Au Revoir to All That Read online

  Within the culinary fraternity, however, Bocuse set an alluring example. He demonstrated that not only could chefs escape the grimy, grinding business of making food; they could become wealthy and famous in the process. They could act and be paid like captains of industry and treated like rock stars. For men who had spent decades hunched over hot stoves, often at great cost to their health and happiness, this was an enticing prospect. In time, economic necessity would oblige many French chefs to pursue outside interests—to take on consulting gigs, to open additional restaurants, and to otherwise stray from their kitchens. Initially, though, it was a lifestyle choice, and it was Bocuse who showed the way. Whether out of need, desire, or both, truant chefs became increasingly prevalent in the 1980s and ’90s, and this was undoubtedly a factor in the diminished creativity, and perhaps also quality, of French cuisine by the turn of the century. French chefs would deny that the ancillary activities had any such effect, and they would scoff at the suggestion that Bocuse somehow led the profession astray; to them, he is a hero. But Pierre Gagnaire, one of the few truly innovative French chefs of recent vintage, revealed more than he perhaps intended when I asked him about Bocuse’s legacy. He lauded Bocuse’s panache and his fidelity to the métier. But about his food, Gagnaire admitted, “I’m not impressed so much.”

  A few months after my visit to Bocuse, I had lunch at Restaurant Alain Chapel. Like Bocuse’s flagship, it was located just north of Lyon, in the village of Mionnay, and likewise on a heavily traveled thoroughfare. But that’s where the similarities ended. In contrast to Bocuse’s gaudy palace, Chapel was painted a quiet shade of yellow with green awnings, and a simple outdoor garden led to a sparsely elegant dining room. The décor reflected Chapel’s personality, the antithesis of Bocuse’s. He was a quiet, cerebral man (his favorite recreation was taking long walks in the nearby woods with his beloved dog) with a poetic spirit. That spirit manifested itself in his cookbook La cuisine, c’est beaucoup plus que des recettes. Recalling the foods that he ate in his youth, he wrote,

  Rye bread, broad bean soup, sautéed apples (delicious dumplings), butter and cheeses from the high mountain pastures, they all testified to an impoverished cuisine, resolutely lacking in all disguise, all artifice, all magic. Something resolutely material … at a table without crystal or table manners, I learned that cooking is much more than recipes. It is the products, first and above all, and the feelings that are no doubt rooted in the landscape, the faces, a familiar everyday life, a happiness more ample than the table. The sincerity of beings falling somewhere on this side of economic constraints and the game of appearances. The sincerity of beings like that of things, of broad beans or of rye.

  Chapel trained at La Pyramide (but following Point’s death) and returned to Mionnay in 1967 to take over the bistro, La Mère Charles, that his parents had opened when he was a child. (He would rename it Restaurant Alain Chapel in 1976.) At the time, the restaurant had one Michelin star; it was awarded a second in 1969 and a third in 1973. The speed with which Chapel was promoted spoke to his talent: He was a brilliant chef whose gifts were perhaps matched only by Guérard. Gault Millau said that a meal at Chapel was like “a symphony.” Craig Claiborne, the restaurant critic of the New York Times, described Chapel’s gâteau de foies blondes, a blend of puréed chicken liver and beef marrow in a lobster and cream sauce, as “one of the absolute cooking glories of this generation.” In keeping with the experimental ethos of nouvelle cuisine, Chapel’s food was innovative, even audacious (lobster in a salad was ballsy indeed), but there were also earthy, humble dishes—stuffed calves’ ears with fried parsley, for instance—that evinced the same rootedness that he had experienced in the foods of his childhood. Above all, he was guided by Curnonsky’s deceptively simple maxim: Good cooking is when things taste of what they are. Chapel was fanatical about the quality of ingredients—“the products.” Nouvelle cuisine stressed freshness, but he took it to an extreme, even cultivating his own fruits and vegetables. A few vivid flavors in complete harmony with one another—that was what he endeavored to put on the plate.

