Chef Christopher Hache's Brilliant New Recipe

In Paris, they are many brilliant young chefs who can cook you a remarkable meal. This, of course, is why the French capital remains hands down the western world’s best food town. However, young chefs who can cook you a remarkable meal and also create a restaurant experience that’s framed by the social, psychic and visual pleasures that come from gracious hospitality, excellent service and a beautiful dining room are very much rarer indeed. Christopher Hache, 36, is one of them, and this is what makes him such an interesting man.

- Alexander Lobrano

Five days earlier at L’Ecrin, Hache’s intimate dinner-only restaurant in a hidden dining room overlooking a pretty garden courtyard in the heart of the recently renovated and reopened Hôtel de Crillon, I’d first noticed the amplitude of his talents. Late on a rainy Saturday night, the atmosphere in this handsome salon was radiant with the well-being of the some twenty or so privileged people who’d just been exquisitely fed and charmingly coddled. Then the chef appeared in immaculate whites to make his rounds.

The chef’s lap at the end of service is very often the de rigueur rite of closure to the experience of an haute-cuisine meal, but it’s usually more of an ego-buffig formality for the chef than anything else. Not here though. When Hache, who looked almost professorial in his tortoise-shell-framed glasses, stopped to chat with a well-dressed older couple from Boston at the table next to ours, he was so sincerely eager to have their feedback, asking which dishes they’d enjoyed the most and the least during the course of the twelve course Les Alliances tasting menu they’d just had, they actually told him the truth instead of just murmuring pleasantries.