VII

BUILDING LE STYLE LOISEAU,
1977–1982

“Côte de’Or, Saulieu 15/20. Their success is almost assured. Ragout of scallops, sweetbreads, and veal kidneys with crayfish; filet of sole on a bed of spinach; Bresse chicken with tarragon.”

Devoted as ever to Bernard and to the cooking to which Claude Verger had guided him, the GaultMillau guide for the year 1976 had faithfully followed to Saulieu the man they considered to be one of their most promising discoveries,* and they liked what they found there. Promising he surely was, but the discovery was only twenty-five years old, and he had not yet found his footing. Bernard’s cuisine was still basically the same as the Barrières, and the mere fact that GaultMillau employed that plural “their” indicated that the Côte d’Or was still being viewed as one more of Claude Verger’s multiple enterprises, or at best a team effort between Verger and his hired cook. But Bernard was already pondering a plan to begin the climb toward his three-star ambition.

On the face of it, he was wildly, extravagantly out of line to even entertain such a lofty notion. Certainly he had enjoyed a nice flash of celebrity in Paris, but how much of that was owed to Claude Verger’s powerful personality and how much to Bernard’s own culinary talents? And anyway, the incestuous little world of Parisian star makers was a notoriously fickle thing that could get bored with terrifying speed, dumping overnight what it had adored the day before. Pipeau, that was the problem—the kissy-kissy world of what was fashionable in Paris was a lot of fun, but you can’t keep a fad going by bullshit alone when you’re sitting on a gloomy, windswept plateau 250 kilometers away from the big city.

Bernard was certainly aware that he would have to continue, and in fact expand, his campaign of caressing the media and the showbiz types who had contributed so much to his notoriety in Paris, but that wouldn’t be enough. If he was to force his entry into the kingdom where the big boys of the restaurant trade played, he would have to make a reputation and an image independent of Verger by developing a personal style of cooking identified with himself alone—a cuisine Loiseau. He had been in the business long enough and spoken with enough of his confrères to conclude there were three fundamental criteria that Michelin cherished most in judging a chef: quality, regularity, and personality.

He reasoned it out. Quality was the most obvious. Your stuff had to be good. No need explaining that any further. Regularity had always been a particular Michelin fret: chefs who get it right not only twice a day but day after day, and year after year. That required the kind of obsessive perfectionism that could make a Michelin boss beam and be prepared to sign a medical certificate attesting that an admired chef was a mad dog. Michelin hates, absolutely hates, flashes in the pan. This is a theme that recurs constantly whenever anyone even remotely connected with the guide speaks of its work.

“We’re trying to make a guide that is reliable,” Derek Brown insisted, with that inflexible, inexorable earnestness of the true Michelin arbiter.* “We want to be sure that something that looks like a trend doesn’t turn out to be just something that’s trendy. There’s a certain impression that we only look for what was good and old and classic in grandmother’s time. That is not true. We’ve got the modern, branché [“in”; fashionable] restaurants in the guide, but we want to be sure that they’ll be there as long as that guide lasts. We did a little exercise in Paris not long ago. We went to a lot of the trendy restaurants, and particularly followed about twenty-five of them. At the end of the year, three-quarters of them didn’t exist anymore.”

So there. Unspoken but understood: Buy other guides and you’ll be knocking on restaurant doors that had been shut for months. All right, then, Bernard could have reasoned with this in mind, I’ll try harder and be more regular, more constant, than everyone else—but anyone, even a mediocre cook, can work hard. Regularity wasn’t enough, then. There was something more that Michelin expected to find up in the rarified atmosphere of top restaurants: personality, real personality. Chefs turning out a singular, clearly recognizable cuisine that reflected their character and their ideas. And those ideas had better be good, too, because there was always a delicate question hanging in the air. It concerned the nuance between personality and that thing called creativity. Since time immemorial, everyone has insistently paid lip service to creativity in cooking, but creativity runs wild leads straight into the shoals of trendiness and precious nouvelle kiwisine horrors like those geranium soufflés and that turbot with raspberry coulis. It is great to tinker and invent and experiment, but never forget that cooking is a manual act: Beware the cook atremble with the aspiration to be considered a poet.

