Meet Mauro Colagreco, the Genius Behind Mirazur, the World's Best

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Meet Mauro Colagreco, the genius behind Mirazur, the world’s best restaurant

When Mirazur on the Côte d’Azur secured top place in the industry’s annual global awards, it was the first time a restaurant in France had won. The only fly in the soup for French foodies? The chef is Argentinian. By Stefanie Marsh

Mauro Colagreco, 42, at his restaurant, Mirazur, in Menton, France HEMIS.FR

The Times, August 3 2019, 12:01am

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hen news broke this June that a restaurant in France had been named the world’s best, the reaction among certain French people was puzzlingly W restrained. While the world’s foodies went bananas and Mirazur (the restaurant in question) took 8,000 bookings in 72 hours, the local paper, Nice-Matin, for example, greeted the announcement with a sceptical headline. “Is Mirazur really the best restaurant in the Côte d’Azur?” it queried – the article underneath put forward La Vague d’Or in Saint-Tropez as a better choice. Given that this is the ﬁrst time in the prestigious World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards’ 18-year history that a restaurant in France has won, it seems odd that the nation wasn’t celebrating more. Colagreco MATTEO CARASSALE

Mirazur’s founder-chef is warm and energetic and many other good things besides, but the one thing he isn’t is French. Mauro Colagreco is Argentinian, born and bred – France’s only non-French three Michelin star chef. Would cheers for his achievement in his host country have been louder if he, like the head chef of La Vague, was French?

Colagreco is still buoyed by the prize-giving when I meet him in the cool, bright lobby of Mirazur. In other parts of the restaurant and the ﬁve acres of organic gardens that surround it, television crews from abroad are trying not to get in the way of chefs scurrying between services in their Crocs and stainless whites.

“I was ’the Argentinian’ – ’What is he doing here? He’ll steal our recipes’

An energetic, earthy, cheerful man, at 42 Colagreco has the compact, bullish body of a former amateur rugby player, which he is, and the mind of what one might describe as a chef-philosopher, with a terror of pesticides and a determination to unleash the creativity of his sta by any means – group yoga and, separately, acting classes were a success.

He describes his first, somewhat tough years in France, having come to the country at 21, as a university dropout with few language skills: “Some welcomed me, of course. The only reason I got where I am today is because France opened its doors to me. But it wasn’t easy. My first job was in Saulieu, a village of 3,000 people in the middle of nowhere. I was ‘the Argentinian’ – it was meant pejoratively. ‘What is he doing, this Argentinian here with us? He’ll steal our recipes. We need to stop him from doing that.’ Well,” he reflects, “that’s what I imagine they were saying. I always had French friends, but there were some people who put barriers in my way.”

Being an optimist who reframes dicult periods in his life as important learning experiences, he intercepts this trajectory of thought. “The way I’ve overcome life’s obstacles is I worked very hard. I was the ﬁrst one there in the morning and the last to leave. Everyone worked very hard, but I worked even harder. I knew to keep my head because it was a big opportunity for me. So I didn’t fall to pieces because of the ﬁrst person who annoyed me. It wasn’t funny. But I tried to see the wood for the trees.”

Geographically, Mirazur is barely in France. If you continue up the steep road out of Menton, you can walk across the border into Italy in under three minutes. But the restaurant’s modern ﬂoor-to-ceiling windows look squarely onto French territory – the Riviera.

If you’re hoping the world’s best restaurant will cater to the budgets of ordinary humans, the truth is a meal here costs 250 euro (£225) a head. Wealthy people will ﬂy into Nice to dine here, then ﬂy out again to other award-winning restaurants such as Gaggan in Bangkok, Central in Lima and, in London, the Clove Club. (The only other British restaurant in the top 50 is Lyle’s, London. Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck fell o the list years ago.) The view of the Riviera from Mirazur

Colagreco doesn’t use the word “expensive”. It takes one and a half members of sta to create every dish – Mirazur has earned him accolades but not a fortune. And here what you’re eating is high art, although in a less visually Dada-esque form than, say, El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, where “the old book essence” listed as one of the ingredients in its pued pastry of butter cookies, cream of Darjeeling tea and lemon madeleine ice cream is the shredded page of an actual book. Dishes here have low-impact names – “Pommes de terre”; simply, “Green” – and their aesthetic draws from the bold Miró sculptures in the gardens of the Fondation Maeght and the stained glass windows of Matisse’s Rosary Chapel in Vence – all the saturated yellows, greens, blues, reds and pinks of the Mediterranean. Naturally, there is foam. Too much, complains a reviewer on TripAdvisor. Another reviewer complains that the bowl of cherries picked freshly from the Mirazur garden she was served wasn’t complicated enough.

Colagreco’s career, emotional and intellectual life have been shaped by a series of significant realisations, the first of which was that he hated studying economics. Reluctantly, aged 20, he dropped out of university in Buenos Aires. “I had a crisis. I felt like a failure. I felt contemptible. A loser.” He corrects himself: “What I thought was a failure. I had a period of depression. I was lost. I was sad and proud and I didn’t want to ask my parents to bail me out financially.”

