Au Revoir to All That Page 7
He surely would have had Mark Williamson’s support. Williamson, the owner of the popular Willi’s Wine Bar and another Paris restaurant, Macéo, moved to France from the United Kingdom in 1975 to work as a chef. At the time, England was still in the throes of an economic crisis that had started in the late 1960s and that was punctuated by rolling power outages; prior to leaving for France, Williamson had cooked at a restaurant in London, and he and his colleagues frequently found themselves toiling in the dark. France, by comparison, was in reasonably ruddy health, and during his first months there, he heard expressions of sympathy for the state Britain was in. “When I arrived here,” he recalls, “everyone said they were so sorry about England, that it was a pity what was happening to such a great country. I knew the French didn’t really mean it, but that’s what they said.” In France, Williamson found a vastly superior place to be a chef and restaurateur. “It was a much livelier restaurant scene, with a better quality workforce,” he said. “In the 1970s, people probably worked too much. But they took pride in the profession, and it gave them a good standard of living.”
Thirty years later, Williamson was back where he started: in a country with a broken economy and a broken spirit. “It’s absolutely horrendous what’s happened,” he said. Had he thought about closing down his restaurants? “Yes, on a regular basis,” he said. But at fifty-four years old, he was close enough to retirement that he would just stick it out for a while longer. The only kind of business that was really possible in France now, he said, was one in which you did all the work yourself; otherwise, it was too much hassle and aggravation.
It wasn’t the taxes and fees that troubled him as much as it was the blizzard of paperwork. Since the 1980s, the number of government agencies that he had to answer to, and the amount of documentation required of him, had grown exponentially. “You are literally sending documents to the government every single day,” he said. “Tax forms, employment forms, questionnaires.” Between the two restaurants, Williamson employed twenty-six people, and the dossier for every member of the staff bulged with official forms. He set aside one day a month exclusively for paperwork, but it usually ended up requiring several days of his time. Different government agencies often demanded the same information, yet nothing was ever done to streamline the process. At this point, Williamson said, he really needed a full-time assistant to handle all the correspondence with the government, but that kind of nonessential hiring was out of the question; besides, it simply would have created more paperwork.
Williamson told me of his most recent run-in with the bureaucracy. The agency in charge of tax collection had decided that it wanted business owners to submit their monthly VAT payments electronically and had sent out a downloadable program that would enable them to do so. For some reason, the program was not usable on a Mac, which was the type of computer that Williamson owned. Because he was unable to file the VAT payments electronically, he started getting fined 120 euros per month. To resolve the problem, he called the official help line, but trying to get even a simple question answered was next to impossible. “No one is ever at their desk, and if they are, they are always watching the clock or stepping away,” said Williamson. “They are almost never there physically; you speak to someone, and the next thing you know she’s off on maternity leave, or away for training, or on vacation. It has slowed the flow of things incredibly.” It took several days of back-and-forth before he was finally told that a decision had been made some time earlier to exempt Mac users from having to file electronically and that he could continue to submit his payments via bank transfers. “It’s mind-blowing; I should have filed a complaint with the European Court of Justice,” he said. Unaccountable, capricious bureaucrats siphoning off huge amounts of the country’s wealth in order to take care of themselves; in Williamson’s view, there was something profoundly sinister about this state of affairs, and here he made the same provocative claim as Sibard. “It is a Communist system, and these people are just apparatchiks,” he said. “I mean, really, what’s the difference between Cuba and France?”
Williamson now regularly sent his two children, aged twenty-two and seventeen, overseas so that they could get a taste of the can-do spirit that no longer existed in France. The older one had done an internship with a venture capital firm in Sydney, the younger one had worked as a stagier at a restaurant in New York. “When you are brought up surrounded by a passive work ethic, by this belief that work is owed to you and that you don’t have to invest yourself in your work, it’s really bad,” said Williamson.