  Mionnay became an essential destination for young cooks looking to hone their talent. When Pierre Troisgros sent his son Michel off to acquire some additional seasoning, he had him work for Guérard; for the great Swiss chef Frédy Girardet, another lion of nouvelle cuisine; and for Chapel. In the late 1970s, a ferociously ambitious cook from the French southwest named Alain Ducasse spent two years at Chapel’s side; he would go on to earn three stars himself and become the most recognized chef of his generation, success that he would attribute in large measure to his stint with Chapel. When I asked Gagnaire, after he had dismissed Bocuse’s food, which older chefs had influenced him, he immediately said Chapel. The acclaimed American chef Thomas Keller has also cited him as a source of inspiration.

  For Chapel, the nouvelle cuisine movement may have been liberating in a creative sense, but the artistic freedom did nothing to alleviate the stress of the job. In 1990, while visiting friends in the city of Avignon on a day that the restaurant was closed, Chapel suffered a heart attack and died. He was fifty-three and left behind his wife, Suzanne, and two young sons, David and Romain. He thus became the second major figure of the nouvelle cuisine revolution to go to a premature grave; seven years earlier, Jean Troisgros had died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six. Suzanne Chapel decided to keep the restaurant open; she took charge of the dining room and installed Chapel’s longtime protégé, Philippe Jousse, as chef. On word of Chapel’s passing, Michelin demoted the restaurant to two stars. Bernard Naegellen, the Guide’s director at the time, later told journalist Rudolph Chelminski that this was a mark of respect for the deceased chef, that to have left the third star would have been tantamount to saying that “he had counted for nothing in the excellence of his restaurant.” Seventeen years later, the third star had still not been restored.

  Before lunch, I spoke with Jousse. A lean, boyish forty-seven-year-old whose age was betrayed only by the dark circles under his eyes, Jousse was known to be a great talent who had sacrificed his own aspirations in order to keep his mentor’s restaurant and memory alive. He insisted he wouldn’t have had it any other way. “I’ve stayed here because this is where I learned everything,” he said. “When Madame Chapel asked me to stay, I couldn’t say no, because I couldn’t bear to see this restaurant disappear.” He admitted he was frustrated by the lack of a third star, and wondered if perhaps Michelin regarded the restaurant as a shrine to Chapel. “We don’t know what the reason is; we go to see Michelin regularly—nothing.” But more distressing, he said, was the lack of interest in the French press; no one wrote about Chapel anymore. He said he and Madame Chapel were partly to blame for this. “We don’t know how to communicate,” he said quietly.

  Suzanne Chapel was a woman still in mourning. She was rail-thin, with willowy blonde hair that was turning gray, and the lines of her face were etched in sorrow. She’d had a previous career, as a nurse, and even now, many years later, she moved uneasily through the restaurant, clearly uncomfortable in the role of patronne. She admitted as much. “No, I can’t say there is a pleasure in doing this; I had another métier,” she told me. “But we had people who depended on us, people we were responsible for, so it was important that the restaurant stay open.” She, too, expressed frustration with Michelin and chalked up the restaurant’s inability to recapture the third star to “political influence,” though she didn’t elaborate.

  It was all pretty sobering, and the melancholy followed me to the table. But the airy dining room, with its pretty, floral-patterned wallpaper, lifted my spirits, and by the time I’d finished my glass of Champagne, I was ready to eat. Jousse had promised to serve me some of Chapel’s specialties, and the first course was straight from the master’s book. It consisted of three plump, bright-green asparagus spears, served alongside a poached egg, its yolk flaming orange, and surrounded by morels and chunks of crayfish. It was a simple, early-spring dish, but the flavors were as vibran
t as the colors, and they exuded an overwhelming sense of place—of the soils and waters that nurtured them, but also of the restaurant itself. Maybe I was projecting, but it really felt as if Chapel was on the plate.

