The 10 Dishes That Made My Career: Ludo Lefebvre

French butter is the best butter in the world. Bordier is a butter from Brittany made by a guy called Jean-Yves Bordier. He created his own technique for making the butter, and it’s really distinctive. The texture is incredible. It’s very soft—the way they incorporate the air in this butter, it just makes it so creamy and so light. And of course it tastes amazing. What he’s doing now is putting a lot of different flavors in the butter. He’s done vanilla, yuzu, grilled buckwheat seeds, olive oil and lemon, seaweed; the seaweed is one of my favorites. It’s amazing, amazing, amazing. When I go back to France, when I get off the airplane, there are two things I’m doing: I’m going to one of my favorite patisseries, and the next day a baguette and we eat it with Bordier butter. If I was on death row, I would love a piece of Bordier butter with a warm baguette. Butter and bread would be my last meal, for sure. No need to complicate things too much.

I love Charleston. It has so much history, and I love Southern food. Sean Brock is one of my favorite American chefs, so when I was in Charleston a month ago I went to eat at his restaurant, Husk. I’ve eaten a lot of grits before, but when I ate the grits at Husk, I’d never had grits like them in my life. It was the texture of a custard, almost like you’re eating a crème brulee, but hot. The texture was so light and airy and at the same time so creamy. I said to him, “How do you do that? When I do grits they’re not like this!” “Oh, we soak them overnight.” “I soak too, they’re not like this!” “We use fine grain grits, whatever.” “I use them too, it’s not like this!” I’m embarrassed to call Sean and ask for his recipe, but it’s just so good. Cooking is about sharing, so sometimes when I have something in a restaurant that I like I want to do it for my guests here. If Sean called me today and asked me, “Hey Ludo, how do you do your escargot?” I would tell him. I have nothing to hide. I’ll be honest with you, chefs all copy each other, we all do the same things. Food is a trend, like fashion, you know?

As a French chef I grew up a lot with chicken, in fancy restaurants and in the house; everybody cooked chicken. That’s what’s amazing about chicken: You can go to a three-star Michelin restaurant and have a poulet de Bresse, or you can be invited over by a friend for lunch and have it too. Everybody cooks it. All of the countries, all of the different cultures have a chicken recipe. But poulet de Bresse is the best—it’s the Rolls Royce of chickens. The skin is so thick, so yellow, it has so much flavor. What I learned in France is that with chicken, your main focus is to make the skin crispy. You want to have that crackling sound when you bite into it. In America it’s very difficult to have the perfect crispy chicken because the skin here is so thin. When the chicken rests, the skin gets moist. But because the poulet de Bresse has such a thick skin, it doesn’t have time to get soggy. That’s why it’s so crispy. And of course, the flavor too; don’t get me wrong, the flavor is amazing. I’ve never found good chicken in America to put on my menu. You can put that in the article: I want to find the best chicken in America.

We opened Petit Trois almost two years ago, and my focus was really to understand—what is a bistro? For me, a bistro is about ambiance, of course, but also the food, and to have a French restaurant and not have the best baguette, it was very stressful. I tried a lot of different baguettes in L.A., some made by very known bakers, but one day I went to a very famous cheese store here in Beverly, and my friend Norbert made me a little sandwich with some cheese and dry ham and this baguette. He knew I was going to like it. My first bite, I looked at him and I said, “Motherfucker, where did you find this?” He said, “Chef, you have no idea who made this baguette. It’s not a professional baker, it’s just a little girl in her house. She’s Mexican-American. Her name is Colleen.” So I contacted her right away and made a deal with her the same day to have her baguette in my restaurant. It’s amazing. She beat so many bakers in this town. We have so many famous bakers in this town, bread is a big deal, you know, but trust me, she’s better than some of them and she has less training.

