The Bizarre Truth (16 page)

Once I finished shopping, I headed over to Pierre Gagnaire for lunch. Now, Pierre Gagnaire’s signature restaurant at Hotel Balzac is a big deal. He’s consistently ranked in the top five restaurants worldwide, with his Parisian restaurant boasting three Michelin stars. He’s a genius. He’s a visionary. He’s a classicist. He’s one of the most innovative chefs of his time, juxtaposing cutting-edge
technology with traditional cuisine. Gagnaire runs an operation that truly embraces the future while honoring the past at every turn.

We hung around a private room in the back, snacking on teeny hors d’oeuvres as we waited for him to return from a photo shoot. When I say teeny, I’m talking the size of your pinky nail. A tiny piece of crisped flatbread, inside of which was a little piece of smoked duck, topped with preserved Champagne grape with a dot of a mustardy sauce and leaf of microherb on top. I wondered if he had a team of little elves working in the kitchen creating these amazing, tantalizing treats. I could hardly control myself, pacing up and down, dying to get out into the dining room.

When Gagnaire arrived, he apologized and said he didn’t have very much time, but invited us to spend some time with him in the kitchen. I nearly fainted. I’d anticipated stealing five minutes to fire off a few questions before one of his sycophantic toadies escorted me to the worst table in the restaurant. But to spend an hour standing next to Gagnaire in his kitchen watching him command his brigade and put out the lunch service was more than I ever hoped for. Gagnaire has an expeditor on the server’s side of the line managing the tickets that the servers write up, making sure the food gets out of the kitchen and into the hands of the right customers at every turn. Hard job. The kitchen, in Gagnaire’s signature restaurant, is a rabbit warren of little cubbies and cubicles. I have never been in a kitchen with so many corners, nooks, and alcoves! Finished plates are stacked up on one stainless-steel service pass, where waiters pick them up as they are worked over by the cooks and set them on trays. They then implore line cooks on the hot side, who carve roasts, plate chops, and put a piece of fish on a plate to do its thing. However, instead of everyone working in an elongated line with cooks working side by side, the kitchen is shaped like a starfish, with the points all turning in different directions. Pastries are down one little turn of the arm. Appetizers, cold and hot, off another. People operate in a vacuum, meaning
you can’t see where your other teammates are until you walk five feet to your left or right. Finding a final garnish or saucing takes some legwork. It was the most unusual high-end kitchen setup I’ve ever seen, and I’ve had the privilege of being invited into some of the greatest kitchens in the world. It was like a madhouse in there. This is an industry where most chefs strive to impose some kind of order on the frenzied chaos of a dozen or two dozen people cooking together. Gagnaire seemed more than willing to let this madness reign supreme.

Everyone treats Gagnaire like a combination of the Pope, the President, and Willy Wonka. He was the ringmaster. He walked in, and some of his more secure cooks were extremely happy to have him there for lunch service. When he’s in town, Gagnaire works in the kitchen. However, his notoriety often takes him on the road. He might be in Dubai opening a restaurant, accepting some award in Asia, doing charitable work, or attending social functions as both a guest and a chef. I noticed a few young cooks who looked completely terrified, as though they’d never put out a lunch with the Master on hand (I’m sure shoving our TV cameras in everyone’s face didn’t help calm their nerves). Gagnaire was milking it, marching up to these fresh-faced cooks, screaming,
“What is this? What is this!”
and poking at whatever it was that they were attempting to cook. It was just hysterical. He was kidding, and the cooks were nearly in tears.

Gagnaire, for all of his greatness, reminded me again and again that he was just a humble cook. And he didn’t just tell me so. He showed me, by making my first bite of his food a simple one. He could have begun with an incredibly complex dish that defied description, but opted instead for a piece of roasted leg of lamb. I wouldn’t say lamb is necessarily easy or hard to cook. Certain preparations are more complex than others, but because of lamb’s high fat content, its preparation is a little more forgiving than that of leaner meats. It can be served roasted to an almost well-done point and still retain a good level of moisture. He served nine- or
ten-ounce (butchered and trimmed) whole legs of lamb from Bordeaux, where the skins had been rubbed with the pasty sediment residuals from the wine-making process as a way to show provenance to the area. We visited in springtime, when the lamb is just perfect. The animals had been in the market for only a short amount of time before Gagnaire made use of them. Without my realizing it, Gagnaire had placed one of the lamb legs into the oven twenty minutes earlier. When it was done, he took it out, grabbed a knife from one of his cooks, and sliced off a wedge. He poked the knife into the meat, handed it to me, and said, “Eer, tazte eet.”