As he wandered around Dumaine’s musty hallways during those first long, lonesome winter months, Bernard had plenty of time to reflect on how to construct le style Loiseau and build the personal image that would set him apart from others and catch Michelin’s eye. He had lots of company in this reasoning process, of course: By design or by instinct—but never by accident—it was something every great chef had gone through before him, each one bending the enormous syllabus of French cuisine in his own manner into his own coherent whole—his oeuvre. If, for instance, you go to Alain Senderens’s Lucas-Carton in Paris, you’ll choose your wines first and Alain will make you a dynamite dinner around that. Pierre Gagnaire will pull one rabbit after another out of his hat, showering you with such a dizzying procession of dishes and accompanying dishes—the plots, subplots, pirouettes, false dénouements, and ultimate resolutions of his culinary detective story—that your head will spin and your mouth will water at the same time. Down in Lyon, Paul Bocuse, lord of the gas rings and emperor of the trade, will play Von Suppé for you on the world’s largest fairground organ and set a culinary “Ode to Joy” on your plate, a classically flawless symphony of taste and presentation that irresistibly makes you think: Best-of-Beethoven. In Cancale, Olivier Roellinger takes his clients on a cruise around the globe with a restless, macrocosmic gastronomy perfumed by exogenous spices and combinations universally considered “exotic,” until he came along, while deep in the southern reaches of Auvergne his brilliant, ascetic friend Michel Bras does precisely the opposite, roaming the rocky confines of his native Aubrac plateau to discover the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a local wildflower. Bras creates a stunning universality from the lowly microcosm of the wild herbs, roots, and plants that lie within walking distance of Laguiole, the little town of his birth.

And so it goes, each one digging according to his or her* talents and inclinations into this country’s unparalleled inventory of produce, tradition, and expertise, to put forward yet another personal interpretation of the vast epicurean tableau. Each one is different from the others, and they’re always shifting, adjusting, evolving. Taken as a whole, these men and women represent a wealth of expertise, originality, and variety in great food that has no equal anywhere in the world.

But what would Bernard’s interpretation of the tableau be? How could an unrated and still largely untested twenty-five-year-old newcomer distinguish himself among the swarm of notables older, wiser, and more experienced than he? He was convinced that Verger’s approach of last-minute manipulation of top-quality ingredients was the right way to go, but that only got him to Square One. Bernard was clear-eyed enough to realize that he did not possess the professional baggage to rival in cooking technique the men with whom he aspired to rub shoulders at the top of the trade. What he could do, though, was to go even farther than them in the mad, manic game of perfectionism. From the moment he assumed leadership, there would be nothing but the best for Saulieu: best ingredients, best wines, best service.

His obsessive pursuit of the very best was aimed at seducing Michelin, of course, but he did not have to force himself: It came naturally to his excessive, Manichean nature. Anyone who worked with him can recount dozens of examples—droll, touching, sometimes infuriating—of Bernard’s devotion to hyperbole and excess. Verger astutely concluded that it was precisely this maddeningly unreasonable nature that could allow his protégé to climb toward the summit of the trade, but the prime example of Bernard’s immoderation that sticks in Verger’s mind today concerns not cuisine but sport. “One day we got to talking about tennis, and I found he was fascinated with Björn Borg—he was the only one Bernard would say anything good about, because that was the time when Borg was winning everything. Everyone else was de la merde. The only thing that interested him was the first. Second place didn’t count for him.”

A little vignette that became part of the established folklore of La Côte d’Or some years later concerned Bernard and a sous-chef who mistakenly thought he was defending his boss’s best interests when he began bargaining over the phone with a supplier for some expensive ingredients. Overhearing him, Bernard held his patience for a few minutes, then grabbed the phone from his hand. “Allô!” he shouted. “Just give me the best you’ve got. I don’t care about the price.”

