Au Revoir to All That Read online

  If the rise of Spain, Britain, and the United States underscored the financial problems facing French chefs, it also posed them an artistic challenge. By the early 2000s, San Sebastián, Bray, and Yountville were the foodie destinations; France, by contrast, was increasingly seen as a culinary museum, a place with a bright past but not very promising future. One could still eat well there, but it seemed to no longer generate the big ideas and the breakthrough flavors. (The Spaniards, on the other hand, were all about big ideas and breakthrough flavors; Ferran Adrià closed El Bulli for six months every year in order to travel the world looking for inspiration and to come up with new creations in his Barcelona test kitchen.) In treating France as passé, said New York chef Daniel Boulud, gastronomes were merely falling in line with the French themselves. “In Spain, nobody is nostalgic about anything,” he says. “In France, it’s all nostalgia. They are caught between tradition and globalization.”

  In 1996, a dozen top French chefs, among them Alain Ducasse and Joël Robuchon, issued a manifesto denouncing the “globalization of cuisine” and the notion of “innovation at any price” as affronts to the French culinary tradition. They wrote that “a great dish is not a juxtaposition, it is a blend. a great dish doesn’t abuse either herbs or spices. A great dish is a model of simplicity, harmony, and tastes … French cuisine owes its reputation to the reputation of [France’s] regions, the region owes its reputation to the products of its terroir. Our knowledge and our traditions are a benchmark.” Eighteen months later, some of their more iconoclastic peers, among them Pierre Gagnaire, Michel Troisgros, and Michel Bras, fired back. The “Group of Eight” declared themselves the heirs to the nouvelle cuisine movement and averred that the way forward for French cuisine was not to wallow in history but to embrace globalization and encourage experimentation in the kitchen.

  While the acrimonious debate over sauces and syringes raged on, many of the chefs had a more pressing concern: staying in business. By the 1990s, it had become exceptionally hard to make money on a three-star restaurant. This was especially true outside the major cities; as more people traveled by air and rail, there were fewer potential clients who could be persuaded by the Michelin Guide to take a detour. Top chefs now needed financial backers and other sources of revenue. Many of them started smaller, more casual restaurants to help support the flagships. In 1990, Georges Blanc opened one across the street from his eponymous three-star in the village of Vonnas. Eight years later, he founded bistros in the nearby cities of Mâcon and Bourg-en-Bresse, and in 2001, he opened a 110-seat restaurant in Lyon. He also operated several boutiques and hotels. “The three-star is not profitable,” Blanc flatly told me when I interviewed him in April 2007. “Three stars used to be profitable; twenty-five years ago, there were more customers, and our costs were lower. But now, because of the thirty-five-hour workweek and other laws, we have to pay a lot for good staff. Staff costs make up forty to fifty percent of the bill. My business today is profitable, but only because of the other restaurants and the hotels.”

  A few weeks earlier, I had driven from Paris to Vézelay, a picturesque village at the northern tip of Burgundy, to meet Marc Meneau, its most famous and now most embattled citizen. Meneau was the chef and owner of L’Espérance, a celebrated restaurant just down the hill from the town center. I’d eaten a mediocre lunch there several years earlier. The food hadn’t troubled me as much as the wine list: It was obscenely expensive, which was all the more difficult to swallow just a short drive from some of France’s greatest vineyards. I had briefly contemplated insulting the kitchen by ordering a Coke, but a young Japanese sommelier, doing a stage with the restaurant, had guided me to a decent half-bottle. Ultimately, though, the extortionate wine prices weren’t enough: Meneau’s company was now in liquidation proceedings, and with L’Espérance’s survival in doubt, Michelin had suspended its three-star rating and omitted it from the 2007 Guide.

  I arrived in Vézelay at around noon and waited for Meneau in the restaurant’s lounge, a bright, airy space overlooking the garden and opening directly into the dining room, which was empty. The bar area wasn’t seeing much action, either: Only two of its tables were occupied. Still, it was early, and the briskness with which members of the large waitstaff moved about suggested that more guests were due imminently. Oddly, though, amid all this purposeful scurrying, no one seemed to notice that a large framed poster had somehow ended up on the floor of the lounge, resting against the wall.