I’m rarely awe-inspired by movie stars, rock stars, or pro athletes (okay, I know I sometimes act like a child around pro athletes), but sitting in Gagnaire’s kitchen, a guy I have worshiped for twenty-five years, floored me. The man was putting a piece of roasted lamb into my mouth while making a point about how flavor, not technique, is what lies at the heart of every dish. At that moment he’s a simple cook slinging out simple roasted food. While I appreciated his point, you couldn’t help but be impressed by the fact that he was anything but that. However, his genius hinges on his ability to stay connected to that simplicity, which is quite a feat considering customers wait months, if not years, for a seat at one of Gagnaire’s tables. The confidence to put out a simple piece of roasted lamb with a couple of turned vegetables, knowing your patrons expect the best meal they’ve ever had, is just incredible. There is no doubt in his mind that his lamb will be perfect.

Before we left I tasted paper-thin, pounded pheasant breast rolled in a puree of spring vegetables and peas, cooked sous-vide and sliced into gorgeous little spirals. I tasted sauces. I tasted vegetables. I tasted roasted wild mushrooms, flown in during the middle of the night just so they could be paired with a sea bass dish. I tasted all the parts as plates were assembled, then later the complete dishes. I tasted soups. He shoved spoons into my mouth with the fervor of a mad scientist. I felt like I was one of those kids redeeming my golden ticket at Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Gagnaire is a master of simple dishes; he’s also at the cutting edge of modern cuisine. This has a lot to do with his close relationship with Herve This. This, pronounced “Tees,” along with the late Oxford physicist Nicholas Kurti, is the man behind one of the biggest food movements in recent decades: molecular gastronomy. Amazing, considering that This is not a cook or a chef at all. He’s a physical chemist at the French Institute for Agricultural Research. This field focuses on taking a scientific approach to cuisine. This and Gagnaire are great friends, frequently brainstorming complex culinary ideas. I was scheduled to meet up with This the following day, so I asked Gagnaire a little about their relationship.

“We discuss food,” Gagnaire said. “We discuss ingredients, and Herve clues me in to possibility, and I clue Herve in to possibilities, because we both do things that the other one can’t.”

I asked if This had collaborated on any of the dishes they were serving that day. He immediately prompted his pastry chef to whip up a dessert called Spring Strawberries. A delicate demitasse cup housed thin, quarter-inch layers of strawberry foam, held between layers of homemade wild-strawberry gelatin, topped with wild-strawberry mousse foam, then even more layers of gelée, mousse, custard, and shaved fruit. A final inch-thick layer of strawberry foam was added, then finished with a thin meringue cracker made with egg whites and sugar.

I went to lift the cookie off the dish, but Gagnaire insisted I break it with a spoon. There was to be no gingerly removal of the cracker. He wanted me to be more violent with it, to not treat it as something so precious. He and This agreed that breaking the top would add an element of surprise and sense of humor to a deeply complex dish. With so much complicated work put into creating such a dessert, it’s difficult to treat this cup like an ordinary dessert. But if you do treat it like that, you miss the point. According to Gagnaire, it is just food, after all. I find this an intriguing idea, especially from a man whose restaurant was a jewel box of an environment. Lunch for two can easily cost more than $1,000. I tried
to put that out of my mind, and attack that gorgeous dessert with a spoon I did. The moment I dipped the spoon down into all that foam, it just kind of evaporated, much like watching locusts devour a field of wildflowers. It disappeared swiftly, yet slowly enough that you could observe it as it happened. Stirring the dish, you uncover layers upon layers of flavors. That last bit of foam, trapped between other layers, lingered with essence of strawberry in every single bite and let me know that Gagnaire’s genius was one that could operate on so many levels, be it the complexity of the dessert or the simplicity of a lamb leg.

Badly in need of a nap, I left the restaurant and journeyed across town to Restaurant Michel Rostang. Rostang is a heck of a restaurant. He is a fifth-generation Parisian chef and hails from one of France’s great cooking families. His grandfather’s restaurant earned two Michelin stars; his father had a restaurant in the French Alps, near Grenoble. Joining them in the kitchen seemed only natural, and with that, Rostang attended culinary school in Nice, followed by a stint as a commis chef in Paris. He did return to the family restaurant in the Alps for a few years, but the siren call of Paris was just too tempting. He and his wife, Marie Claude, opened Restaurant Michel Rostang in 1978. Within a year, he had one Michelin star. A year later, two.

