Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at how sustainability has become a rapidly growing movement within the food world. Chefs at the forefront of this trend are introducing their patrons to local farms, fresh ingredients, and innovative dishes while farmers are educating chefs and consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow the food served. Their practices and personal customer approaches provide a bigger impact to the community at large, hoping to create a better and more sustainable future for all.
A modern butcher shop nestled in Paris's hip Canal Saint-Martin district is probably the last place you'd expect to find dishes experimenting with sustainable honey-based recipes, but then again chef Benjamin Darnaud has a reputation for upending assumptions. After all, this was the contestant who walked off the set of France's first season of Top Chef.
"It was just a nightmare," Darnaud says of his brief flirtation with reality TV. "Real life wasn't like that."
Now Darnaud's the mind behind Viande & Chef, a 10th-arrondissement butcher shop that you can find him at when he's not busy acting as private chef and caterer to intellectual celebrities such as iconic French designer Philippe Starck or American director David Lynch. Its mission: to reconnect people with the source of their food, and to help create a culture of sustainability in the food Parisians eat.
Darnaud's appreciation for a food life in tune with nature was cultivated early. Growing up around Marseilles, then on his father's family's home in a rural village in the southwest of France, and then finally in Provence, where he and his relatives picked wild asparagus and fruits such as apples, pears, peaches, and even kiwis. "The tradition of natural food is so super strong—you don't have big factory farms and all that," he says. "The market was still just a grandma and grandpa, and you'd bite into a peach, and the juices would run all the way down your arm. And the quality of the produce? Amazing. The chickens were like three kilos—they're massive—and all they need to eat is roots in the field."
As an adult, he enjoyed massive success as a chef trained under the great Michel Bras, and then as the host of two cooking shows. One teaching children how to eat healthily, the other, called Taste Hunters, which followed Darnaud as he explored the lives, work, and food of farmers around the world. "It was about the passion for food and the countryside, and I thought, I need to show this to the people."
Fast-forward to February 2015, when he opened Viande & Chef, a butcher shop that plays into his lifelong ambition to connect people to the sources of the meals they ate. "I thought maybe a chef needs to to work with the butcher shop he gets his meat from," he says. "We can't cook meat and not even know where it's from. Are we sustainable? Are we ecologically correct? Are we respectful of the animals and nature? I had this problem in other restaurants in Paris, where you don't have have a connection to the farmer. Instead, you have a bunch of production and distribution numbers on the side of the package the meat was delivered in."
But the first day was a disaster. "I had to face this trouble and say, 'OK, we don't even know what we're doing here, cutting meat and putting it in a fridge. I know how to cook it, but I don't know what I'm doing here. People are asking too many questions. I said, 'I don't want to open a butcher shop anymore.' So we closed the shop after half an hour. It was a big kick in my ass."
Darnaud started to turn things around, with the help of friends and colleagues who had lifetimes of experience in the meat industry, from hoof to hook. Trained butchers came in and took over the butchery while teaching him and the others the techniques. He developed relationships with farmers who raised their livestock with traditional and sustainable methods, and now he has a steady network of ten to fifteen farms from within 200 kilometers away. He learned about the importance of heritage breeds, good and varied feed, and soil. "Just like in wine, terroir has an impact on the animal. And imagine if you were forced to eat nothing but corn and soy all the time. You wouldn't be happy—how do you expect the cows to be happy on that diet? And yet that's what people are doing to their cows now, all for the sake of time and profitability. When today's French farmers say they're concerned about their stock, they aren't in the yards checking on the grass or the meat. They're on their phones, checking on the price of soy and corn."
Darnaud's philosophy paid off for his business. As soon as the doors open at his little shop only yards from the canal, a steady stream of customers piles in, ordering his grass-fed beef or asking questions about the sustainable practices that he says make for better flavor and texture in their dishes. The lanky chef engages in cheerful banter with them all, from the hairdresser he dubs the mom of the whole neighborhood to the owner of the Korean restaurant nearby who wants advice on ingredients for a menu he's preparing for that night.
As a man known for breaking the rules, it shouldn't be surprising that someone who owns a butcher shop, likes coming up with recipes using sustainable honey. Darnaud's a big fan of the Société Central d'Apiculture, Paris's volunteer beekeeping group, and is among those in line when the precious honey from the apiary at the Société's secret garden in the Butte Beygeyre goes on sale once a year. ("I'll admit I keep a lot of the honey for myself," he says, chuckling, noting that there's a limit of one jar sold to a family.) But the recipes he invents will go on to wow private clients and other customers who will make them using the traditionally raised, grass-fed meats he sells in his shop, he says. "Using the permaculture and their whole sustainable system, they make honey that has lots of different flavors—it's floral, but it's full, like a brioche. It's like 10 different things at once."
Because whether it's meat or honey, Darnaud says, the chef serves his customers best when he knows when to get out of the way of the natural processes. "Nature does its thing in a really proper way—it doesn't need us, even in the middle to the city."