A Letter to My Former Self

To the Arrogant Chef I Once Was

CHEF ALEXIS GAUTHIER
MAY 19, 2025

For years, I built my career on dishes that dazzled. I earned applause, accolades, and respect. But behind every standing ovation was a silence I refused to hear—the silence of suffering, of animals turned into ingredients, of pain plated as art.

I told myself it was craft. I told myself it was culture. I told myself it was necessary.

But I see it differently now. With clarity comes guilt—and it is a terrible kind of guilt. Because I profited from lives that were not mine to take. I built prestige on the backs of beings who had no voice in the transaction. And worst of all, I silenced the small voice in me that always questioned it—smothered it under demi-glace and truffle foam.

This letter is for the version of me who still believed that cruelty was part of excellence. The me who thought integrity and indulgence couldn’t coexist. It’s a message from the future—a future I never imagined possible, and one I almost didn’t reach.

If you are a chef, a cook, a creator—if you feel the flicker of discomfort when you prep a foie gras torchon or break down a crate of lobsters—know this: that flicker is a flame. Don’t smother it.

There is no more time to wait. The animals cannot wait. The planet cannot wait. And your own soul—however buried beneath the rituals of service and tradition—cannot wait.

So here it is: a letter to my former self. To the arrogant, celebrated chef I once was. To the person who needed someone to say, “There’s another way—and it’s not just kinder. It’s better.”

Let this be the beginning of your awakening.

London May 2025,

Dear Arrogant Chef in Your Stainless Steel Tower,

Put down the foie gras.

Yes—that grotesque, glistening lobe of force-fed duck liver you’re gripping like a sceptre, as if it bestows power or immortality. You’ve just emerged from another 16-hour shift at The Louis XV Alain Ducasse, your sanctified, three-Michelin-star fortress, where you’ve spent years transforming living beings into edible theater. The Poulet de Bresse, deboned tableside and whisked away before a guest glimpses mortality. The lamb saddle, carved with ceremony, its blood pooling like a velvet curtain. The lobster, poached alive in Mediterranean herb broth—its agony drowned in bubbles.

You call it haute cuisine. Sacrifice in pursuit of transcendence. But I remember something else: You’re a taxidermist with plating tweezers, preserving suffering in the name of elegance.

There’s a memory you’ve buried. Let me unearth it.

That night in the walk-in, after the last critic praised your “truffle-stuffed pigeon with existential despair jus.” You’re hunched over veal sweetbreads, your hands cracked from scrubbing blood from porcelain. You glance up and catch your reflection in the steel shelving. Your eyes—dull, overcooked. You tell yourself it’s just fatigue. But it isn’t. It’s the first tremor. The beginning of something inconvenient and true.

What if this is all a lie?

You’ve built a mythology around cruelty. Convinced yourself that excellence demands ruthlessness. That your soufflé of ambition needs to rise atop a foundation of silence and suffering. You mocked the vegan commis chef when she dared whisper cashew cream. Called her la hippie lesbienne while your hands, unshackling, piped duck fat into rosettes with the precision of an assassin.

But here’s the secret: her question will outlive your mockery. It will echo in your quietest hours. It will dig into your sleep and bloom like mold beneath the polish of your success.

One day, a farmer will visit your kitchen. A wiry man with gravel in his voice and dirt in his fingernails. He’ll look down at your foie gras—gilded in gold leaf, posed on a plate like a crown jewel—and say, “I raised those ducks. They screamed when we force-fed them. You can hear it, if you stand close enough.” You’ll laugh nervously. Call him sentimental. Offer a ’98 Yquem and hope the moment passes.

But his words will cling. Like smoke. Like guilt. Like truth.

Then one day, you’ll read Antispéciste by Aymeric Caron. And by page 47—“Animals do not exist to be our metaphors”—you’ll sob into your toque. You’ll see it all for what it was: not transcendence, but performance. Not genius, but dominance. A danse macabre where the animals bled, and you basked in applause.

The unraveling will be slow, and it will be brutal.

You’ll ruin a bavarois because your hands won’t stop trembling. Snap at the sommelier for a wine pairing that doesn’t matter. Stare into the unblinking black eyes of live langoustines and recognize yourself. One night, you’ll hide in the pastry pantry—your vanilla-scented sanctuary—and scream into a bag of flour until your voice is raw.

But then comes the shift. Not just a moral reckoning, but something deeper.

Integrity.

The kind that doesn’t show up on a plating diagram. The kind that doesn’t earn stars. The kind that stands quietly behind your shoulder and asks, “Is this true?”

You’ll walk away. Leave the knives behind like relics of a war you no longer believe in. And you’ll begin again.

You’ll discover that cashew Camembert can make a Parisian cry. That beetroot carpaccio, translucent and cured in smoked salt, can seduce even the most devout carnivore. That aquafaba—yes, chickpea brine—can whip into a meringue of mercy.

And yes, you’ll fall for nutritional yeast. That golden, stubborn powder with its unapologetic umami. You’ll marvel that something so odd can be so honest.

And here’s the real triumph: no more stars. Not in disgrace, but in liberation. Your diners will call you unhinged, a traitor, a heretic. But in your new kitchen, elbow-deep in almond curd, laughing with cooks who measure worth in kindness, not cuts—you will feel it.

Integrity. At last.

You’ll begin to teach. Young chefs, blistered and bright-eyed, will call you Chef with reverence. You’ll tell them, “The most powerful dish you’ll ever serve is the one that harms nothing.” If they roll their eyes, you’ll hand them a carrot—dirt still clinging—and say, “Make this the star. I dare you.”

And sometimes, you’ll dream of the old kitchen. The hiss of heat, the sharp clang of porcelain, the sacred “Oui, chef!” But you won’t wake in regret. You’ll wake in truth.

Because real genius doesn’t demand cruelty. It demands conscience. It doesn’t dominate. It liberates.

So put down the foie gras, you arrogant bastard.

The future is vegan. And it’s built on flavor—and integrity—you never thought possible.

—Future You