Kitchen matrimonial

The glass of 1996 Château d’Yquem was not quite right. It was three days before the marriage of Prince Albert II of Monaco to Charlene Wittstock of Benoni, South Africa, and chef Alain Ducasse – creator of the wedding feast – was taste-testing the dessert course in the kitchens of Louis XV, his Michelin three-star restaurant in Monaco’s Hôtel de Paris. The d’Yquem accompanied a confection of almond biscuit layered with currant jelly, encased in vanilla cream and dusted with white chocolate, to be served in 500 individual portions. The couple’s towering eight-foot wedding cake was a facsimile cut for the photographers, not the guests.

Just as the dessert’s temperature had to be pitch-perfect for Ducasse – “the cake frozen, but not ice frozen, the currants fresh, not cold” – so too the dessert wine. Fill the glass too full and the Sauternes risked arriving at the table lukewarm; not full enough and the wine’s amber sweetness might be too cold to savour fully. Or worse, overpower the dessert itself – which, like the rest of the menu, was pre-approved by the bride and groom. “Everything must depart the kitchen like a Swiss clock,” insisted Ducasse, who chose the redcurrants and white cream to salute Monaco’s national colours.

This modest “cake crisis” was one of the smaller logistical contortions Ducasse and his 10-man development team faced in nearly five months of preparation. With a trio of local restaurants – his flagship Louis XV, the more casual Le Grill and year-old La Trattoria – Ducasse is no stranger to Monaco, or its royal family. Since opening Louis XV in 1987, Ducasse has become a house-chef of sorts for the Grimaldi clan – including its newest member, the freshly (and some thought reluctantly) crowned HSH Princess Charlene. A former Olympic swimmer, 33-year-old Wittstock’s icy blondness is unavoidably reminiscent of Grace Kelly, who married Albert’s father, Prince Rainier, in 1956. The wedding of Grace’s son, however, would be a far grander affair – even for Ducasse, whose global empire of 25 restaurants is more than au fait with the idea of dinner-as-theatre.

Armed with a battalion of his most trusted deputies, Ducasse would serve the meal on temporary terraces cantilevered alongside the Opéra de Monte-Carlo fronting the Mediterranean Sea. The meal would be prepared in two 300-sq m kitchens temporarily installed in the heavily frescoed Atrium and White Room of the Opéra. As tourists thronged on the promenade below and Albert’s 700-year-old palace stood illuminated in the distance, the four-course dinner would culminate in a 15-minute fireworks display unleashed at the stroke of midnight. At least, that was the idea.

. . .

For Ducasse, the planning began even before Albert – a perennial bachelor at 53 – formally enlisted his services. “We’ve waited a long time for this marriage, and I hoped the Prince would ask me to do the wedding,” says Ducasse, aware that even his strong Monaco ties offered no guarantees. Nonetheless, Ducasse had developed a 15-page “concept” book by the time Albert brought him on board at a January meeting in Monaco’s Paris embassy, six months after announcing his engagement.

Ducasse’s concepts resonated with the couple, who are sporty, healthy and stridently eco-friendly. There would be no caviar, no lobster, no foie gras – none of the luxuries traditionally associated with royalty. Instead, the menu would celebrate “la terre et la mer” – organic vegetables and fresh fish. The fish would be sustainably netted along the Nisso-Ligurian coast by the Rinaldis, Monaco’s last remaining fishing family; the veg mostly supplied by Rocagel, Albert’s working estate just across the French border.

Two days before the wedding, there is an industrial amount of prep to do, but the most striking thing about the Louis XV kitchen is its silence. Inside a subterranean labyrinth of prep stations and pastry rooms, chef’s lines and cooling chambers, some two dozen cooks – mostly young, mostly male – are doing double duty preparing for that evening’s service while getting a head start on the wedding. Franck Cerutti, Hôtel de Paris’ curly-haired executive chef and a 32-year member of Ducasse’s inner circle, has just returned from a morning with the Rinaldis – their haul alive and writhing on a stainless steel counter-top.

Charged with overseeing the meal’s logistics (in cohort with the Société des Bains de Mer), Cerutti is clearly pleased with the catch – spiny rock fish, rascasse and girelles destined for fish stock, along with dozens of red mullets hand-scaled and deboned with surgical tweezers. The mullets and stock will later unite as the main course, a saffron-laced bouillabaisse-style soup with slices of eight different Mediterranean seafoods, capped with a trio of crostini, including one made with the mullet’s livers and another from spider crab meat.

Today, Cerruti’s catch begins the slow transformation from fish to fish stock – dumped into a sizzling brass cauldron, sautéed with olive oil and tomatoes and finally whirled into sludge, triple-filtered to separate the liquids from the solids. Everything is done by hand and will have to be replicated dozens of times. So far, however, so good. “The broth is very fragrant,” Ducasse declares. “It tastes like the bottom of the sea.”

Elsewhere, three pastry chefs are spinning flowers rendered in sugar and hand-moulded under heat lamps to give them a satiny sheen. They have thousands more to make. The grandest – bulbous King Proteas, South Africa’s national flower – have more than 100 pink and white petals each and will cascade down the wedding cake like sugary show-girls. Like the Western Cape Chardonnay paired with the first course, the proteas are Ducasse’s nod to Wittstock’s homeland. And for the royals and heads of state staying at Hôtels de Paris and Hermitage, the patissiers are making tiny lemon-filled chocolates delicately embossed with the couple’s conjoined A and C cipher. It is detail verging on surrealism.

