Roland Chanliaud
Never-ending intuition
By Laurent Feneau

On the Beaune ramparts, avoiding all danger of becoming trapped inside a cuisine considered too regional, Roland Chanliaud welcomes cooking methods and techniques from all over the world in his restaurant "Jardin des Remparts." The art of being advisedly open-minded, to never end up closing down...

A sturdy and imposing building - the restaurant of Roland Chanliaud - stands several metres from the Hospice and the heart of Beaune. Former estate of a wine trader, it gives the illusion of being built on the fortified wall, surrounding the city where he himself was born in 1963. Upon approaching it and seeing all the bushes, flowers, and a fountain, it becomes obvious that the renowned "Jardin des Remparts," is far from being a stone of this structure, but more a small door opening onto another world. Without having pushed open the kitchen door, he is already in his world: contrasted, lively, refined, and dazzling, and an impressive emphasis on details. This visible harmony was purposely dreamed up by himself and his wife, Emmanuelle - a desire to create a culinary current running from the kitchen, to the dining room, and onto the plate.
The starting point of Roland's epicurean experience is a date boldly stamped in his memory. After a family training and short periods working in prestigious restaurants, Marc Meneau at L'Esperance led him to discover the incredible and inseparable happiness between the chef and the guest. And the additional importance of realizing the wondrous pleasure a person experiences appreciating the dish. It was after this initial experience that he decided to "plant" his own restaurant, where he has since managed to grow stars, macarons, and other promising titles.

What a nerve!
Roland's "thing" is to change all the cooking times. Infusion, roasting, low heat, or how to play with fire without getting burned. "Sometimes using a variety of cooking times gives the dish a unique touch," he explains. His audacity pushes him towards perilous, refined techniques. He moves from one experiment to another, knocking down the boundaries and references. Instead of breaking his teeth on a lobster shell, Roland chooses to crush it, and roast it at 140 degrees. Reduced to a powder and cold-brewed, he ends up with an extraordinary broth. All this is served with lobster water aspic and brown butter … This is typical of Roland Chanliaud - using a sort of ongoing culinary intuition which creates dishes seemingly obvious but in reality, complex.
Like all chefs working on technical experiments - sometimes excessive but always essential, Roland likes to work with the most fragile products. Whether it is a fine oyster or small, precious, wild mushrooms, they are all sliced, emulsified, cooked, grilled, or even pulverized, making incredible dishes such as Charolais tartare with Gillardeau oysters.

Darwin cuisine
All his technical and chemical movements have an objective. For example, the tender Charolais seems to beckon the wild sea-scented shellfish for company. It has so much taste and meaning! In fact, he puts meaning into anything that passes through his hands. With Roland, the pike perch - Darwinian - abandons its fins to adopt three duck feet so as to flirt easier with local honey, hazelnuts, and chanterelle mushrooms. All the elements blend or inverse, just like his vegetables which musically crunch with vivacity and freshness, opening up the palate to new pleasures.
Furthermore, Roland jumps on any opportunity to be open and discover new ideas. If he insists that he has never even considered leaving his native city, he nevertheless admits some recurring and irresistible desires to sometimes just run away. Not that the grass is always greener, as his garden is full of chlorophyll, but just for the pleasure of meeting other people and exchanging experiences, as his main ambition when travelling is to talk, and not necessarily to bring back strange concepts. He wants to understand techniques and discover a new meaning of the product. Even if cooking isn't the major motivation for making these trips, it certainly follows pretty close behind. Japan, Russia, Singapore, Prague are for him the best places for exchanges and surprises.
As he is only drawn to what is new and unexpected, Roland likes to surprise his guests with innovative dishes. This open-mindedness could be the key word to describe his cooking style. It is often defined as "improbable" but it is more audacious and independent… like an ode to freedom, where all categories are abolished. This is where his need comes in to crack shells and to blend together what tradition tries to separate … along with his need to glance up, high up, over the ramparts into the outside world.

Chinese portrait
" If you were … "
... a quality
Love of food
... a bad point
Too much love of food
... an animal
A cat
... a country
France
... music type
Billy Idol
... a film
Midnight Express
... a book
the Bible
... a famous woman
Michelle Pfeiffer
... a dish
Eggs in aspic
... a wine
"La Grange des Pères" from Laurent Vaillé

Top