The Man Who Ate Everything (50 page)

I have eaten his crispy lamb sweetbreads with a hearty pan sauce sharp with peppers; the spicy chopped blood sausage nestled under a circle of mashed potatoes and then gratineed; crunchy
langoustines
wrapped in Vietnamese spring-roll skins and served with garlic chips on the cutest, tiniest salad called
mouron des oiseaux;
potatoes filled with braised cow’s cheeks and marrow; and his positively epitomic cassoulet. Most of it is robust regional food, perhaps updated in appearance or garnish, but always true to the original, and cooked with the skills Yves learned in four of the great kitchens of France. And some of it is spring-roll skins. I love spring-roll skins.

By 1995, Yves’s fellow sous-chefs at the Crillon had decided to follow him into the
bistrot moderne
business, as had other young cooks around town, many of them also trained at the fanciest restaurants. An endless economic recession in France had both lessened their chances for advancement in the haute cuisine and lowered the price of leasing a vacant restaurant. And Yves had shown his friends what they could accomplish on their own. For a while, Yves’s 160-franc menu set a maximum for the chefs who followed him; now some have crept toward 180. When you order the budget menu in an expensive restaurant, you feel like a second-class citizen; at a famous old bistro I was once told that I would be served supermarket ice cream while my wife and
everybody else in the room would be treated to the handmade version. At La Regalade, there is no way for a tycoon to spend more than the student at the next table.

Meanwhile the grand cuisine of France was descending into a state of near collapse. Where two decades ago fifty or a hundred great establishments were thriving, it was now hard to list more than a dozen. The culinary world bubbled with rumors that several great chefs recently awarded their third Michelin stars — the highest accolade in France — were in a financial pickle. Each order of Bernard Loiseau’s $60.00 frogs’ legs with garlic puree and parsley juice earns him only $1.20 — after he has covered the salaries of fifty employees and paid off his investment in silverware impressive enough for the Michelin inspectors. Loiseau’s profit comes from his boutique and the adjoining inn. The economics differ only slightly from those of haute couture, a dazzling show of artistry meant to lure the public to a designer’s more modest and lucrative productions.

Three years ago, I flew from Orly to Lyons in a driving rain, waited two hours for the airline to find my luggage, rented a car, returned fifteen minutes later to get windshield wipers that worked, and drove an hour and a half to Saint-Etienne, a tedious and dying provincial city where Pierre Gagnaire had his restaurant. Gagnaire had just received his third Michelin star, once a guarantee of fame and at least a little fortune. My memory of every morsel is indelible — I thought at the time that Gagnaire had lifted mankind to a new level of eating.

Then last summer a friend visiting Saint-Etienne reported that on a Saturday night at the end of July, a moment when the demand for tables should have been overwhelming, Gagnaire was only two-thirds full. That very night you could not have forced yourself into La Regalade with an assault-type weapon. I knew something was hideously wrong — wrong with Saint-Etienne, with France, and with the cosmos. I learned that Gagnaire’s revenues had dropped by more than half since my first visit and that he had let half his employees go. And by spring,
after a strike of government workers paralyzed the nation’s transportation system and made travel to Saint-Etienne even more difficult, Pierre Gagnaire’s restaurant closed.

This was an inconceivable disaster, no less grotesque than if the Louvre itself had crumbled into the Seine. The French newspapers could write about nothing else. Gagnaire blamed Michelin, whose standards had forced him to borrow millions to buy and restore a spectacular Art Deco house in Saint-Etienne. Gagnaire’s wife, Chantal, blamed nearly everybody else, including the French people. If I can travel from Manhattan to taste her husband’s food, why can’t the French drag themselves one-tenth as far? Pierre Gagnaire is a goddamn genius in an art form that the French nation worships, one of the greatest cooks in the entire world, the ultimate product of an ancient system of ruthless apprenticeships meant to identify, like incarnate lamas, the three or four godlike cooks born in every generation.

