In Monaco, carrots just might be the new caviar. "For me, luxury is eating baby peas that were picked an hour earlier or maybe a carrot that was just pulled out of the ground," says the chef Paolo Sari, whose cooking at Elsa — a sunny restaurant at the suavely bohemian, India Mahdavi-designed Monte Carlo Beach Hotel — recently won him the first Michelin star ever awarded to a 100 percent organic establishment.
Sari is a Venice native whose peripatetic career has included stints at the Four Seasons in London, several kitchens in Sardinia, Bice in New York, the Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles and a hotel kitchen on Jeju, a volcanic island a hundred miles off the coast of South Korea. It was the latter experience, which included a three-month stay in a Buddhist monastery there, that caused his ideas about cooking to change. "The monks were such healthy, peaceful people," he says. "They lived on the vegetables and rice they grew and locally caught fish. In its simplicity, their food was delicious, and as a Venetian, it made sense to me, since so much of what I ate as a child came from the Venetian lagoon and the 200 little islands around Venice." When he returned to Europe and took the job at Elsa, he says, "I wanted to create an occidental version of the food I ate on Jeju."
Glittery Monaco might seem like an improbable setting in which to concoct a cooking style Sari describes as "simple, healthy and natural," but the principality has actually been in the locavore vanguard ever since the Mediterranean menu at the Louis XV restaurant in the Hotel de Paris, created by Chef Alain Ducasse, won three Michelin stars in 1990. "Adding organic to the locavore equation required a lot of research," Sari says. But the restaurant was able to build a network of small organic farmers to supply its fruit and vegetables, and more than 90 percent of its produce comes from within a radius of 60 miles. Elsa — named after the American society chronicler Elsa Maxwell, who launched the Monte Carlo Beach Hotel in 1929 — was also awarded a level-three label (the strictest possible) by Ecocert, the respected French organic certification agency.
When a visually stunning dish like Sari's "Bio Sama," an artful tumble of vegetables — shaved baby carrots, wild asparagus, fava beans, radishes, fennel — and edible flowers dressed with organic extra-virgin olive oil and Camargue sea salt comes to the table, it's an earnest invitation to meditate on the essential taste of the vegetables. Other dishes, like a carpaccio of San Remo shrimp garnished with tiny cubes of pink grapefruit, shaved baby fennel bulb, bergamot oil and a little caviar, amp up the menu's sensuality. Even the bread — baked with organic Italian flour and served with four different kinds of organic olive oil — requires your undivided attention.
Though Sari makes some superb gnocchi, risotto and pasta, the catch-of-the-day is the real star of his menu; on a recent visit, he served a superb filet of grilled sériole (amberjack) with a sauce marinière (fish fumet, white wine and herbs) and baby vegetables. The single cheese course is a dazzling tasting plate of 3-year-old organic Parmesan prepared as an ice cream, dribbled with 25-year-old balsamic vinegar, Parmesan-cream-filled barbajuan (Monegasque ravioli) and shavings of the cheese. And the dessert not to miss is the Sicilian almond soufflé.
Sari is now working on making the hotel's three other restaurants all-organic, too. "Many people still associate healthy eating with gastronomic deprivation," he says. "I want to show people that the best-tasting foods are also the ones that are good for you."
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