  After perhaps fifteen minutes, Meneau, dressed in his chef’s whites, came ambling into the room and greeted me with a perfunctory nod and handshake. Lean and tall, he had always cut a dashing figure, but not now: His hair was white and unruly, his face was covered in gray stubble, and his skin had a sickly pallor. Meneau led me through the kitchen, mindlessly grabbing a piece of candied fruit from a baking sheet en route, and then up a rickety staircase to his glass-enclosed second-floor office. I began by asking where things stood with his company, but before I could finish the question, he cut me off. “Are you here to talk food or business?” he demanded, his tone defiant. “Because I am only interested in talking about food.”

  So we talked food and the state of French cuisine. Meneau insisted that France was still the gastronomic world’s pacesetter: “Food that nourishes the spirit, that shows terroir; France is certainly the richest country when it comes to this.” But having just chastised me for bringing up his financial situation, he suddenly wanted to discuss it. He said that the restaurant business was in bad shape at the moment; France’s economic problems made it very difficult to run an enterprise of any kind, especially a restaurant, and most especially one in the countryside. “Here, we have to attract people; we need to give them a reason to travel down from Paris, or to get off the highway,” he said. “We need to provide luxury—rooms where they can spend the night, a pool, flowers everywhere. In the city, you don’t have to do all these things.”

  To support L’Espérance, he had opened four casual restaurants in the area, and he had also taken out some loans, which he now found himself struggling to repay. But he was surprisingly upbeat about his prospects. His case would be heard by the court soon, and he was optimistic a solution would be found allowing him to remain open. “This is not like the United States, where they just shut you down,” he explained. “Here, they take into account the social cost. Many people in this area depend on my restaurant. If I close, it’s not just a problem for me.” I asked how business was holding up; the French press had reported his difficulties, and with L’Espérance absent from the 2007 Michelin, I imagined turnover had suffered. The restaurant was doing extremely well, he claimed; clients were coming to show their support and to help him pull through.

  We finished up, and his secretary walked me back through the kitchen and to the lounge so I could have a quick cup of coffee. Meneau’s twenty-one-year-old son, Pierre, was there, and we chatted about the restaurant’s plight. A roundish young man with a Prince Valiant haircut, he said his parents had options if L’Espérance went under; in fact, his father had already received several job offers. Obviously, though, they were hoping to survive this crisis and remain in Vézelay. His father had been born there and had devoted his life to the village. From where I stood talking to Pierre, I had an unobstructed view of the dining room. Only two tables were occupied, six diners in total. If restaurant-goers were rallying to Meneau in his moment of need, it was not apparent on this afternoon. Waiters and busboys continued to circle the room, but they were like nightshift employees, just trying to make the hours pass. By then, it was clear that no one else would be coming for lunch. But the fallen poster was gone.

  While Meneau’s surly mood made for a challenging interview, it was at least reassuring to find him combative rather than despondent. L’Espérance was located just thirty miles up the road from Saulieu, the village that was home to Bernard Loiseau’s three-star, La Côte d’Or. The restaurant’s renown predated Loiseau’s presence there. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, La Côt
e d’Or’s reputation had been second only to La Pyramide’s, and its chef at the time, Alexandre Dumaine, had been nearly as influential as Fernand Point. Loiseau, who had apprenticed for three years with the Troisgros brothers and then worked in Paris, took charge of the restaurant in 1975. La Côte d’Or’s landmark status appealed to his vanity: He wanted to be among the giants, and working in Dumaine’s old kitchen was a powerful statement of intent.

  Two years after arriving in Saulieu, Loiseau was awarded his first Michelin star; the second came in 1981, and he reached the pinnacle a decade later. In the years between his second and third stars, Loiseau remodeled the restaurant’s kitchen and public rooms and also added luxury guest quarters. Almost all of the work was financed with bank loans, and by the late 1980s, Loiseau was five million dollars in debt and paying forty thousand dollars a month to his creditors. Even after winning the third star, he continued borrowing and spending. And the outlays were no longer confined to La Côte d’Or and Saulieu: Between 1998 and 2000, Loiseau acquired three properties in Paris and turned them into bistros. By 2000, he had gone through ten million dollars.