As he began his Michelin-seducing campaign, there was only one aspect of the best he could afford: the food. The best rooms for the hotel, the best silverware, the best china—all that could come later. For the moment, he was concentrating only on the plate.

Intentionally or not, this was very much like throwing down a gauntlet to Michelin. The guide’s editors never tired of insisting that it was the plate alone that determined the attribution of stars, regardless of the décor. Now, stranded in the empty shell of Dumaine’s prestige and working with hand-me-down china, silverware, and cooking gear from his predecessor, he undertook to bring a restaurant totally stripped of three stars back up from point zero to the Michelin summit. It had never been done before.

For its part, Michelin unbent enough by 1976 to allow that Bernard’s place really was a restaurant, after all. That had taken some doing. Verger’s wife, Martine, took time off from her busy dental practice in Paris to charge into Michelin headquarters and beard the lion in his den, buttonholing André Trichot, then editor-in-chief, to complain about the injustice of removing the Côte d’Or’s restaurant from his guide’s august pages. Trichot relented, and the crossed forks and spoons reappeared in the new guide. That was a start—better than nothing—but Bernard could only gaze with wistful eyes at the listing for the Barrière de Clichy, now emblazoned in the very same guide with a bright shiny star under chef Guy Savoy, his sidekick and “little brother” from Roanne. Guy was a terrific cook, but it was clear that much of the glory he was harvesting had been built up under Bernard during the Barrière’s waiting period in Michelin’s gastronomic anteroom. Never mind. Guy was his best friend. Bernard didn’t begrudge him the pleasure of his newfound laurels.

Some big things were happening down in his area, too. In three consecutive years, 1974, 1975, and 1976, three Burgundy restaurants made the jump from one to two Michelin stars. First there was Jacques Lameloise (a wunderkind only five years older than Bernard) down south in Chagny, near Beaune; then, in St. Père de Vézelay, 30 miles across the hills, the Espérance of Marc Meneau, the self-taught son of a village saddle maker; and finally Michel Lorain with his Côte St. Jacques, on the same R.N. 6 by the River Yonne in Joigny, at the northern edge of Burgundy. All three would eventually make it to the summit of three stars, and in the same order of precedence: Lameloise, then Meneau, and finally Lorain.* Michelin, it seemed, was making a deliberate effort to encourage young chefs in the provinces. Bernard fairly quivered with anticipation at the thought of joining these regional eminences.

There was another important event in 1976, one that had a considerably greater impact on the world of gastronomy—and in particular, on the cooking style that Bernard was seeking to develop—than these two-star awards: Michel Guérard published La Grande Cuisine Minceur.

The Mozart of French cooking had been thunderstruck by the condemnation for demolition of his little restaurant in Asnières for an urban renewal project. Shortly thereafter, he got married. Christine, his new wife, plunked him down in the middle of nowhere—a place called Eugénie-les-Bains, in the Landes, the foie gras and armagnac country of the deep southwest, where the foothills of the Pyrenees rise—because Papa owned some properties there: a little chain of spas that he had picked up for cheap because spas were essentially a nineteenth-century fashion, and nobody was doing that trip anymore. Wouldn’t it be nice, Christine said in essence, to settle here and get people to come back to Eugénie? Yes, dear, said Michel, and began thinking about how to find a gimmick that would persuade Parisians, and maybe foreigners, too, to make the 500-mile trek down from the big city and join him and Christine in the sticks.

The gimmick he came up with was cuisine minceur: cooking to lose weight by, also known in one of its later commercialized avatars as Lean Cuisine. It was a stroke of pure genius, and it worked like a charm. Michel completely rethought the cooking from the Pot au Feu and produced an entire range of recipes that were ingeniously low in fats and calories but still looked and tasted great. Taste: That was the hard part. Anyone, even a doctor, can make harmless dietary food by boiling carrots and beef and serving them up with a leaf or two of lettuce, but Michel’s challenge was to make gastronomic dietary food: haute cuisine for the ponderously challenged. He steamed a chicken leg, stuffed it with nonfattening sweetbreads, mushrooms, and truffles, and served it with a bright, optimistically green sauce composed of watercress, spinach, mushrooms, and marjoram cooked together in a bouillon, emulsified in a blender, and then reduced over a direct flame. With his near calorie-free recipes, he achieved a character and depth of flavor nearly equal to classical dishes prepared with butter, cream, and rich meat reductions.

