Off. He is pals with Gordon Ramsay, who told him “what the fuck, learn English more quickly — I want to make a TV show with you!”, Cyril laughs.

He speaks English perfectly charmingly, however, when we settle down for a succession of Franco-Japanese plates at his London restaurant (he has six more in Paris), and begins to enthuse about scallops and blue prawns and his childhood kitchen.

One senses — and this is pure conjecture, not an orchestrated leak — that he is being buttered up backstage for some meaty British food show cameos in the near future, and it is not hard to see why. The French just seem better equipped to convey culinary pleasure than the English, even when they’re not opining in their mother tongue; something about those guttural shrugs and lilting, flowing vowels, which Cyril peppers with raspy laughs. The Inuits are supposed to have 100 words for snow. The French have 100 grunts for bread.

"I thought: if I cook very well, the people will love me, too..."

It is surprising to Cyril that he should be quite as well-known as he is, on either side of the channel. For the majority of his life — despite his rangy build and tall frame, like a county fast bowler — he tells me he was rather shy and uncertain.

“I grew up in the countryside” — in a small town between Toulouse and Montpellier — “and I didn’t believe in myself”. Paris, let alone London, seemed impossibly far away and impossibly cosmopolitan to him then. “We are not talking about living in St Tropez,” he says. “And I liked school, but school did not like me.”

Cyril’s mother worked in a hospital and his father was a carpenter. “I grew up in a simple family, and school was a disaster,” he says. “And so I needed to find my way.” The answer was close at hand. This was a corner of the countryside, he tells me, “where we had a lot of tradition and a lot of cooking.” His mother reared her own ducks and made homemade foie gras — the kids were allowed a slice of it on Christmas day. “And when she cooked, all of the people would look at her with so much emotion. So I thought: if I cook very well, the people will love me, too.”

Later, Cyril moved to Paris, where he worked in the three-Michelin-starred restaurant L’Arpège under Alain Passard. He trained as a pastry chef and a regular chef — a rare combo in a country with age-old delineations between its disciplines — because he felt he simply couldn’t pick between the two.

It’s a happy indecision on this particular Friday afternoon, as we tuck into what some say is his signature dish — a sort of crab tarte tatin, with beautiful white meat layered fluffily below wafer-sliced, apple-green avocado in a way that brings out both its butteriness and its fruitiness at once.

It’s very lovely, and absolutely the sort of thing that the chef’s runaway success (there has been a steady succession of Parisian openings under his watchful eye across the last twenty years) has been built upon: modern and light and surprising, but underpinned by gallic generosity and the warmth of the deep south.

“Whatever country I am in, I find myself in love with its culture..."

Other dishes are more straightforwardly Japanese, like a superb, pearl-white scallop sushi which is unusual and excellent. Cyril spent a great deal of time in the country, and is struck by their natural understanding of food-as-health. He stopped drinking coffee for the duration of his stay, weaning himself onto green teas, and ate his supper at 6pm.

“I slept perfectly, and my stomach had no stress. It’s crazy; amazing.” But when he returned to Paris he went straight back to his love of croissants and black coffee, he says with a laugh, which seems characteristic — whatever country Cyril is in, he seems to dive merrily into its way of living and eating. When he happened to find himself in London for the Queen’s funeral, he became obsessed with the pageantry and the pomp; the hierarchy of deathly crowns.

“Whatever country I am in, I find myself in love with its culture,” he says. “Some French chefs insist on only working with French produce,” he explains. “But I work only with English produce here — I love the stilton, the oysters, the Dover sole… everything!”

I believe the ‘everything’ there. For Cyril, the joy extends beyond food, even if it’s mostly expressed by it. At one point, the chef walks me through his weekly schedule. It sounds exhausting, and highly international. The day’s are long and late, as chef’s always are.

But you get the sense that Cyril bounces around from country to country, kitchen to studio, studio to horseback, horseback to press engagement with unflagging enthusiasm and coltish energy. It is enough for two chefs, two men; a double life. I ask him why, with so much going on in Paris, where they know him and love him so, he has bothered to attempt to to crack the cold, unforgiving surface of our dear London.

“I know Paris. I drive everywhere, and the policeman say: ‘Hi Cyril!’” he says. “But for me, I need new things, new challenges, new adventures,” and he tucks triumphantly into a sticky pecan mille-feuille that is beamed directly from a childhood daydream. “That is the way I stay young!”

Want more culinary insights? Meet Jean Imbert, the ‘enfant terrible’ of French cooking…

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