  Much of the spending was warranted. The restaurant had needed renovating, and like L’Espérance, La Côte d’Or now required more than just good food to attract clients. Loiseau outfitted it with the kinds of amenities—a spa, a fitness center, a heated pool—that could tempt wealthy Parisians to journey down for a night or a weekend. But there was another factor, too: The manic spending was also inspired by his desire to be the next Paul Bocuse. It was an ambition that the older chef seemed to encourage. When Loiseau was awarded his third star, Bocuse hosted a celebration in his honor at Collonges au Mont d’Or. Bocuse rented a pair of elephants for the occasion, and he and Loiseau each climbed aboard one of the pachyderms, magnums of Champagne in hand, to pose for the assembled journalists. He and Bocuse spoke often by phone, and though there was always an undercurrent of competition, Bocuse plainly regarded Loiseau as his culinary offspring, the next ambassador of French cuisine.

  Like Bocuse, Loiseau loved the camera, and his high-energy persona earned him the nickname “Monsieur 100,000 Volts.” Following Bocuse’s lead, he opened a restaurant in Japan and started a line of frozen foods. In 1995, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by François Mitterrand, joining Bocuse as the only chefs to have the prestigious medallions personally affixed to their lapels by a French president. Three years later, he made headlines by becoming the first chef to get a listing on the Paris Stock Exchange. He took his company public mainly because he needed to raise money to pay off his debts. But there was also a healthy dollop of gimmickry and showmanship: He told one interviewer that he was “the Hermès of food” and that “we’re in the era of marketing. You have to create a brand name with concepts. Today I have a brand. It took me twenty years to do it. That’s why I am going public now. Because it will explode.”

  That last word has a grim, premonitory ring. I had dinner with my wife at La Côte d’Or in September 2000. It was said that the quality had declined; never having been before, we couldn’t say whether the kitchen was struggling, but the food wasn’t impressive. Even the Loiseau classics—frogs’ legs with garlic purée and parsley juice, chicken poached with truffles under its skin—were lackluster, with flavors that seemed washed-out. It was a Sunday night and a popular time of year for tourists, but the dining room was almost empty. (Loiseau’s wife, Dominique, would later tell us that business was suffering; Americans, in particular, weren’t coming as much anymore, and they were desperate to get them back.) Loiseau was around, dressed in his chef’s jacket. He appeared to be in a good mood despite the slow turnover; he could be seen joking with the staff, and he was delightful when we chatted with him for a few minutes. He was a picture of fatigue, though—drawn, with dark circles under his eyes. He looked like he needed a month at the beach.

  In the fall of 2002, there were whispers that Loiseau’s third star was in jeopardy, and he and Dominique traveled to Paris in November to meet with Derek Brown, Michelin’s editorial director. Several months later, on January 18, François Simon, the influential restaurant critic for Le Figaro, published an article previewing the 2003 Michelin Guide. Evidently tapping an inside source, Simon reported that Loiseau, after “a big scare,” would be keeping his third star for at least another year but would fall two points, from 19/20 to 17/20, in the forthcoming Gault Millau guide. In mid-February, the 2003 Gault Millau was released and La Côte d’Or had indeed been downgraded. Loiseau had once told fellow chef Jacques Lameloise, “If I lose a star, I will kill myself.” Now, faced with that possibility and having been sanctioned by Gault Millau, Loiseau fell into a deep funk. The gloom didn’t lift even after he learned that La Côte d’Or had retained its third star in the 2003 Michelin. On Monday, February 24, he went home after lunch service, grabbed a gun, and took his own life, leaving behind his wife and three young children.

  In the judgment of Bocuse and other chefs, Loiseau had been the victim of malicious rumors. They blamed Simon (this despite the fact that he was right about the Gault Millau demotion and had said that Loiseau would keep his third star), but they also lashed out at the two major guides, which were accused of placing hellish demands on chefs and of treating them callously. The New York Times quoted Loiseau’s assistant as saying that her boss, during his visit with Michelin the previous autumn, had been urged to “be careful, stay in your kitchen and don’t do too much business.” However, Derek Brown denied issuing any sort of warning. “We didn’t and never would threaten to take away a star, and we didn’t advise him what to do,” he told the New Yorker three months after Loiseau’s death. “We are not a consultancy, after all.”

