Roland Trettl meets Normand Laprise

The improviser

Planning's not his thing. When Canadian Normand Laprise cooks, he is guided by the product and his intuition alone. Recipes? Forget it!
Roland Trettl lured him to Salzburg. What did he cook? It's a surprise!

It seems that lately I've tended to invite guest chefs who become culinary problem cases. It may have been virtually impossible to obtain the products that Tokyo chef Stefan Mörth required in Europe, but Normand Laprise and his Montreal "Toqué!" presented me with a completely different challenge, which also tested our Hangar-7 concept to the limit.
In short – how on earth is one supposed to copy the cooking of someone who relies almost exclusively on intuition and improvisation?

At first glance 47-year old Normand appears conventional and staid, and when he talks about how relaxing he finds a game of golf (depending on how fit he is, his handicap hovers around 10), the conventional image is heightened. Which is absolute rubbish when one sees the Canadian on the ski slopes, or is allowed to watch him at work. Mr Laprise is very, very strange and his chef de cuisine, Charles-Antoine Crête, is his equal in every way, for example when the latter holds a bottle of beer in his mouth, and performs a backward roll in the middle of the kitchen, without dropping the bottle. There's no culinary point to it, but it's very impressive nonetheless.

Normand's cuisine is wonderful, incredibly light with lots of flowers and herbs. It reminds me a little of the uncomplicated simplicity of the 1960s, flower power and the hippy era. All highly unconventional and carefree; don't plan ahead too much, instead cook for today with relish and enjoyment.

The results, such as marinated salmon with smoked sour cream, or black cod with an onion confit, coated in a potato soufflé from the aerosol, or scallop ceviche with Imperial caviar and a vodka, Red Bull and lime foam, will bring you to your knees.
No, that last one wasn't a Hangar-7 idea, but at Normand's restaurant something like this sits quite easily on the menu. As I said, Normand Laprise is anything but a conventional golf player.

All in all "Toqué" follows a restaurant concept that I could imagine for myself in the future: open just five evenings a week, big enough for just 140 diners, catered to by 15 chefs. Discussing the menu is mega-casual – almost like a relaxed chat with friends, although it must be said that trying to achieve any form of planning is pretty much superfluous anyway, because Normand and his chef de cuisine are accustomed to a form of improvisation whose inspired style seems to me to border on madness. They adopt a style which, although many diners will regard it as the current model, is hardly practised any more. Both experts really put their dishes together according to what's seasonal. If they see 20 nice red mullet, then there's 20 nice red mullet. And if there is no more fish on the menu after 20 portions, there's no more fish.

It's also characteristic of the house style that the menu is limited to just 15 items, and the main premium in "Toqué!" is for the mystery menu. The two of them can really go to town on this - go into the kitchen at midday, take a look at the produce and start to play. The end result will be a sensational menu – for just this one day. Tomorrow's another day. Recipes? Forget it!

Ultimately this is where I have a problem. I practically had to hold a gun to Normand's head to get him to agree two menus with me for Hangar-7. It took him a full five hours. For 14 dishes – he simply could not make up his mind. And really the menus that Normand has decided on are irrelevant, because from what I know of him, he won't stick to them when he's in Salzburg anyway.

Recorded by Christoph Schulte • Photos: Red Bull Photofiles / Jane Heller