What he found particularly insidious was the oft-repeated claim that the policies of the Mitterrand and Chirac years had helped sustain the French way of life. To Williamson, there was no doubt that the standard of living for most French had declined since the 1970s. “It’s great to have all this free time,” he said, “but you need money to enjoy it. So many people in France are now living on the minimum wage. You walk into the big supermarkets and you see what people are buying—the standard of living is way below what it was in the seventies.” He said the story was written in the faces of the people he encountered on the Paris subway. “The thing that always strikes me when I take the Métro is that everyone looks so fucking miserable,” he said. “You can’t really blame them. They’ve had their lives taken away from them; everything is programmed. All they want is to get a job as a fonctionnaire and to wait until retirement.”
The Pain from Spain
FROM THE OUTSIDE, MOST Michelin three-star restaurants exude grandeur. Strangely, Restaurante Arzak evoked thoughts of Little Italy. Located a mile or so from the center of San Sebastián, a city on the northern coast of Spain, hard up against the Pyrenees Mountains and just minutes from the French border, Arzak occupied a building with an exterior aspect—red brick and salmon-colored stucco, white awnings emblazoned with the restaurant’s name—more suggestive of a Bay Ridge spaghetti house than a gastronomic Lourdes. Entering through the small, Spartan bar area, I half-expected to see a TV set tuned to ESPN mounted on the wall. It was only when I arrived in the dining room and spotted the white linen tablecloths and the elegant cutlery and stemware that I was assured that, yes, this really was a three-star establishment. And even then, there was a sense of the unusual. The contours of the walls made it appear as if Arzak had been shoehorned into someone’s house, which it was: It was the house in which Juan Mari Arzak grew up. He had converted it into a restaurant and from this unlikeliest of launching pads, Spain’s food revolution, the most important culinary movement since nouvelle cuisine, had taken off.
In the opinion of many observers, la nueva cocina, as the New Spanish Cooking was known, wasn’t just nouvelle cuisine by another name; it was a continuation of France’s gastronomic insurrection. In 1976, Paul Bocuse, in his self-appointed role as French cooking’s roving ambassador, took part in a food conference in Madrid, during which he shared some of the central tenets of nouvelle cuisine (this despite having told Jacques Pépin that he didn’t really understand what the movement was about). At the time, Spain was just beginning its transition to democratic rule after four decades of stifling right-wing dictatorship under Francisco Franco. Franco’s death in late 1975 opened the door to political, economic, and cultural renewal, and this sense of liberation and opportunity reached into the kitchens of Spain. In the audience that day in Madrid were two young chefs from San Sebastián, Juan Mari Arzak and Pedro Subijana. They were intrigued by what they saw and heard and made their curiosity known to Bocuse, who invited them to visit him in Lyon to learn more about what he and other French chefs were up to. Arzak and Subijana spent ten days in France—hanging out in Bocuse’s kitchen, visiting the Troisgros brothers—and returned to San Sebastián determined to give their native Basque cuisine a similar facelift. With several like-minded colleagues and a group of freethinking diners happy to be lab rats in exchange for complimentary meals, they began holding get-togethers during which updated versions of Basque classics and entirely original creations were pr
esented. Thus was born contemporary Basque cuisine; the experimental spirit that guided it quickly spread to other parts of Spain, notably Catalonia, and what began as a regional phenomenon became a national one known as la nueva cocina.
Thirty years on, with Paul Bocuse now cracking jokes about nouvelle cuisine, its spirit still animated Spain’s gastronomic discourse, as I learned when I interviewed Arzak at the French Culinary Institute’s gala event in New York in October 2006. I had asked him about his experience in France in 1976, and just as he began to reply, Ferran Adrià walked into the room. He overheard our conversation, and within moments, he and Arzak were vigorously debating whether Alain Chapel or Michel Guérard had been the most important figure of that era. They spoke Spanish, firing back and forth at such a pace that my translator finally gave up and just listened. After about ten minutes, Adrià announced that he had to get ready for his cooking demonstration, but as he left, he told me (as if I didn’t now realize it) that this question was one of great consequence; indeed, he was spending much of his free time these days studying the nouvelle cuisine movement.
