Lunch with Thierry Marx

Welcome to Planet Marx (Minerva, 2006). Service wraps up and there he is, standing before me, ordering a coffee.

What’s the worst thing you’ve heard about your cuisine?
It’s always pretty much the same thing: "molecular" because some people, since the term is now a bit out of fashion, have not understood that molecular is a tool for understanding and especially not a style of cooking. Yesterday in a university, it was a question during my speech to try to understand the transformation mechanisms to be able to continue to evolve - and I mean evolve and not revolutionize cooking - and this is especially not a trend of the kitchen.

And conversely, the most beautiful compliment?
The compliment that makes me happy is always the following: "your cuisine gives me emotion". Cooking is not just about mixing ingredients together, it's always about textures, temperatures, an environment that we create around. There is no room for chance: hospitality is important, the place, the ingredients you have chosen to make these dishes must have a meaning and a history, all this means that in the end, there is a emotion. Because in this century, we no longer enter a restaurant to eat, we return to feel an emotion, whatever it is. The whole difficulty of my profession lies in giving memory to the ephemeral, to something that no longer exists.

But to truly feel that emotion—it takes time. And isn’t that exactly what we lack in today’s world? A world where time is rarely taken, especially for something as essential as eating.

Thierry Marx shares with me how he’s adapted to this fast-paced reality, all while striving—if only for the duration of a meal—to bring us back to an Epicurean philosophy rooted in craftsmanship and human connection. He reflects on how the end of the 20th century deeply altered our behavior at the table, reminding me that 2,000 Facebook friends mean little if there’s no one to share a coffee or a meal with.

Thierry Marx doesn’t preach. As I keep saying—he’s not a lesson-giver. He’s a philosopher.

You opened a cooking school where students can learn the craft for free, along with the restaurants Le Camélia, Sur Mesure, and the Cake Shop. Most recently, you launched a bakery in the Saint-Augustin district. It seems like you never get bored—do you?
I’m not bored, but I’m deliberately causing boredom. Because I think you can be very creative in boredom . You have to give yourself rest periods, which I do through meditation, music, reading; a few hours when I leave my mind wandering. Boredom is part of the balance between the boss and the entrepreneur. If there’s not a little bit of boredom, a little bit of daydreaming, a little bit of the improbable and the impossible, projects don't really come to life.

Where you bored when the idea of opening a bakery came out?
The idea of the bakery was born at the end of my schooling. I was walking past a bakery going to school in a busy neighborhood. There was this baker, “meilleur ouvrier” in France and I was told that I was not good at school and since I was not good, I would go to apprenticeship. And I saw this worker, happy with his worker status, starting to flourish, to impose a style of bread that Parisians no longer knew. He became my mentor.

Trained by his mentor, Thierry Marx mastered the art of breadmaking. After experiences in Bordeaux and Japan, the time has come for Paris to welcome his bakery. For Chef Marx, baking is nothing less than the “first profession of gastronomy.”

I shall see you then in Paris - 51 rue de Laborde - in June for the opening. Tell me Chef Thierry Marx, do you eat at McDonalds?
I have eaten at McDonald's very often. And I will even tell you what I ate and why: I often ate at McDonald's an egg muffin for breakfast when I went to judo competitions or during motorcycle trips with friends because we didn't all have the same budget. This type of restaurant has taken a place that was empty because we – cooks - have not taken it: the place that allows you to eat at a very low cost, to be able to find yourself without this pressure of necessarily having to eat. So it wasn't the best coffee or the best egg-muffin, but I had fun surrounded by my friends at a price accessible to the whole group.

Are you then in favour of low-cost food?
I don’t hate many things in life, except low-cost. A baguette of 1.20 Swiss francs can protect an entire subsidiary from know-how and transmission. An 80-cent euro baguette from an industrial production terminal makes no sense for this planet, in its social aspect. Low-cost is to be banished, it is a failure, a blow. On the other hand, working on the baking profession where there is an accessibility to a low-cost product with which we can create emotions by tasting it, that I believe. So I'm not afraid of the word popular because for me, popular does not rhyme with mediocre.

I have nothing against the supermarket as long as the supermarket sources products that are interesting for the planet and pays them at their fair price. I do not condemn the food industry or the large distribution and going into a scapegoat strategy is useless. The cook, to return to my profession, is part of this environment. If I don't start saying that we must favour short circuits, go and help the producer to sell their products better, if we - cooks - do not have environmental behaviour, we will simply cut the branch on which we are sitting. It’s quite easy to be done: you share a pasta dish and you just have to ask where the tomatoes that made the sauce come from, where the flour comes from, how the recipe was made, already everything soothes and all this is linked to a social and economic history. And this is what is interesting in a kitchen.

For a moment, seated before Thierry Marx’s soy risotto, the emotions of a childhood spent by the water came rushing back—the foam of memories, the scent of sea and soil. Over lunch, other journeys and discoveries were shared, wrapped in a poetic simplicity that lingered long after the last bite...