Most of the problem is probably price. Meals at places like Gagnaire’s run two hundred dollars a person, much more if you buy a very good wine. Though the French economy has been in the doldrums for most of the nineties, prices at Michelin-rated restaurants have climbed by 900 percent since 1974, more than double the rise in consumer prices. In 1994, the madness stopped. For the first time in more than twenty-five years, tabs at the better restaurants rose by less than the cost of inflation.

Gastronomic pundits list other causes of the collapse of traditional French eating habits: longer workdays,
le stress,
shorter lunch hours and vacations, diets,
le cocooning.
And there is
a
more ominous and foreboding possibility. With fewer women free to cook at home and restaurant prices out of reach, the French are forgetting how to eat.

But not if Yves Camdeborde and the other young chef-owners of
les bistrots modernes
continue to have their way. They aim at nothing less than the revalidation of French culture. At least that is what Camdeborde told me over a plate of sauteed sweetbreads.

These young chefs begin with classic regional fare full of the deep, strong flavors of provincial France. Then they apply their training in modern French cooking—really the discoveries of the nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s before it took a disastrous turn into preciousness, luxury, decoration for its own sake, and intellectual pretense. Pan juices replace meat glazes and cream sauces. For the most part, cream and butter are used as flavorings, not as major ingredients. Vinegar supplants sugar in savory dishes, and desserts become less sweet. Much of the cooking is done at the last minute. And the plate has been simplified down to three elements: the main ingredient, a sauce, and a vegetable or two as a garnish. Giving pleasure has returned as the aim of cooking.

By charging thirty dollars for a meal, the young chefs attract a mixture of workers, artists, businesswomen, pensioners who watch their pennies, and gourmands who would squander any amount for food like this. To keep costs down, they have had to reinvent the methods of
la cuisine moderns.
It is easier to please with a pot of caviar, several of these chefs told me, than with a plate of potatoes. At the central market every morning, they insist on the finest fresh products—nothing frozen, precooked, or packaged. But instead of searching for the best cep
e
s and truffles, our chefs look for the finest carrots and potatoes. They use the top butchers but buy only the cheaper cuts—oxtails, ham hocks, and beef cheeks. They purchase excellent bread, but usually in large loaves instead of rolls, which turn stale in half a day and go to waste. They use the stems of herbs for broths and pan juices, saving the tender leaves for soups, sauces, and garnishes. By offering only one cheese—a perfect Camembert or Brie or sheep’s cheese that can be easily divided without any waste—they avoid charging extra for the cheese course. They shop at the central market, not because they have keener eyes than the leading suppliers, but because they can afford the more costly ingredients, such as
langoustines,
asparagus, and cheese, only by waiting for bargains. And they work all the time, keeping employees in the kitchen to a minimum. This means that they must know precisely
what cooking can be done in the morning and what must be done at the very last minute.

I have eaten at twenty-five
bistrots modernes
in Paris over the past two years. The five best, in addition to La Regalade, are La Verriere, L’Os a Moelle, L’Epi Dupin, Chez Michel, and Le Bamboche, which all opened this year or last. Three of them are owned by young chefs who had worked with Camdeborde under Christian Constant at the Crillon.

Eric Frechon was the last to leave Constant. He had earned the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France—the highest accomplishment of a French artisan—and had risen to become Constant’s second in command. But in November 1995, at the age of thirty-two, he opened La Verriere in ample, cheerful quarters in the Nineteenth Arrondissement in northwest Paris. Every dish I have eaten at La Verriere has been something of a revelation. Warm oysters roasted in their shells or cold oysters with little slivers of foie gras; salted breast of pork, lacquered with spices, and served on a mound of “sauerkraut” made from shredded turnips; a circle of gratineed buttery mashed potatoes over a rich oxtail stew; roasted cod in an herbed crust—all of Frechon’s dishes are deeply satisfying and true to both French regional traditions and Frechon’s own imagination. The desserts are old-fashioned and modern at the same time, like the roasted mango on puff pastry with almond cream and a sorbet of lemon with basil—this is French technique on a frolic in the tropics, all for
1
80 francs.