Whether la nueva cocina was an extension of nouvelle cuisine or simply a by-product, it was driven by the same hunger for innovation, openness to new ideas, and desire for creative freedom. It drew heavily on the principles of molecular gastronomy, a culinary approach founded on a self-evident proposition—cooking is a form of chemistry—that had given rise to some of the most intricate and controversial food ever created. It introduced all sorts of laboratory equipment to professional kitchens, an array of test tubes, syringes, pH meters, and lasers that poured forth a riot of strange powders, foams, jellies, flash-frozen dishes, and unusual flavor combinations. In Spanish hands, at least, the results were often playful (melon caviar served in a real caviar tin, pistachio truffles frozen with liquid nitrogen) but also sometimes gratuitously provocative (coconut ravioli in soy sauce, Parmesan ice cream sandwiches).
La nueva cocina has its roots in San Sebastián, and the city now boasted more Michelin-starred restaurants per capita—eighteen as of 2008, with three three-stars—than any other in the world (an achievement that caused some in France to regard it as a hemorrhoid on the bottom of France). Arzak was awarded three stars in 1989, one of the first Spanish chefs to be so honored (“it was like winning the Nobel Prize”). His daughter Elena now ran the kitchen, but he was at the restaurant most days, and the two appeared to work as a team. While their food was not as outré as Adrià’s, the Arzaks also had their hands firmly planted in the molecular gastronomy tool kit and were not above pyrotechnics; Juan Mari had made headlines at a culinary conference a few years earlier when he prepared an exploding strawberry milkshake using dry ice. I was somewhat dubious of this newfangled cooking, so it was with anticipation but also with a certain ambivalence that I sat down for lunch at Arzak on a warm afternoon in September 2007. The kitchen wasted no time getting to the funky stuff. My first course was a dish of roasted figs served with kefir that had been infused with foie gras oil. I eyed it suspiciously, then reminded myself that an open mind sometimes required an open mouth, and I took a bite. It was delicious. The next course was a sweet, buttery lobster claw in a vermouth and onion sauce and topped with freeze-dried olive oil—also great. After that came an outrageously good white tuna with blackened skin and pickled cucumber sauce, followed by a roast pigeon seasoned with rosemary and served with a side of shaved blue potatoes and blue potato crisps arranged like masts on a ship. For dessert, I was served chocolate grapes in a thoroughly fetching tomato and raspberry soup. Having arrived a skeptic, I staggered away from the table a believer. The food was fascinating, and, more important, it was a pleasure to eat.
The atmospherics also made an impression. Unlike most French chefs, who would sweep into the dining room maybe once per service (and then mostly for the purpose of having their rings kissed), Juan Mari and Elena spent much of the lunch hour tableside—suggesting dishes, fielding questions about the food, hamming it up with regulars. And in striking contrast to high-end establishments in France, which were usually half-empty at lunch and dependent now almost entirely on tourists, every seat at Arzak was filled on a Thursday afternoon, and by a mainly local crowd. Even the most successful French three-stars now seemed like relics of a bygone era. Arzak felt alive. And it wasn’t just Arzak: Almost every restaurant one encountered in San Sebastián felt that way. There was a similar exuberance to the dining scenes in New York and London, and the contrast between these places and what one found now in Paris and Lyon told the story better than any newspaper or magazine article could: Spain was ascendant, other countries were on the rise, and France had ceased to be the undisputed First Nation of Food.
For this, much of the credit belonged to France. It had set in motion Spain’s gastronomic awakening, and a steady influx of gifted French chefs helped do the same in the United States and Britain. André Soltner, Alain Sailhac, and Roger Fessaguet in New York, and the Roux brothers and Pierre Koffman in London, created food the likes of which those cities had never experienced, encouraged the development of artisanal food movements, and nurtured homegrown culinary talent. In the case of Michel and Albert Roux, not only did their restaurants, Le Gavroche and the Waterside Inn, earn three Michelin stars; two of their protégés, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay, became the first British-born chefs to win the Guide’s highest rating. The culinary vitality on display in New York and London by the mid-2000s quite literally grew out of the kitchens of those transplanted French chefs.