My favorite thing to eat is ice cream. When I moved to this country 20 years ago, I’d never heard of a sundae. In France we didn’t have them—the best ice cream I’d had was at McDonald’s, just the vanilla ice cream with caramel sauce and peanuts. So when I moved here, I discovered the sundae you do here in America, with all the different toppings and sauces, and I loved it. A year ago I went with my kids to New York and I asked a lot of people about an ice cream place to take them, and this place Serendipity kept coming up. Have you seen the sundaes they do over there? I’ve never seen something like this in my life! It was huge. To see the joy on my kids’ face to dig into this big bowl of ice cream, it was a good memory. 

I’ve always wanted to do a sundae store. The textures are amazing: the ice cream is soft, you’ve got the crispiness of the nuts, you’ve got the sauces that are a little bit sticky. It’s like a fireworks of textures. You can do so many things with sundaes. I opened a new restaurant six months ago called Trois Familia, and I started to do a big sundae there, like in New York, but people in L.A. didn’t get it.

My mom was not a good cook, but she was not bad. She would cook a lot for me on the weekends—the week she would be working, but on the weekend, I would ask her what she was going to cook for me. As a kid I loved to eat. She would make this dish called hachi parmentier, which we eat a lot in France, and it’s very simple: just beef and Italian sausage mixed together with onion, parsley, and salt, and baked with mashed potatoes and cheese on top. Who doesn’t like meat and potatoes when they’re a kid? She makes the best hachi parmentier in the world, of course. My mom came here three weeks ago and she asked if I wanted her to cook something, and I asked for hachi parmentier. I was at work when she baked it, but she gave it to my five-year-old twins, and they loved it. I was so happy about that. Now they’re going to know the hachi parmentier of Mami Colette. It’s cool to pass recipes down through the family, to give memories to your kids with food.

When I was a kid, I remember every Sunday my dad would go get bread, and he would always buy an assortment of patisseries for us. He would get religieuses, napoleons, mille-feuilles...but my favorite one was the Paris-Brest. I just love pâte à choux​, but I also love the praline with almonds—it’s so good. It’s my favorite dessert, really. When I go to Paris, my favorite Paris-Brest is by a pastry chef called Philippe Conticini. He has many stores in Paris, but the one I like to go to is on Rue du Bac, because you can just buy the Paris-Brest and walk down the street and shop at the same time. That’s the way to eat it, because it’s not just about the dessert, it’s also the ambiance. It’s my favorite street in Paris. 

In my cooking, at every one of my restaurants, I use a lot of vinegar. I love sweet and sour together. Of course, I’m French and I do a lot of vinaigrettes, where you have to focus on the best vinegar, but I also use it a lot in broth—you do a broth and you put a little touch of vinegar with honey. It’s amazing. I finish all of my sauces with vinegar. I can’t imagine not having vinegar to cook with. Right now my favorite vinegar is a Spanish called O MED. They do a moscatel wine vinegar that’s just beautiful. It’s good for you, too! I have two spoonfuls of vinegar every day, straight. Thirty years ago vinegar was so strong and so acidic, it would burn your stomach, but now they’re so smooth. You can just sip it now, like you sip a little glass of banyuls or port.

When I was in France, I was just a sous-chef. I didn’t create menus, but I always had a passion for citrus. I love to juice it, to use the skin to confit, to put citrus in a sauce, in a vinaigrette; it just makes your food more fresh. I love its little zing. I moved to California in 1996, and now I use a lot of citrus in my cuisine because I love it, but also because I live in the place where you find the best citrus in the world. One day recently I went to the farmers’ market and I collected all the different citrus there. I had 27 varieties! My basket, when I came back to the restaurant, it was just beautiful. That’s California.  I’m so lucky to be in California. I think it’s one of the best states in the United States for produce. 

I’m from Chablis, in Burgundy, France. I grew up with Chablis wine, so of course I love it. When I feel homesick, I love to drink a good bottle of Chablis. I love white wine, and Chablis is one of the best white wines in the world. On the weekend, with some oysters, with my wife, with friends—it’s home for me. The one I like best is called Domaine Pattes Loup Beauregard 2013, it’s a premier cru.