Like any French chef worth his fleur de sel, Joël Robuchon was “raised on butter.”
“Everyone in my family ate it!” he tells The Post. After all, it’s a staple in his country’s cuisine … and in the Paris-based cook’s own pureed potatoes, which are one-third butter. They’re a longtime favorite at his Michelin-starred restaurant franchise, L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, which has 12 locations worldwide.
That addictive, buttery dish helped New Yorkers fall in love with Atelier’s Four Seasons outpost, which closed in 2012. And it’s sure to win new fans at the eatery’s Meatpacking District locale, which opens this week.
But butter was also hurting Robuchon’s health.
Four years ago, during a stint in his Las Vegas restaurant, Robuchon wasn’t feeling so great. “I was always tired,” the now-72-year-old says. “I kept waking up with pounding headaches.”
He took a blood test, and the results, he says, were “terrible — high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar.” That cluster of symptoms put him at risk for a host of scary health issues, including heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
“I needed to go on a diet,” he says. “But where to start?”
‘It’s really not difficult to follow my regimen. I’ve built one that I really love. Now, I eat nutritiously with pleasure.’
Weight loss is a daunting undertaking for anyone — and perhaps especially for a gourmet chef, who spends night and day around fine food. But Robuchon, who has 31 Michelin stars to his name (the most of any chef), wasn’t intimidated. In fact, he approached his health scare the same way he approaches kitchen work: by assembling a diverse, talented team to help carry out his vision.
A key player on his new health panel was Nadia Volf, a Paris-based doctor with nutritional expertise. Together, they devised a strict but simple strategy for Robuchon: No more cooking with fats, like his beloved butter or oil. No more sugar in his coffee. Less bread, red meat, refined flour and dessert. And Robuchon stuck to it — losing 44 pounds in the first four months.
Today, he weighs 60 pounds less than when he started working with Volf in 2013, and he feels better than ever. “Headaches, gone,” he says. “I have so much energy … I wouldn’t be able to live the way I do now without my diet.” His lifestyle could exhaust a person half his age; he’s often on the restaurant floor past midnight, or jet-setting between time zones. “But [since I started my diet,] I don’t even get jet lag anymore.”
And he really does think it’s all thanks to what he’s eating. He’s not exactly hitting up the gym. “I’m too lazy to work out,” he says, laughing. “Lazy” may not be quite the right word: Robuchon spends hours on his feet in his kitchens and likes to hike when he’s on vacation. But food, he insists, is the biggest change he’s made.
It’s a serious shift, to be sure. At a glance, his new meal plan sounds a bit like deprivation. But Robuchon has never seen it that way. Instead, he treated the restrictions as a challenge to learn how to make “food I like,” without fattening preparations.
Take, for example, his go-to breakfast of sliced tomato and avocado. It sounds simple, and even a little spare — but in Robuchon’s hands, it’s luxe. That’s partially because he’s picky about the ingredients, only eating “100 percent organic” tomatoes and avocados, which he finds more flavorful.
The rest comes down to preparation. “You can’t use the wrong kind of salt,” he says. (He likes fleur de sel, sprinkled on top, just so.) “If you don’t get the details right, you get tired of [your diet food] really quickly. You get disgusted by it. Then you start craving other things.”
To keep his healthy dishes zingy, Robuchon relies on spices, such as pepper and turmeric, and condiments, such as spicy mustard and fancy ketchup (the gourmet kind, not the corn syrupy stuff of fast-food packets).
He even has a system — kind of like a gourmet version of a food pyramid — which he explains in “Food & Life” (Assouline), the 2015 book he co-authored with Volf. First, he starts with a dish’s main element, a k a “the principal food” — usually, a protein. From there, he builds out a meal with a “partner food” — say, a vegetable or grain — a “supporting food,” something to help the first two elements digest, and a “guest food,” to add a kick of flavor. For example: if the “principal food” is sea scallops, he might pair it with spinach or green beans, a splash of cognac to help the scallops digest and a dash of fruit coulis to heighten flavor.
Some of his go-to dishes include a simmered, then roasted, chicken (simmering drains some fat) and an “energizing” homemade bouillon with turmeric and ginger. His favorite snack is an Obama-like 15 almonds, skin-on, plus a heart-healthy glass of red wine.
“It’s really not difficult to follow my regimen. I’ve built one that I really love,” he says. “Now I eat nutritiously with pleasure.”
He loves his new way of eating so much that he’s sharing it with the world, incorporating some of his healthy lifestyle into the menu at the new Atelier in the Meatpacking District.
The restaurant will serve Robuchon’s first-ever nine-course vegetarian tasting menu ($145; the nonvegetarian one is $325). It includes such produce-forward dishes as l’artichaut, a roasted baby artichoke that sits on top of an artichoke puree, with a chickpea emulsion and turmeric, and la betterave, a tartare-like beet dish topped with avocado and green-mustard sorbet — nods to Robuchon’s nutritional awakening. “My menu is full of antioxidants and nutrients now,” he says.
In general, the chef thinks his cooking is “less rich” overall now. Still, that won’t stop him from treating L’Atelier’s diners to foie gras, caviar (“so healthy! It’s a shame it’s so expensive”) and other decadent dishes.
Sometimes, he’ll even treat himself to a bite.
“I do cheat on my diet sometimes,” he says, “but I’m very careful.”
One thing he can’t resist? The bread at his own restaurants. (Understandable: It’s a pretty great bread basket.) “Once you establish a diet, you can make exceptions,” he says. “Once you’re able to balance it out.”
L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon, 85 10th Ave.; 212-488-8885, JoelRobuchonUSA.com