  Daniel Boulud, a native of the Lyon area who had gone on to become an enormously successful chef in New York, once told me that Chapel was the John F. Kennedy of French cuisine—an iconic figure struck down at the zenith of his career. And as with Kennedy’s death, Chapel’s passing seemed to represent not only lost promise, but lost possibilities. Chapel was a businessman, as attentive to the bottom line as other chefs. Like Bocuse, he went to Japan, opening a restaurant in the city of Kobe in 1981, and it is conceivable that had he lived, he would have pursued additional projects. It was said that he hoped to one day have a restaurant in the United States, maybe in Florida.

  But up until his death, and apart from the restaurant in Japan, Chapel remained anchored to Mionnay and dedicated to his craft. Guy Gâteau, who worked for Chapel from 1973 to 1980 and rose to be the number one in the kitchen, told me that as the years went by, Chapel stepped away from the stove, but he remained close to the flame—closer, certainly, than Bocuse. He could be found at the expediting station, exhorting his brigade, and the creative spark never went out. Working with Gâteau and Ducasse and other gifted lieutenants, Chapel never stopped trying to push his cuisine, and, by extension, French cuisine, to new heights of refinement, ingenuity, and pleasure. For French gastronomy, said Gâteau, Chapel and Bocuse “were the two faces of Janus.” The great Rhône winemaker Jean-Louis Chave, whose father, Gérard, was one of Chapel’s closest friends, put it somewhat more directly: “There were two ways things could have gone, the Chapel way or the Bocuse way. Chapel died, and Bocuse won.”

  * * *

  The mid-1970s also proved to be a turning point in the world of French wine. In 1970, Steven Spurrier, a twenty-nine-year-old Englishman, purchased a wine shop on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris and soon expanded it to include a wine school. One of the first people he hired was Patricia Gallagher, an American expatriate working in Paris as a freelance journalist. Over the next few years, Spurrier and Gallagher traveled widely to source the most interesting wines and worked tirelessly to promote both the shop and the school. Hoping to tap into the excitement over America’s bicentennial celebration, they decided to organize a tasting pitting some top Burgundies and Bordeaux against a handful of California Cabernet Sauvignons and Chardonnays. Spurrier and Gallagher assembled a distinguished group of participants—all of them French—that included Aubert de Villaine, the owner of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Burgundy’s preeminent estate; Odette Kahn, the editor of France’s leading wine publication, La Revue du Vin de France; and Jean-Claude Vrinat, the owner of Taillevent, a three-star restaurant in Paris.

  The tasting was held on the afternoon of May 24, 1976, at the InterContinental Hotel in Paris. Twenty wines were poured—ten reds, ten whites—and all were served blind, with the judges unaware of the identities of the wines in their glasses. The white wines were tasted first, and when Spurrier announced the results, the sound of jaws hitting tables echoed across Paris: The 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay, from Napa Valley, had finished first, ahead of one grand cru white Burgundy and three other venerable French whites. The reds were tasted next, and shortly before six P.M. Spurrier dropped another bombshell: The 1973 Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon had come out on top, besting a group that included two Bordeaux first growths, the 1970 Château Mouton Rothschild and the 1970 Château Haut-Brion.

  The so-called Judgment of Paris made headlines around the world: The United States beats France at wine! (Three decades after the fact, the tasting remained a source of fascination; in 2005, former Time magazine correspondent George Taber, who was the only reporter at the InterContinental that afternoon, published a book about the tasting, titled Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine, which quickly yielded a pair of Hollywood scripts.) Overlooked amid all the panting were a few salient facts: Blind tastings often produced surprising results, and California wines tended to show better in their youth than did French wines. To proclaim, as some did, that the tasting had revealed French wines to be overrated was silly. Nonetheless, the Judgment of Paris showed that other places were capable of making good wine and that French superiority could no longer simply be assumed.