The next morning, Cerutti is back in the kitchen after a pre-dawn harvest of Rocagel’s finest: blossom-topped squash, fragrant mint bundles, carrots and courgettes, along with unpasteurised milk from the Prince’s small herd of cows. As Ducasse inspects the produce, lingering over a zucchini blossom battered by the morning rain, Cerutti describes his own logistical pas de deux. “We’ve essentially had to work in reverse, timing the dishes from the moment of service backwards,” he explains. “So the key here is to not begin cooking too early.”

Much of the meal will be prepped – or rather “pre-prepped” – in the Hôtel de Paris’ kitchens, but the actual cooking will take place in the Opéra next door. Cerutti’s face visibly conveys the magnitude of the task ahead; Ducasse’s, not so much. “If everything goes perfectly, they’ll blame me, but if something goes wrong, they’ll blame Franck,” Ducasse jokes affectionately. And what if something does go wrong; a chef stumbles, a waiter is unwell? “In these kitchens,” Cerutti makes clear, “there are no off days.”

The first course – slices of raw golden mullet with vibrant Rocagel vegetables – is lengthy and laborious, precisely plated, served cold and finished with tiny flowers to evoke a Provençal garden. Cerutti’s challenge is to assemble the dish à la moment without compromising its colour or flavour. The second course is warmer and relatively straightforward – heirloom spelt topped with garden vegetables and doused with a fragrant pistou. The main course – the fish fillet and bouillon combination – is the meal’s wild card, equally elaborate in composition and execution.

The timing could not be tighter: roughly 15 minutes to set the fish chunks on a base of new potatoes, add in the crostini, deliver them to the guests and pour on the precisely heated broth that will complete both the presentation of the dish and the process of cooking the fish at the table. The process must be multiplied 500 times without under-heating the flesh or over-heating the bouillon before they meet a few brief moments before consumption. And every guest at every table must be served at exactly the same time. “This would be relatively easy if we were in our own kitchen,” Cerutti concedes. But as Ducasse insists repeatedly, “we are cooking for a party of 500 as if we were cooking for a table of four.”

. . .

It is midday on July 2, the official wedding day. The Place du Casino is festooned with South African and Monegasque flags. Inside, hundreds of waiters practise for the service while the finery is carefully set up. There are crystal coupe goblets from Saint Louis (owned by Hermès), vintage table linens from Karl Lagerfeld’s personal collection and porcelain soup bowls by Swedish artisan Pieter Stockmans.

There’s also a problem: balmy weather has left the opera house worrisomely warm. It’s hardly sweltering, but it could easily foil Cerutti’s crucial time/temperature calculations. A solution, however, has already been devised – a temporary 111-sq m refrigerated room hastily constructed in the 120-year-old Touzet room. Within hours, 40 of Ducasse’s cooks will be relocated to this chamber to finish the cold dishes and fine-tune the warmer courses.

On the terrace, construction workers have nearly completed the dining room – sparsely furnished but lushly foliaged with bundles of lavender and towering lemon and olive trees. There are dozens of wine glasses on each table. “None should ever be empty,” says Patrice Franck, Hôtel du Paris’ chief sommelier. Just out of sight is the hotel’s chocolatier confiseur Franck Madala, midway through the 10-hour task of assembling the wedding cake and attaching its 2,000 sugar blossoms.

Everything appears in hand for a 9.30pm kick-off, but – royals being royals – the dinner begins late. By 10pm – just two hours before those fireworks – the Belgian, Swedish and Moroccan royal families are still in cocktail mode, along with the Casiraghis, Princess Caroline’s stylish adult children. Caroline herself suddenly appears, in a black Chanel dress and delicate tiara, and along with sister Stéphanie takes her place at the head table.

Ducasse digests the delay, but appears unfazed. “We will gain back 20 of those 30 minutes,” he confidently declares, before he scans the kitchen, slyly smiles, raises his hands and claps loudly. And, in an instant, it’s on: Ducasse’s debut vegetable dish extracted from the cold room, finished with flowers and delivered to each diner in barely eight minutes. While it’s enjoyed, the spelt is gently warmed and plated, drizzled with pistou and set up for service. “Smile, smile – hurry, hurry,” Ducasse commands loudly, as his waiters flash by in a whirl of sky-blue vests and thick golden ties.

Although he never fully regained those lost 20 minutes, Ducasse’s menu, judging by the empty plates, is triumphant. The spelt is served in just over 10 minutes, the bouillon-bathed fish a minute longer. Speeches and songs delay the first dessert – a pre-cake course of fresh berries with warm raspberry jus and Rocagel ice cream. Madala has managed to complete the cake itself just as it’s rolled into the dining room where Albert – in white tux – and Charlene cut into its sugary shell. A beaming Ducasse looks on. “She was magnifique,” Ducasse says of the new princess. And as for the cake, “she said it was even better than during that final tasting”.

Then, as if on cue, fireworks soar high over the Mediterranean. Almost in unison, royal guests and their citizen servers rush to the opera’s terraces to view the display before them. And, for a brief moment, the line between Grimaldi and gentry fades. Ducasse, too, delights in the display, but there’s only so much enjoyment he can allow himself. Come tomorrow there’s a brunch for 300 at the royal palace to prepare – and all that food won’t cook itself.

For a slideshow go to www.ft.com/ducassemonaco

This article is subject to a correction and has been amended