Since its inception, the restaurant has moved to a larger location, near the Arch de Triumph in Parc Monceau. It’s a very upscale sort of place and always listed as one of the top restaurants in the world. With Michel Rostang, I wasn’t looking for inventive modern French food, but instead one of the most classic dishes in the French repertoire: Canard à la presse, or pressed duck. Few restaurants serve that dish these days. In fact, there aren’t many chefs who even know how to do it. And even if you can afford the multiple thousands of dollars price tag, getting your hands on a traditional duck press is nearly impossible.

An hour before dinner service, Rostang took me into his kitchen. Gagnaire’s system was all about chaos. In Rostang’s, you
could hear a pin drop. Everybody worked with exquisite precision. I watched them prepping, making sauces, cooking broths, stocks, and reductions, watching the pastry chefs get their tarts and plates ready for that evening. The master led me around the kitchen, letting me taste all these little goodies. Eventually, most of the staff left to fuel up on the staff meal, a hearty chicken stew, leaving Rostang, his sous chef, and me alone in the kitchen. He shoved spoons into my mouth, allowing me to taste the sauces of the classic repertoire, all the while explaining how their kitchen worked—labor divided classically, as you would expect in any serious kitchen. Sauciers made sauces, gardes manger managed the cold side, and so on.

We got on to the topic of his classic style of cooking, and how he managed to survive doing these traditional dishes in an age where people worship whatever is new. He confessed to tweaking the same menu they’ve been serving for years by essentially lightening up dishes and modernizing the plating. They’re doing phenomenally well. It made complete sense to me. Classics are classics for a reason. They taste good. The combinations work. The sauces are fantastic. These days, people want less butter and cream, more vegetables, and smaller portions, and creating the same dishes through a modernist’s lens, he accomplished the mission of bringing the restaurant into the twenty-first century.

He made me a dish that was most emblematic of fusing the old with the new. His father was well-known for a sweetbread and crayfish dish, which is very popular when it pops up on their seasonal spring menu. Traditionally, it’s composed of spring vegetables, crispy sautéed sweetbreads, and French crayfish sautéed in butter. The crayfish are then taken out of the shell and topped with a decadently rich crayfish sauce. With these beautiful little spring vegetables, baby turnips, bits of squash, peas, and chanterelle mushrooms, it’s simply gorgeous. But where his father’s dish was an assemblage in the middle of the plate, bathed in three or four ounces of this rich butter sauce whipped with crème fraiche and
served in a pastry cup as a vol au vent, Michel modernized it. He created a pedestal, placing pieces of the poached crayfish, tiny squares of the sautéed sweetbreads, and individual vegetables all around the plate. He drizzled spare spoonfuls of the sauce all around, leaving the diner to pick at the little jewels of the ingredients separately. The essence of the dish was unchanged. The sauce had been lightened, the portion was smaller, but the inventiveness and wittiness were there. Even the puff pastry vol au vents were transformed into small puffs the size of gumballs and employed as a garnish. While not on the level of Gagnaire’s kitchen in terms of its modernism, it certainly was a memorable changing of the guard at Rostang’s. And the flavors and compositions were stunning. With that, we proceeded to the dining room.

After that dish, I was ready for the main event. Pressed duck is an entire roasted duck, cooked at a very high temperature for only twenty-five or thirty minutes, which essentially crisps the skin and ensures that the rest of the duck is warm but very rare. At that point, the muscle just begins to tighten with the heat, allowing you to cut away the legs and carcass, as well as bone out the breasts with ease, slicing the meat paper thin. The bones, skin, and all the rest of the body-cavity viscera are placed in a cup that resides in a large, silver contraption resembling a giant French coffee press. The cup has many holes and works as a colander as you wind a handle, which smashes the contents, releasing the blood and liquids from the duck into a beautiful silver bowl. Next, it is skimmed and strained. The juices are reduced tableside with wine and stock. This deep, rich, earthy wine sauce—basically thickened with the animal’s own blood and juices—is poured over the thinly sliced duck. And that’s all it is; that’s what the dish is about. For anyone who appreciates food, it’s a must-see, must-eat. Words cannot describe the simplicity of this dish and the complexity of its flavor. It’s deep and minerally in a good way, but the tannic wine notes pull back the sanguine quality of the rest of the sauce. The duck itself dissolves in the mouth.