Olivier Roellinger announced this month that he’s turning in his three Michelin stars and closing the Maisons de Bricourt, his renowned restaurant in the small Brittany port of Cancale.
With the glory of winning France’s ultimate culinary laurels still so fresh, Roellinger becomes the third chef in recent years to leave Michelin behind at the pinnacle of success.
Running a three-star restaurant is an honour, but it brings on terrible stress. It is passionate but exhausting. As much as I respect the chefs who work with me, my relationship with the restaurant is too intimate for me to turn it over to anyone else.
He has a smaller restaurant, the charming little Le Coquillage also in Cancale.
Roellinger’s cuisine is rooted in his native Brittany, whose ports were once on the major route of the Spice Trade, and he uses exciting combinations of spices. His food is an interplay of familiar and exotic — lobster with sherry and cocoa, or scallops infused with Dream of Cochin, a mixture of coriander, anise and cardamom.
Roellinger wants to share those flavours in a less formal setting.
After having fed the well-off I want to share my cooking differently: less mise-en-scène, with a more fluid, accessible and natural experience. In a word: more modern.
Le Coquillage, near Cancale, will serve food similar to that in his three-star restaurant but in a simpler environment.
This is happening to a number of top class restaurants everywhere. We hear talk of ‘retiring’ and ‘stress’ but I wonder how much is because of thinning patronage. Not that Roellinger should feel the economic pinch, he and his wife own a spice importing company, a cooking school, a pastry shop and a hotel with cottages. No doubt we will see books soon.