His father, an accountant, did however provide his son with the emotional support that set him on his way. “It was dicult to tell my parents, but I was very lucky in that they never put pressure on me. My father said to me, ‘Listen, if you’re not passionate about this, you’ll never be able to do it. You will ﬁnd your path.’ He was extraordinary at that moment, not that I realised it at the time.”

He doesn’t really know why his next impulse was to ask a friend who ran a restaurant in Buenos Aires for kitchen work. “A week later I enrolled in a cooking school. I’ve always loved cooking. My father, mother, sister, grandmother all cook. But I never thought of cooking until I was 20, at that restaurant.” This, too, was a life lesson. “It was a good lesson in not giving up – because we all have a passion. We all have something hidden that will reveal itself, not necessarily from one day to the next, in a ﬂash.”

Salt crusted beetroot LOPEZ DE ZUBIRIA

Pigeon, wild strawberries, spelt, yarrow EDUARDO TORRES

It’s interesting to contrast the arc of Colagreco’s rapid professional ascent from when he arrived in France in 2001 with the diminishing reputation of French cuisine at the same time. The ﬁrst hammer blow to France’s longstanding gastronomic hegemony came in 2003 when The New York Times Magazine ran a devastating cover story alleging that the cuisine that had revolutionised cooking in the Seventies had “congealed into complacency”. Barely a year later, came the second blow, delivered by a veteran Michelin Guide inspector, Pascal Rémy, whose tell-all memoir revealed Gallic cultural imperialism at the leading food bible. French chefs such as Alain Ducasse, Rémy said, were regarded as “untouchable” by Michelin sta and ratings were prejudiced towards French cuisine.

Zagat and the recently set-up World’s 50 Best Restaurants exploited the moment to become rivals to the Guide Rouge. Soon restaurants in France and French restaurants outside France began to disappear from the top ten, replaced by the work of more progressive chefs in Spain, Denmark, the US and Asia.

And in the middle of all this, a horrible tragedy. Bernard Loiseau, the world-famous French chef, committed suicide, fearing he’d lose one of his three Michelin stars. It was at Loiseau’s restaurant in Saulieu that Colagreco was working at the time. “Loiseau was my boss, my mentor,” he says. “Sometimes you’re put in a position that will go beyond who you are. And, with Bernard, I think he built a persona around himself and the persona ate the person. And when everything [he’d worked for] seemed suddenly very fragile, he fell apart. It was hard for me because I had a very good relationship with him. He was the person who opened the doors of French cuisine. Even 15 years later, I haven’t been able to go back. I think it’s important to stay who we are and try not to show something we are not. Or to think you always have to be at the top, like he did.”

There are plenty of women in Colagreco’s kitchen – his pastry chef, for example, is female – but of those top 50 restaurants, only 5 have women at the helm. It’s a persistently intriguing state of aairs, given that, traditionally, in the domestic realm those statistics are reversed. “We [men] can cook at home,” suggests Colagreco (who does), “but maybe some of us don’t want to.” There’s more glory being a chef. “Men want to show o their feathers,” he grins. “They’re peacocks.” Having babies is still a problem for women with professional culinary ambitions. “Unless you have a partner who will look after the children and is supportive, it’s dicult.”

He attributes his recent success – the two Michelin stars he’s won since he was named chef of the year in 2009 – to a woman: his wife, Julia, whom he met in 2010. “It was love at ﬁrst sight. When I met Julia, I was completely, madly in love with her. She imprinted something feminine in my work. It really helped me. She’s my business partner and my wife and she’s my rock.”

He has two children, one from a previous relationship. “The birth of my children was very powerful for me. I realised that the ﬁrst act of love is this mother who is exhausted by the birth but still has the strength to feed her child. For a chef, it’s profound to realise that feeding someone is the primary act of love.” Colagreco in Mirazur’s organic kitchen garden MATTEO CARASSALE

Having children also intensified his worries about modern food production, switching him on to the Japanese microbiologist and agriculturist Masanobu Fukuoka, whose work changed Colagreco’s vision. Most of the food at the restaurant now comes direct from Mirazur’s organic garden. “All the chemicals in food – I’m terrified of pesticides. The way we destroy the earth and the sea and it makes me feel conscious of tomorrow and it is worrying. The eect is on our health and on our gut.” He blames weak environmental legislation in France. It took the team three months to find biodegradable gloves for use in their kitchen.

Looking back on his life, “I’m grateful I did all these stupid things when I was young. Drugs. Alcohol. At 13, I was travelling around South America with friends. Those are things that formed my character.”

Later I scan the French reviews of Mirazur. They’re very positive, but I was surprised to see it all the way down at No 476 in La Liste, the French food guide launched in 2016 as a response to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. This year Emmanuel Macron hosted its winners at the Elysée; four in the top 10 are in France, with Guy Savoy at No 1 and Alain Ducasse third. Of course, the World’s 50 Best is fallible too – its voting system is vulnerable to lobbying. But I can’t help but feel that France’s attitude to food remains determinedly aloof. Colagreco thinks that’s changing. “It’s true French chefs have a reputation for navel-gazing, but I think there has been a real regeneration of French cuisine. It is much more open, full of people who share, people who travel, on a mission to inject a new freshness.” What a nice symmetry in a future where it’s Colagreco who helps reinvigorate the gastronomic reputation of a country which, however inadvertently, turned “the Argentinian” into a culinary star.

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