L’Os a Moelle means “marrow bone,” Thierry Faucher’s symbol for the robust and essential tastes that he transforms with his nearly haute-cuisine magic. The third of our sous-chefs from the Crillon, Faucher brings something like the
menu degustation
of a grand gastronomic palace to a residential neighborhood in the Fifteenth. And he succeeds with nearly every dish I have tried. When you enter his place, an old restaurant built on a triangular plot with windows on two sides, you remember that this is why you, or at least why I, born with an immunity to shoe stores,
come to Paris: a happy room, groups of all ages in animated conversation, people eating very, very well.

Lunch is three courses for 145 francs ($28), with a number of choices for each course, and dinner is six courses for 190 francs ($37) but with no choice at all. Faucher’s food is amazingly, continually changing, with new ideas on every menu. Soup might be Jerusalem artichokes or asparagus with morels, or in the summer cold melon with ginger and ham; the second course a rabbit salad hiding under a rosette of crispy potatoes, or a fricassee of wild mushrooms—
pleurotes
and
girolles—
with chicken pan juices and somehow a quail’s egg. Then comes the fish, a generous piece of skate in browned butter and vinegar; or roasted rascasse scented with branches of dried fennel and surrounded by a pool of peppery, sweet crustacean broth, not easy to forget. Meat comes next, and then a salad with a wedge of cheese. For dessert, you may be offered the silkiest dark-chocolate quenelle with a stylish Asian sauce of saffron, star anise, and cinnamon, or hazelnut cake topped with creme brulee. Can you imagine a restaurant in the United States with a fixed menu, a place that ignores the phobias and hypochondria of its customers, where everybody gladly eats the same dishes? Don’t they have lactose intolerance in France, or allergies to peas?

Francois Pasteau, thirty-four, did not work at the Crillon before opening L’Epi Dupin, on the rue Dupin in the Sixth, just beyond Poilane’s revered bakery. But he did apprentice at Faugeron, Due d’Enghien, and La Vieille Fontaine in the Paris suburbs (all holders of two Michelin stars). A cold terrine layered with every little treasure from a pot-au-feu and served with a surprising compote of pears and tomatoes; small chunks of spiced lamb long stewed with eggplant and called
capitolade;
a guinea hen flavored with fennel and anise; a crispy square of phyllo and apple concealing dark, spicy sausage meat; a generous puffy flaming crepe souffle of chestnuts; a deep, dark molten chocolate
dariole
streaming into a brilliant green pool of pistachio; a perfect Brie—these are what Pasteau exchanges for your 153 francs
($30), nearly everything delicious, intelligently made, and exceedingly generous.

Do you crave some
kig hafarz
or
kouingaman?
This is Breton dialect for stewed pig’s cheeks with stuffing and an unusual, caramelized flaky pastry. And one of the few chefs who dare bring to the capital the real food of Brittany is, fittingly, Thierry Breton, which takes us back to the Crillon Four (or Five if you count chef Christian Constant, who himself has opened Le Camelot on the rue Amelot and charges an impossible 120 francs for dinner). Breton’s Chez Michel, near the Gare du Nord, has nothing to do with Michel, if it ever did, but with a young chef who once was named Apprentice of the Year; worked at the Ritz, at the Tour d’Argent, on Joel Normand’s team for President Mitterrand, and at the Crillon; and now runs a place so retro-provincial it almost looks intentional. This is country food from the Nord—lots of fish, to be sure, plus
la cuisine d’armorique,
dishes like ceps stuffed with oxtail and
terrine d’andouille
(smoked tripe) served with little pancakes fried in salted butter—plus occasional trips into fantasy—with all the twists in technique and
methods
we have come to expect from this crowd.

One of the best of the small new restaurants is Le Bamboche, in the Seventh, owned by the fine young chef David Van Laer, who first became well known at the cutting-edge haute-cuisine restaurant Apicius. Though its style of cooking is similar to (if slightly more tailored than) that of the others, Le Bamboche could not be mistaken for a bistro. It is beautifully decorated and probably 50 percent more expensive and 30 percent more dressy. The special 180-franc budget menu is excellent and honest, but this is not the same as at the
bistrots modernes,
where everyone eats the same food for the same price. Whenever I stick to Van Laer’s 180-franc menu, I always wonder what I am missing.