  It was subsequently learned that the fifty-two-year-old chef had suffered from bipolar disorder. We also know, thanks to Rudolph Chelminski’s excellent book, The Perfectionist, that Loiseau was haunted in his last years by a sense that culinary fashion had passed him by. (He was one of the chefs who had signed the letter condemning the globalization of haute cuisine.) He was already in a fragile state when the speculation about his third star began, and the prospect of losing it ultimately drove him to reach for his rifle. But although his suicide, in hindsight, looked preordained, it is fair to wonder if things might have turned out differently had he not run himself senseless pursuing the kind of glory that Bocuse had achieved. While it would be absurd to suggest that Bocuse was in any way responsible for what befell Loiseau, the example that he set clearly propelled the younger chef along his tragic arc. Had Loiseau not been led astray by his determination to emulate Bocuse, the food coming out of his kitchen perhaps wouldn’t have suffered, and critics would have had no reason to reconsider La Côte d’Or’s standing. His death, at any rate, was a tragedy for French cuisine, and one that would have seismic consequences.

  Star-Crossed

  “WE HAVE TO CUT it. We have to kill it. We have to burn it.” It was nine o’clock on a warm, hazy morning in May 2007. Paris was still half-asleep, the café was a picture of tranquility, and Luc Dubanchet was issuing a battle cry. The bellicose talk was directed not at another nation, nor at international terrorists, but at an enemy that he seemed to believe was nearly as dangerous: the Michelin Guide. A former editor of the Gault Millau guide, Dubanchet had left four years earlier to launch his own insurrectionary publication, Omnivore. Like the Gault Millau of old, Omnivore sought to call attention to innovative chefs trying to shake French cuisine out of the slumber into which it was thought to have fallen. The magazine quickly won an ardent following, and its popularity had spawned an annual restaurant guide celebrating “young cuisine” and a yearly food festival that attracted top chefs from around the world.

  But as with Gault Millau, Omnivore was defined as much by what it was against as by what it was for, and what it was against was the tyranny of the Michelin Guide. To hear Dubanchet tell it, the Michelin Guide was a dead weight for French cuisine. It discouraged creativity, demanded a level of opulence that made fine dining appeali
ng and accessible only to rich fogeys, and was unacceptably opaque about its reviewing methods. Dubanchet said that he had started Omnivore in part to combat “the Michelin way of thinking about food, and the Michelin way of building restaurants, and the Michelin way of not explaining.” It wouldn’t be easy, he acknowledged; he and his colleagues were up against a pillar of French cultural life. But as the slight, bespectacled thirty-five-year-old sipped his coffee and looked out across the Place de la Bastille, cradle of an earlier revolution, he expressed steely confidence in the uprising he was leading. “I want war,” he said. “I want to tear down the Michelin system.”

  Even for an American well versed in the passions and peculiarities of French food culture, it was hard not to burst out laughing as Dubanchet enumerated the reasons why Fortress Michelin needed to be stormed. This was, after all, a restaurant guide he was talking about—a powerful one, to be sure, but a restaurant guide all the same. But while Dubanchet’s martial language may have been overwrought, he wasn’t exaggerating Michelin’s clout, nor was he alone in believing that the Guide had become a malignant influence. Indeed, Michelin was now facing perhaps its most serious backlash ever, one that involved not just journalists but also some of the world’s most esteemed chefs—a few of whom had even taken the radical step of handing back their Michelin stars. At the same time, several scandals had so tarnished the Guide’s once-unassailable reputation that by 2007 it was fair to wonder if a revolt was even necessary: Michelin seemed to be destroying itself. If one accepted Dubanchet’s critique of the Guide, this was a salutary development. But for nearly a century, Michelin had been France’s culinary bible, and while the Guide’s diminished stature could be seen as an opportunity for French cooking to reinvigorate itself, it could just as easily be taken as a sign of France’s gastronomic decline.