Dozens—hundreds—of combinations of this sort sprang from his agile brain, from grilled pigeons with garlic puree to veal kidneys with a sauce of zero percent fromage blanc and mustard thickened with mushroom puree, to luxury items like roast lobster with aromatics and herbs. For sea bass, he invented an accompaniment so peaceable and inoffensive to the health that he named it sauce vierge—“virgin sauce”—a concoction of tomato, garlic, chervil, parsley, tarragon, coriander, and olive oil. Michel went so far as to incorporate mineral oil into sauces and vinaigrettes for his salads, but after he decided it was perhaps not ideal for the human digestive system (huile de paraffine is a derivative of petroleum, like kerosene), he invented a nearly fat-free oil substitute made of vegetable bouillon lightly gelatinized with chicken bones and finished off with just a touch of olive oil for taste.

It was major groundbreaking wizardry that was going on in Eugénie in those early days, as Michel and Christine built up their clientele, and within a few years, cuisine minceur rocketed both the cook and his newly renovated spa into the orbit of worldwide celebrity. Eugénie-les-Bains now officially styles itself Premier Village Minceur de France. Michel has an unejectable seat on the town council—his fellow citizens would gladly name him mayor if he ever took the time to stand for office—and the massive influx of tourists and curistes—chubs taking the cure—has turned what was formerly a forgotten little backwater burg into a prosperous, artfully decorated, and beautifully equipped model town, thanks to the shower of cash that Michel conjured up.

“I had to do something dramatic and different to draw attention to Eugénie,” he explained to me some years later. “Cuisine minceur was just the thing.”* A gimmick it was, then, but it was an inspired gimmick and a true act of creation. Cuisine minceur, like nouvelle cuisine, was a shot heard ’round the world. Knowingly or not, thousands of cooks on every continent benefit today from tricks and techniques developed by Michel Guérard down in his spa, lightening up and freshening up the cooking they put on the plates of an increasingly diet-conscious and weight-conscious clientele.

In Saulieu, Bernard heard Michel’s shot loud and clear. He was in the sticks, too, and he needed a gimmick every bit as much as his more celebrated elder in Eugénie. Throughout his career, Bernard took great pride in his originality, frequently averring that he had never opened a cookbook in his life, and that all his recipes had sprung sui generis from his head. Even so, it is clear that he knew all about the many wonders that Michel was producing down in Eugénie—they were the talk of the trade. He would have been foolish to ignore them as he sought to distinguish himself by building the grammar of what he would eventually present to the world, and to all those Michelin inspectors he was hoping to feed, as le style Loiseau.

So Bernard learned, and as he learned he borrowed. From Mama’s home cooking (honest regional dishes, sauces from simple deglazings with water) to Troisgros (great French classics relieved of much of their heaviness) to Verger (best products simply treated at the last minute) to Guérard and the magical lightness of his cuisine minceur, the intellectual development of his culinary thinking followed an arrow-straight line. It would be several years before he amalgamated it all into a coherent proposition, but even in the early days the rough ideas were in place: He was in Burgundy, so his cuisine would lean heavily on some classics of the region, but reinterpreted in his fashion; it would be light, as fat-free as possible, and easily digestible; and above all it would emphasize the purity of taste—things would taste exactly like what they were. It would be a cuisine of essences.

