It could be a Zen koan, a coded message or the title of a passionate homage to the sea by one who has lived near it all his life. But this kernel of wisdom has emerged from French chef Olivier Jehannin's twenty-year voyage across the culinary landscape of his native land. A voyage that brought him, eventually, to Les Templiers, the hostelry which is a local institution at Collioure, a sleepy Mediterranean paradise of castles, pastels and palm trees on the edge of the French Pyrenees, just north of the Spanish border.

I first stepped into the kitchen at Les Templiers as Jehannin pulled a huge tray out of the oven. It was piled high with pounds of steaming, baked salt. Jean Marc, the gentle-mannered head waiter went about cracking and scooping away the salt to reveal a small, whole fish buried deep inside. He delicately peeled away the skin, expertly lifted the filets from the bones. Next he set them over a bed of roasted vegetables on a plate and sailed out into the dining room with it. Chef Olivier was pleased by my curiosity as I examined the remaining hunks of crusted salt.

Born in Brittany, Jehannin armed himself with a culinary degree and set off on an odyssey that took him through the kitchens of Paris and up into the French Alps; but ultimately he returned to the coast, and his passion with seafood, at Nice and Monaco. "I loved it," he admits with a smile, describing his years at the Bec Rouge in Monaco. "It was nothing but the best quality of everything." But he smiles nostalgically as though that life, and more importantly that style of cooking, are a distant dream. And indeed they are. "It's too...complicated," he says, rubbing the air with his fingers in search of the perfect word to summarize traditional French cooking. "Especially the young nouveau chefs who are trying to prove something. Too much sauce. The flavor is in the fish." He pauses briefly to emphasize this last point with a simple gesture, as though he is feeling the weight of an imaginary fish in his hands, "and you just kill that flavor by smothering it in sauce and spice."