Gargoillou dates back to 1983. It’s the most celebrated and well-known dish of Michel Bras, a French autodidact chef. He and his son run a three Michelin hotel-restaurant in Aubrac, a town in the southern Massif Central of France.
The landscapes, emotions, colors and shapes of his region is what inspired him to create his most famous creation, the vegetable Gargouillou, that is an ever-changing palette of ingredients and tastes that evolve differently each day, expressing the landscape just as the chefs have experienced it on a particular day.
The dish is a liberal marriage of seasonal vegetables, flowers and fruits and it is a painstaking assemblage of 40 to 60 different items that have been cooked with all kinds of different methods, playing with the texture and adding layers of depth to the plants. The ingredients change daily based on what they found in the market and their home garden.
This dish had enormous influence on a whole generation of chefs, all around the world. They reformed and rebuilt it giving their own take on the dish. This has been made for example by Daniel Patterson at Coi in San Francisco who serves “Abstraction of Garden in Early Winter”.
Today the Bras restaurant is run by Sebastien, Michel’s son, but still, Michel, is every day in the kitchen, working on the Gargouillou.
