Where the Chefs Eat asks your favourite chefs for their top restaurants in cities across the world. For this edition, we sit down for coffee with Pierre Koffmann.
“I am known for dishes other than my pigs’ trotters!” Pierre Koffmann teases when we meet for coffee. The French chef introduced Brits to the delicacy back in the 1970s. But these days, it is not just pigs’ trotters for which he is known and loved.
Koffmann’s influence over where and what we eat cannot be overstated. Before Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White, Jason Atherton, Tom Kitchin, Tom Aiken and Eric Chavot, there was Pierre Koffmann, a brilliant chef from Gascony who came to the UK for a matter of months and never left. He trained every chef I just mentioned, and his influence over generations will go down as his greatest legacy – even more so than those trotters.
I meet with Koffmann and his wife Claire in a small Mayfair café where he regales me with stories of his Gascon childhood, nose-to-tail cooking with his beloved grandparents and his early days at Le Gavroche. I read that he came to the UK with the sole intention of watching France play England at rugby, before moving on to Australia to settle, and he confirms that this is absolutely true. “My plan originally had been to watch a game at Twickenham between England and France, but I saw a job opening at La Gavroche. That was in 1970, and the plan was just to stay for six months.” Luckily for us, he never left. He moved from Le Gavroche to the Roux Brothers’ other venture, The Waterside Inn, and, while he was there, it gained two of its three Michelin stars.
As with any great chef, Koffmann wanted to open his own restaurant. So he ventured off solo. Le Tante Claire came onto the restaurant scene in 1977 on what is, today, the site of Gordon Ramsay’s three-star Restaurant Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea.
Claire clearly adores her husband. “He is my soulmate,” she tells me openly. They met, quite literally, over a potato harvest (her father was a wholesale potato merchant). She tells me adamantly that she wants her husband known for what he has given to younger generations. “You’ve got this younger generation now, and everyone thinks that it started with chefs like Gordon Ramsay,” she exclaims, “and [Gordon] is brilliant. But I want people to really understand that they were able to be who they are because of the people before, like Pierre. I’d like that story to come across.”
Koffmann is very bashful when I ask about his gargantuan influence: “I don’t really think about it,’ he says softly. “And I don’t really miss working in restaurants now. When I go back into the kitchen, I love cooking because it’s like muscle memory, but I don’t miss restaurant life now. Cooking was my life. I was opening my restaurant, and I was closing my restaurant every day by myself, so I was working all the time. And I never had a PR. The best PR is the dishes that you make.”
From Le Tante Claire, he opened Koffmann’s in The Berkeley, and in 2009, he opened a pop-up in Selfridges during a food festival which was only slated to be open for 10 days. “We ended up doing it for two months. We sold 3,200 pig trotters,” he chuckles. “People always asked me about the pigs’ trotters, but I have made other dishes!”
