VIII
BACHELOR DAYS IN SAULIEU,
1977–1982
After the milestone of his first Michelin star, Bernard had five years remaining as Verger’s employee. They coincided exactly with the last five years of his bachelorhood. With the Vergers bankrolling the restaurant like surrogate parents, as he matured into a fully fledged chef and leader, there was a plausible analogy to be drawn between those five years and the situation of a teenager growing into manhood—except that in this case it was the “parents” who eventually left the house. At the start of the Saulieu adventure, Claude and Martine Verger arrived religiously every Friday evening and stayed until Sunday night, sometimes helping out with the reception, planning, and personnel, but mostly unwinding from the hard week’s work in Paris. Little by little, as the months and years passed, they began arriving later and leaving earlier, and frequently it was just Claude himself who rocketed down in his big gray Citroën BX while Martine stayed behind in Paris—as indeed happened on that memorable Saturday afternoon of Jean Didier’s lunch. Over those years, the Côte d’Or gradually came to be identified with Bernard alone: his cuisine, his authority, his personality as the mark of the house.
Supplanting the father figure is, of course, the normal role for any young striver in most human endeavors, especially one of competitive excellence, but in Saulieu it was a supplanting that Verger actively encouraged. “He had the ambition and he had the drive. I put the place in his hands and gave him a free rein. After a while I came around to believing that he really was going to make it. You see, the thing about Bernard was that he never admitted defeat.”
From the start, both men agreed to a fundamental premise: since they had a monument on their hands, they would not debase it with anything but gastronomic fare: top-level for everything and no corner-cutting. “We couldn’t serve bifteck-frites, not in the Côte d’Or,” said Verger. “But that didn’t mean we would just reproduce Dumaine’s cooking. We did our cuisine—my cuisine. That turned everything upside down. A lot of the old farts of the traditional clientele didn’t like that, and they came at us with their shotguns, but things worked out after a while and a new clientele built up.”
At length, the “my” label on the cuisine changed from Verger to Bernard through the normal course of development, but either way it was risky to chuck tradition out the window at a house that had prospered on tradition ever since the eighteenth-century days of horse-drawn carriages on the north–south route. But Verger was a gambler and Bernard was a true believer, so they shot for the moon. Curiously enough, their hell-for-leather approach probably pleased the high priests in the temple on avenue de Breteuil, because as much as Michelin deeply mistrusts fads and trends, the guide tends to look benevolently upon chefs who take risks—but only within bounds. Intelligent risks. Reasonable risks. Coherent, productive risks. Risks that please a Michelin inspector.
But which ones are these?
There lies the whole mystery of Michelin’s dominant but sibylline presence in the world of gastronomy, and the maddening difficulty of attempting to anticipate or influence their judgments—most especially where the magical three-star summit is concerned. Nobody really knows. Judging restaurants, like judging a landscape, a beautiful woman, or a pleasant melody, is subjective and largely indefinable. Who touches the heart most deeply, Schubert or Mozart? Who’s your ideal of feminine beauty—Monroe? Deneuve? Cleopatra? Is Manet a better painter than Monet? Every such act of judging is riddled with imponderables. There are a great number of wonderful restaurants that almost made it to the top, but not quite, and no one, either within Michelin or without, can clearly articulate the difference between a two- and a three-star place, when the food is often equally stunning in both. In the end, it probably comes down to the personality of the individual who runs the show. A most pertinent example is La Pyramide in Vienne. When Fernand Point died, not even Michelin, the Godzilla of guides, had the guts to remove any stars at all, because Mado Point was a formidable, intimidating personality who knew her business inside out, tasted her food better than any inspector, and judged wine more accurately and severely than 90 percent of the males in the trade. (I have watched grown men tremble as she arrived on the scene of a dégustation of Côtes du Rhône.) As a result, La Pyramide sailed tranquilly along with three stars until Mado expired in 1986. On the other hand, when the very great Alain Chapel checked out in 1990, the guide instantly demoted his restaurant to the two stars that it still holds today under the direction of his widow, Suzanne, and his longtime chef, the faultless professional Philippe Jousse.
“I did that,” Bernard Naegellen told me without the least hesitation. Director of the guide until the advent of Derek Brown, Naegellen had run a tight ship, sticking unwaveringly to the ancient Michelin principle that when a chef departs—feet forward or otherwise—his restaurant will be déclassé. “Leaving the three stars would have been a lack of respect for Chapel. It would have indicated that Michelin thought he had counted for nothing in the excellence of his restaurant, and it would be just as good without him.”
Misguided multitudes of two-star chefs, reasoning that décor and luxury can make the difference, have broken their wings trying to buy their way to the top by launching ruinously costly building programs. Many more have wandered off into the swamps of unbridled creativity and ended up just looking foolish, with wasabi, coconut milk, and agar-agar all over their faces.