It was flattering to the young, inexperienced chef of 1976 that the GaultMillau had praised the ragout of scallops, sweetbreads, veal kidneys, and crayfish that he presented to them, but the mature Chef Bernard turned his back on such a profligate mix of tastes, colors, and textures. The ragout was surely delicious, but it smacked suspiciously of mishmash. It was not pure. As the years passed and he honed le style Loiseau into a disciplined syllabus with defining rules and taboos, Bernard grew far more sectarian about what was right and what was wrong, and his rules hardened into something like a party line. There were to be no more than three saveurs on the client’s plate: the main ingredient, pure in its true, unadorned flavor; a simple but vigorous sauce that recalled and reinforced that flavor; and two accompanying sub-dishes, each one designed for that ingredient alone and not for any other. Unsurprisingly, this cuisine reflected his character. Like the theorizing Parisian intellectuals who continued to cling to their uncompromising Marxist–Leninist weltanschauung, even as the world of communism was falling into shambles everywhere, Bernard’s insistence on purity of taste had an absolutist ring to it that was strangely reminiscent of Maoism.

Claude Le Gall, a young maître d’hôtel who came to the Côte d’Or in 1978, remembered a telling scene that occurred next to the hotel’s reception desk, where Bernard habitually stood to speak with clients as they filed out after their meals. The chef wore that huge, winning smile, as he always did, while harvesting the chorus of praise that inevitably washed over him after every lunch and dinner. This time, though, there was a customer who was only 99 percent ecstatic, and that was like a handful of sand in the skin balm.

“Monsieur Loiseau,” he said, “our lunch was wonderful, but could I perhaps make one small suggestion?”

The smile continued to hang on, but his face clouded ever so briefly. The chef nodded.

“The purée de celeri was very good, but perhaps a bit strong in flavor for some people. Perhaps you could mix some mashed potato in with it?”

“If you don’t like celery root, don’t eat it,” Bernard snapped. End of conversation. There was a right way and a wrong way for everything in le style Loiseau. He always asked for criticism—he truly did want to make everything about his place perfect—but he rarely liked it when he got it, and he tended to go into a funk.

In 1977 the Côte d’Or won its first Michelin star at the same moment that Michel Guérard won his third. (After moving to Eugénie-les-Bains, Michel got his first star in 1974, his second in 1975, and his third in 1977, the fastest promotion from zero to three in Michelin history. But it wasn’t really quite zero, because everyone knew that he was already worth three stars before he left Paris. Even so, Michelin had to abide by tradition and propriety: Stars are to be delivered singly, not severally.) Bernard’s single star, while less brilliant than Michel’s triple, was not bad for a chef who, at twenty-six, was only six years out of apprenticeship. Not bad at all, but his menu still reflected his youth and inexperience, and was derived heavily from his masters. There was nothing reprehensible about this—chefs constantly crib one another’s ideas, and the good ones tend to be reproduced thousands of times, with slight variations, as they make the esculent circuit. The green peppercorns, the little raviolis, the salads with warm goat cheese,* and the crèmes brûlées all began somewhere with someone, to be picked up and cloned more or less faithfully throughout the world. More recently than these, Michel Bras’s extensive use of wild herbs and roots in his cookery has been liberally plagiarized without the least attribution. (But that’s all right. No one can do it like him.)

Barely six weeks after Bernard won his first star, I had the occasion to see him again up close in Saulieu. I was in company with Jean Didier, editor of the Guide Kléber, Michelin’s lesser rival from the lesser tire company that the Clermont-Ferrand giant gobbled up a few years afterward, spitting out the Guide Kléber like so many chicken bones. As it happened, the Côte d’Or was the last stop on a grueling week-long inspection trip that Didier had undertaken in the Burgundy area, one of the many tournées through which he courageously attempted to personally take the place of Michelin’s cohort of inspectors.

As editor-in-chief, the guide’s primary writer, and only salaried inspector, Jean could not possibly hope to remain anonymous, so he chose the opposite tack—brazenly advertising his presence by driving from restaurant to restaurant in his fire-engine red Lancia convertible, bursting into restaurants and jovially greeting the chefs as soon as he arrived. After all, he reasoned, how much better can they make their stuff for me than for the ordinary client? After the first day of each tournée, the entire region knew that the Guide Kléber was on the prowl, and Jean became the turkey to be more and more deliciously stuffed with each passing meal.