  France in Crisis

  IT WAS A BRIGHT, warm early May morning, and Marc Sibard was seated on a bench outside his Paris wine store, Les Caves Augé, a glass of Alsatian Muscat in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Les Caves Augé, located on the Boulevard Haussmann, was said to be the city’s oldest wine shop; with its comically narrow aisles and chockablock displays, it was undoubtedly the city’s most cluttered one, but also probably its finest. Augé had a sensational selection, with all the most sought-after names from all the major wine regions of France. Dauvissat, d’Angerville, Lafon, Joguet, Selosse—they were all here; you just had to find them. The forty-four-year-old Sibard, Augé’s proprietor for nearly two decades, was short, bald, and stocky, with a graying soul patch on his chin and a pugnacious personality to match his bulldog aspect. He and I got along well, but some Americans apparently found him difficult. Part of the problem, it seemed, was that he was unwilling to allow rich tourists to cherry-pick Augé’s choicest bottles—things like Jean-Louis Chave’s Hermitage, a much-sought wine from the northern Rhône Valley. It was a stand I personally admired but that had, unsurprisingly, sent more than a few frustrated New York collectors skulking away and muttering darkly about the Second World War and ungrateful frogs.

  On this morning, Sibard was talking not about troublesome clients but about the problems of doing business in France. He had a thriving enterprise in the heart of Paris, but the French government seemed determined to throw up as many barriers to success as it could. “In France,” he said, “the better you do, the more they try to fuck you, the more they want you to die.” Business owners had to contend with exorbitant taxes, inflexible labor laws, and a morass of burdensome regulations. He gave me an example that he considered particularly outrageous. “A few years ago,” Sibard said, “they put in place a law that says wine shops cannot display AOC wines next to vins de pays.” In the official hierarchy of French wines, AOCs were considered premium offerings, vins de pays were one level of quality down, and vins de table occupied the lowest rung. In reality, the classifications were not quite so well delineated: There were lots of awful AOC wines, and there were many excellent vins de pays and even some first-rate vins de table. Indeed, some of the best wines being made in places like the Loire Valley were classified as vins de pays or vins de table. Augé stocked a number of these, and both as a practical matter and as a sales strategy, it made no sense to segregate them from the AOC bottles.

  But to resist doing so was now a punishable offense. “If customs finds you keeping the wines next to each other, you pay a fine,” Sibard said. The idea that some bureaucrat, working in the bowels of a French ministry, had decided that it was the government’s role to dictate how Les Caves Augé displayed its wines was unfathomable to him. “Can you imagine this bullshit?” he asked, his voice rising in exasperation. Pointing at the open wooden crates splayed about the inside of his shop, he said, “If they come here, I’m dead; it’s such a mess in there.” In his view, everything about the way France now operated was designed to stifle ambition and thwart initiative. “We don’t motivate people to excel,” he said. “It is all about the lowest common denominator now, and what we get is mediocrity instead.” He paused briefly to admire an attractive female passerby, asked an assistant to fetch the bottle of Muscat so that we could top ourselves up, and resumed his peroration. “But if you say the system is fucked too loudly, customs will be visiting you the next morning,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you want to know something? France is the last Communist country on earth.”

  Sibard was exaggerating; surely he knew tha
t Vietnam and Cuba still swore allegiance to Marx and Lenin, and had I pressed him, he probably would have admitted that, no, France was not truly Communist. But his was the sort of remark that one heard frequently now in France, and it contained at least a kernel of truth: France’s government seemed determined to take a hammer and sickle to free enterprise, to punish the striver rather than the slacker, and to micromanage the economic life of the nation down to the last cream puff, and the results, if not as catastrophic as what befell the Soviet Union, were pretty dire all the same. Since the early 1980s, France had been one of the industrial world’s perennial laggards, with unremittingly sluggish growth and high unemployment. The failure of the French political establishment to reverse the country’s slide had created an increasingly embittered and cynical electorate—one that took its revenge in 2002 by choosing not a Communist but a fascist, Jean-Marie Le Pen, as one of the two candidates to face off in the final round of that year’s presidential election. On top of all this, many of France’s cities were now gripped by ethnic unrest, its once-vaunted university system was in shambles, and the rot had spread to the cultural sphere—even to the holy sanctum of the French table.