Infused with flavour

Marc Veyrat describes himself as a prisoner of his own cooking. He has evolved his own style and the public expect it from him. L'Auberge de L'Eridan, on the shore of Lake Annecy, a resort close to the Swiss border, is everything a jet-setter expects from a three-Michelin-star watering hole. The man himself is rough, bluff, charming, rude, kind, chaotic and yet beautifully organised in his work.

His cooking earns him few friends among his peers. Antoine Westermann finds it hard to disguise his lack of enthusiasm for Veyrat's range of skills. Michel Bras implies that Veyrat knows far less about the mountain herbs that he uses than he makes out.

What these rivals fail to recognise is that Veyrat understands "flavour" in a personal way. His cooking is a close cousin, he admits, to the perfumer's art: "I'm working with the memory of taste."

Yes, his dishes are relatively easy to prepare. So what? Yes, they can look like throwbacks to nouvelle cuisine, but they always taste good and have a kind of personal signature. Eat at his table and the mouth, especially, is in for a host of surprises.

He'll present a battery of tiny desserts in groups of three or four with an invitation to diners to guess their ingredients: three individual crèmes brûlées flavoured with chicory, lavender and verbena; three fruit cheeses flavoured with rosemary, passion fruit, bitter herbs; and four tiny sorbets with gentian, wild thyme and sage, alpine strawberry and raspberry, and lemon balm.

The frothy sauces he serves, mixed with powerful hand-blenders have the same distinctive herbal notes. To achieve these, he works almost entirely with emulsified infusions. Nothing more, nor less than herbal teas are the secret of his inventions. But he has carried their formulations to a complex level. The object is to extract the optimum flavour, so sometimes the infusions are rapid, but large quantities of herbs are used. At other times the quantities may be less and the maceration time longer.

The enemy is astringency. Balancing each combination requires practice and plenty of tasting along the way. It is easy to foul up, which is why he takes charge of the sauce preparation during service.

If he is a fanatic about the special notes in his dishes, he is equally exacting about specifications of his raw materials.

Veyrat works with unpasteurised farmhouse butter; organic vegetables; fresh fish from Lake Annecy; breads baked in a 150-year-old oven by a cousin whose bakery is up in the mountains at Manigod; remarkable charcuterie smoked in a chimney, thick with pine and juniper tars; and, mountain cheeses of which Reblochon is his favourite.

"My work is like a watch-mender's," he says, implying that it involves endless tinkering with tiny working parts. His kitchen in the basement of the hotel, is suitably designed for high performance.

His office, raised above floor level allows him to see what's going on in every cranny. The ranges are equipped with blenders and induction hobs as well as conventional electricity. Next to the kitchen, he keeps a personal hospitality suite, laid out like the interior of a Savoyard farmhouse and next to it a demonstration theatre for teaching other chefs.

He has a contract with Sodhexo to train its chefs, and Gardner Merchant crews have already taken courses there.

Veyrat likes to depict himself as an "enfant terrible" of gastronomy. He got thrown out of no less than three hotel schools as a student, but he has a clear vision of the kind of cooking he wants to do and knows how to carry it off.