It was on April 30 that Didier arrived for lunch in Saulieu, and Bernard had been warned that he was on his way. How far had Bernard pushed his perfectionism, and how hard was he trying? I’ll tell you. Jean had visited all of the greatest eating places in Burgundy on that trip, from Blanc to Bocuse to Troisgros, the Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance of the gastronomic circuit, plus all the others in between, but it was only in Saulieu that the chef was waiting to greet us in person. Literally waiting: as Jean wheeled up the steep little rise at the side of the Hôtel de la Poste and the Côte d’Or came into view, what should we see but Bernard himself, standing halfway out into the roadway, unmistakable in his immaculate white regalia, peering down rue Argentine, smiling enormously, making traffic cop gestures and waving us straight into the hotel’s garage.

Within milliseconds we somehow had kirs* in our hands and Bernard was shooing us into Dumaine’s famous dining room. Hellbent for seduction, he immediately went into action and sent out first a lobster terrine with little spring vegetables, then poached oysters, sauced and laid lovingly back in their shells, and a ragout of rockfish with sweet red peppers, all of which we managed to choke down with the help of a prodigiously good 1971 Puligny-Montrachet, bright yellow, fat, and full of flowers and honey.

Hardly able to get a word in edgewise upon his arrival, and then submitted to the onslaught of Bernard’s hyperbolically warm welcome and the ensuing food that appeared without bidding, Didier had scarcely had a chance to study the menu. Now, almost furtively, casting his eye to the side during breaks between the avalanche of Bernard’s offerings, he gave it a quick, expert perusal.

In presentation and layout, it nicely reflected Verger’s number-one Barrière rule: everything for the food and to hell with the décor. The card was large but simple and clearly not expensive to produce, two handwritten pages inside a heavy, unglazed faux parchment folder featuring a rather amateurish charcoal drawing of the Côte d’Or with a festive table set up before it: a ham, a chicken, a stockpot, a bottle of wine, a tart, a cheese, and a fruit bowl. The carefully disciplined script of the two interior pages showed a selection of specialties that was extremely generous for a country restaurant that, unlike urban places of similar size, had no reliable customer base to count on, and by professional ideology, refused to countenance frozen or canned foods. There were thirteen entrées, seven seafood dishes, three fowl, five meat, and eight desserts, with the addition of four little extra tags for the day’s specials, affixed to the bottom of the card with paper clips. But if Verger was being economical with printing expenses, his chef had already become profligate where image was concerned. The entire top of the menu was occupied by a single line:

Bernard Loiseau proposes

What he proposed was very interesting, because it bespoke a young chef in transition, determined to make a name for himself but still not quite sure of how to do it. Many of the dishes on offer were classics that could have appeared on any menu in the region: lobster bisque, smoked ham, Burgundy snails, Bresse chicken in a tarragon cream sauce, sweetbreads with the truffles and Madeira accents of a saucepérigourdine, steak with the green peppercorn sauce* so popular in those days. Other dishes were straight borrowings from his distinguished elders. The mussel soup with saffron was a reprise of a staple on the cards of Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers, and harked back beyond them to Fernand Point. The candied grapefruit recalled a similar dessert specialty at Jean Ducloux’s Restaurant Greuze in Tournus, and the tea-infused prunes that Bernard served with it owed a debt to Alain Senderens in Paris, who had been making tea ice creams and sherbets for several years. What he called the salade Côte d’Or (based on lettuce, foie gras, and green beans) was Guérard’s salade folle by another name, and Bernard could have made the salmon in sorrel sauce in his sleep after participating in its preparation for nearly three years in Roanne. The light apple tart served hot (ritually marked on every menu as an item to be ordered at the beginning of the meal) was nothing but Michel Guérard’s tarte fine aux pommes, an emigrant from Asnières to Clichy to rue Molière to Saulieu. On the other hand, several other dishes bore the imprint of Bernard’s thinking about a style Loiseau that emphasized the lightness of last-minute legerdemain: asparagus with a simple herb sauce; scallops on watercress mousse; sweetbreads with asparagus tips; filet of John Dory with sautéed cucumbers (prepared like Guérard’s one-franc chicken wings from the Lido); tiny lamb chops with spring vegetables.

