ALAIN Ducasse is a demi-god among chefs. Not built in the grand tradition of master chefs, and in fact, spare of build, he is soft-spoken and precise, wears pin-striped suits more often than a chef�s apron and toque, and is more businessman than cook, more entrepreneur than artiste.

The only son of a French peasant family, Alain was expected to take over the family farm, but got influenced by his grandmother�s cooking. �She was like a magician with the poultry and eggs from the farm, the fish I used to catch in the river, the vegetables from our garden, and the mushrooms from the woods. By the time I was seven, I knew I would not be taking over the farm,� he says.

To dissuade him, his parents apprenticed him to a transport cafe, where young Alain spent long vacations plunging freshly-killed turkeys in boiling water and then wrenching off their feathers. It was foul-smelling and finger-numbing, but he didn�t give up. Next came a cooking school in Bordeaux which bored him stiff. So he joined one of France�s most renowned chefs, Michel Guerard, to peel carrots and potatoes, clean chicken, cut up lamb and do any of the dirty work thrown at him. By his mid-20s, he was a chef running a seaside restaurant near Nice.

Then fate tested him before his 28th birthday. He was involved in a plane crash over the Alps and was the only survivor. For six hours he lay in the wreckage unable to move while all the other passengers died. Bleeding, temporarily blinded, one leg mangled and nearly severed, he was evacuated to a hospital. After 14 operations and nearly a year in a wheelchair, he had to learn to walk all over again. The crash taught him a lesson about priorities. �I was given a second life, so I started a new one from scratch,� he says.

Today, Alain juggles a host of top-level establishments with unrelenting precision. His two flagship restaurants, Louis XV in Monte Carlo and Alain Ducasse in Paris, are among the greatest in the world. Both boast three stars, the highest rating possible in the Michelin Guide, gastronomy�s definitive judge. Throw in his Italian restaurant in Paris, Il Cortile, and his Bar & Boeuf in Monte Carlo, and the star count comes to eight. Alain either owns outright or directs 12 top-calibre inns and restaurants and all are packed at every sitting.

He employs 350 master cooks, maitres d�hotel, wine stewards, waiters, and other personnel for an annual turnover of some 20 million dollars. He has written nine cook books, created a line of kitchen equipment, runs a consulting service, and has recently opened a school for professional cooks to teach them la methode Ducasse! �Cooking today is a business for a chef d�enterprise,� he is fond of saying. �A company manager�s job!� Which is why he has hired an economist from MIT to handle accounting and contractual matters, leaving him free to dream up new ideas.

�There is only one criterion: taste. Only one requirement: quality. Only one judge: the chef,� is the motto he cooks by. Alain has found the key to success. He is an entrepreneur who defies risks. �If I jump two metres, right away I want to jump two and a half,� he says. He travels and observes food from different cultures and his own cooking reflects this fact. The menu in his restaurants include soups, salads, steamed dishes, sandwiches, eggs, fish, poultry, and deserts, cooked in unique ways like induction, steam, pressure cooker, wok, plancha, grills and roasting spit too!

After Paris, his favourite city is New York. The restaurants there, he finds, are as good as Paris, and you can eat better and more low-priced meals in New York than you can in Paris. And to prove his point further, Alain did something very un-French. He opened a Paris bistro called Spoon, Food & Wine with an American wine list. The menu of the restaurant is cuisine of the world, 90 per cent of the wines are from outside France, with 80 per cent of these coming from US. The wines, some 120 of them, are served by the glass. The bottles are kept on the wall. Customers point to what they want to drink. �Fashion should be created rather than followed,� says Alain Ducasse, knowing that he has made eating an exquisite, unforgetable experience for people, and in the process, today, at 43 he is one of the richest and the most successful chefs in the world.