But there was also no denying that France had slipped. “French restaurants had been the kings of the world, but in the 1990s, they lost their greatness,” the long-expatriated Michel Richard (last seen signing autographs on Michel Guérard’s behalf) said over coffee one afternoon at Citronelle, his restaurant in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. The shifting gastronomic fortunes were, at heart, a reflection of shifting economies. While France stalled, Spain flourished. From the late 1980s on, its GDP grew more than 3 percent per year on average. Between the mid-1990s and 2007, the economy doubled in size, becoming the world’s eighth-largest, just behind France and ahead of Russia, India, and South Korea. During this same period, unemployment declined from 25 percent to less than 9. All this progress naturally accrued to the benefit of Spain’s restaurant industry, which had another thing in its favor: Spain’s VAT was only 7 percent, almost a third less than the rate in France.
Likewise, the vast wealth created in New York and London during the 1980s and the 1990s fueled vibrant restaurant scenes there. Scores of ambitious new establishments opened, their owners confident that if they put good food on the plate and offered a winning ambiance, their investments would be rewarded. Robust economic growth didn’t just promote spending at the table; it also encouraged exploration. As New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl observed in 1998, “The fate of restaurants … is tied to the economy. It’s not just because people spend more in times of prosperity. Diners also become more adventurous when they are flush; it is no coincidence that the great advances in American dining have all occurred during bull markets. Remember the early 80’s? It was an exhilarating time when restaurants reinvented themselves to give us New American cooking, open kitchens and casual chic. But then came the recession of the early 90’s, and a spate of the safe and the dull. When times turn tough, customers turn conservative. In response, restaurateurs get frightened; many close their doors, and those who stay open stick to the tried and true, producing copycat cuisine that is the edible equivalent of Hollywood studios churning out Jaws 3, 4 and 5.”
Booming economies did indeed yield innovative chefs and intrepid diners; Spain was the obvious example, but this was also true in Britain and the United States. In 1995, a young, self-taught chef named Heston Blumenthal opened a restaurant called the Fat Duck in the village of Bray, near London, offering wildly inventive dishes (oyster with passion fruit jelly and lavender, for instance, and bacon-and-egg ice cream) that incorporated elements of molec
ular gastronomy. Londoners quickly embraced the restaurant, and Michelin did, too, awarding Blumenthal’s restaurant three stars in 2004. Exactly ten years after Blumenthal started the Fat Duck, Gourmet magazine named London the best food city in the world. The magazine’s editor? Ruth Reichl. (To appreciate how far British cooking had come, consider what Michel Roux had to say in his memoir, Life is a Menu, about the food he encountered in London in the 1960s. “One of the most chilling experiences of my life was discovering the British pea,” he wrote. “I happened on this fluorescent green object, almost the size of a quail’s egg, when I passed a Lyons Corner House near Marble Arch soon after arriving in London. Through a steaming window, I saw plates with these peas, a dollop of tomato ketchup and bleached-white Mother’s Pride bread smeared with deep yellow salted butter. I was appalled not only by this sight, but also by the fact that people seemed to be tucking in with such gusto. It bothered me that millions in the British Isles were eating in such a way. Like a witness of an atrocity, I told myself I had to put this out of my mind as quickly as possible.”)
The U.S. dining scene of the 1990s didn’t yield anything quite as audacious as Blumenthal’s cooking, but it did bring to the fore some hugely talented and original chefs, notably Thomas Keller, who combined an almost monastic reverence for classic French techniques with an ingenuity that saw him give haute-cuisine makeovers to such down-market American staples as macaroni and cheese, surf and turf, and coffee and donuts. His Yountville, California, restaurant, which opened in 1994, was called the French Laundry, and it had the unmistakable look and feel of a Michelin three-star. In 2006, Michelin introduced a guide to the San Francisco Bay area and gave the French Laundry three stars, to go along with the three that Keller’s New York restaurant, Per Se, had earned the year before when he became the first American-born chef to achieve that distinction.