The kid was thinking. The ideas were coming. Even if the hotel was dilapidated and his kitchen a wreck, the mere act of bringing his cuisine moderne to Dumaine’s august address was creating the kind of favorable comment that had brought Jean Didier and a host of other critics and journalists down to Saulieu. Nor was everything about the place rotten, because down under his feet in the basement he had a secret weapon: a first-rate cave à vin. That was a godsend. As he watched Didier sipping and slurping that magnificent 1971 Puligny-Montrachet Le Cailleret, Bernard must have been thanking Bacchus and the perspicacity of his predecessors, because the Côte d’Or’s wine list was a wonderfully effective part of his best-of-everything campaign. No fool, Verger had known before he signed any checks that the successive proprietorships of Dumaine and Minot had endowed the old barn with one of the region’s richest wine cellars—one that was, curiously enough, especially deep in reserves of fine Bordeaux. The heavy stock of Bordeaux may have simply been a reflection of a longstanding customer preference for the local Burgundies, but they offered the added advantage of being virtually impermeable to the passage of time: for the most part they simply got better as they aged. On the value of the cave alone, Verger had got himself a bargain when he took the place off Minot’s hands.*

Bordeaux be damned, though—Bernard wasn’t going to serve le Kléber anything but Burgundy at that memorable lunch, not in a restaurant named La Côte d’Or, situated at the heavenly gates to the golden slopes where the grapes of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir even then were sucking up the goodness from the rocky soil that would turn their juices into the makings of the world’s most magnificent wines. After he had wolfed down the last scrap of his rockfish, Didier got a muscular Latricières-Chambertin to accompany thin cutlets of duck breast that Bernard had briefly seized in a scalding pan on both sides, leaving them nearly raw in the middle, and artfully supporting them with a half-moon formation of peach slices, browned in butter on the outside and canary yellow within. From beginning to end, the whole lunch had been light, imaginative, and easy to eat, and Jean told him so. For those few minutes, at any rate, Bernard didn’t give a damn that there were no girls and there was nothing to do in Saulieu.

It was time to look at the kitchen. In those days, Bernard brought professional visitors into his kitchen the way an anatomy professor might bring fellow doctors to contemplate his collection of two-headed fetuses preserved in formaldehyde. Dumaine’s famous old workplace was already tired when he left it but now, thirteen years later, it was a two-level ruin long past amortization, with holes in the ceiling, wobbly, rusting equipment held together with wire and glue (including that famously idiosyncratic oil-fed piano), an untreated concrete floor, a direct view into the grease-splattered garage, and, down below, a pastry section masquerading as the Black Hole of Calcutta.

“Pretty good, huh?” said Bernard, for once abandoning his gushing spontaneity to lapse into irony. Didier shook his head and made a mental note to be kind to the boy in his next guide. Just as we returned to the now-empty dining room, Claude Verger himself appeared, down from Paris for the weekend at an average speed of 100 mph (traffic cops were rare then, and road radar nonexistent). Sharp and aggressive as a gamecock, and as outrageous as Lenny Bruce, he enjoyed nothing more than shocking listeners with hyperbolic generalizations expressly designed to provoke. He called for a bottle of champagne (Perrier-Jouët) and railed on in that thin, reedy voice of his, denouncing just about everything and everyone in the profession. Ninety-five percent of cooks in France were lousy, he shouted, and he knew of only two or three who could put together a decent steak marchand de vin. The only guy in the world who knew how to make sauces was Jean Troisgros, but then most sauces were no damn good, anyway. When Didier—a good-natured bloke—failed to rise to the bait and argue, Verger put up his dukes like Mohammed Ali and poured calumny over the gastronomic guides and food critics in general. “You’re all whores,” he shouted, but Jean was too full of good food, good Burgundy, and good champagne to do anything but smile indulgently. Bernard was grinning, too, but as Verger’s diatribe flowed on, the smile began to look more and more forced. Don’t overdo it, boss, don’t get me in trouble just when things are starting to look up.