And yet they keep coming back to the fray, because the three-star rating is the Oscar, the légion d’honneur, and the Pulitzer Prize all in one, where cooking is concerned. There’s an interesting psychological point here: Who are these people, and what is the nature of the demon inside them? Among all the tens of thousands who make their living as chefs, there is a tiny minority that deliberately sets out to be the best among the best (or at least perceived as such), itching for those three stars and nothing else. But only twenty-five or so of them finally make it to the top of the heap. Call them what you will—aristocracy, all-stars, mad dogs, whatever—but they are all exceptional people who would surely have been equally successful in any other work they undertook. What they accomplish along their route is an extraordinary act of will, intelligence, and perseverance, because reaching that professional summit is as exhausting as it is fraught with obstacles, and is frustrating and frighteningly expensive to boot. Most normally constituted persons, sound of mind and reasonably aware of the body’s need for occasional rest, wouldn’t bother trying. Why bother, indeed, when a well-placed pizza parlor can bring in bigger and faster profits than a three-star palace?
Because any M.B.A. can run a pizza joint, a bank, or the International Monetary Fund, that’s why. Obstinate chasers after the big brass ring, these characters are all obsessive perfectionists who want more than money. As much as fluttery terminology tends to be overused in relation to cooking, there is an aspect of art in their endeavors, a seeking of something more estimable and transcendent than the famous bottom line that rules our advanced Judeo-Christian societies. Such quixotics are rare, though. Of Bernard’s fellow apprentices in Roanne, only he and Guy Savoy chose to run the body-strewn obstacle course. More reasonable, the others settled for less. Jacques Cète became a teacher in a cooking school, and is alive and well in sunny Menton with an untrammeled view over the Mediterranean. Bernard Chirent went to work for others, where the money was, mostly in the U.S. Jean Ramet limited his ambitions to the single star of the excellent little restaurant that bears his name in Bordeaux. Claude Perraudin was perhaps the most lucid of all. This is a man who learned la grande gastronomie at the feet of four of the trade’s greatest masters—Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Michel Guérard, and Paul Bocuse (not even to mention Claude Verger, because Perraudin had cooked in one of the Barrières, too), but he resolutely turned his back on the search for any stars at all—too damn much trouble. Instead, he created Le Père Claude, the kind of unpretentious Parisian bistrot that everybody loves.* The place is not even mentioned in the Michelin at all, but Perraudin was well rewarded for his perspicacity. The restaurant is full, lunch and dinner, every day of the year.
“I always kept my feet on the ground,” he explained. “Bernard was more of a dreamer. But Saulieu turned out to be something of a poisoned gift for him.”
Down in Saulieu, the dreamer could have had a much easier ride by taking the same tack as Perraudin, sticking with the great regional specialties of Burgundian cooking and contenting himself with one or two stars. But he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t make the itch go away. He had to go for the big prize: three stars or bust. It very nearly was bust, too, because the risks he took in later years were greater than any of his contemporaries would have contemplated. But even in the days when he was just Verger’s employee, and hardly concerned with the financial side, he was already monomaniacally intent on tracking down Michelin, seizing it by the scruff of the neck, and loving it to death.
“When a nicely dressed gentleman would come for lunch alone,” remembered Claude Le Gall, “he told us to go out and check his car to see if the tires were Michelins. That wouldn’t be proof, but it could be an indication, anyway. Sometimes, when we weren’t sure which car he had come in, he would have us going through his coat pockets in the vestiare, to see if the keys might identify the car.”
Le Gall was an important element of Bernard’s early career at the Côte d’Or. Hired as waiter in March of 1978, exactly a year after Michelin awarded the first star, this Breton was a stripling of twenty-three when he arrived in Saulieu, the first of the young dream team of dining room personnel that was soon to become the envy of all of Bernard’s confrères. Both within and outside the restaurant, Le Gall shared the experience of growing to professional maturity under a boss who was a mere four years older than himself. (With that slightly anachronistic but still elegant formalism that characterizes so much of French society, he never would have dared to address his boss with any term but “Monsieur Loiseau,” in spite of the proximity of their ages, and in spite of Monsieur Loiseau’s often childish behavior.) Like the rest of the staff that would be coming in over the following years, he rapidly succumbed to the unique and disconcerting new style of captaincy that Bernard had invented: leadership by wild, unbridled enthusiasm. Never had the méthode Coué—“Every day, and in every way, I am becoming better and better”—been applied as indefatigably and effectively as at the Côte d’Or under Bernard Loiseau.
“On est les meilleurs!”—“We’re the best”—was the house mantra under Bernard, and anyone who didn’t come to sincerely believe it soon realized that there was no place for him in Saulieu. Bernard’s incessant cheerleading was totally successful, too. There were two reasons for that: first, the staff he hired after the departure of Dumaine’s and Minot’s grizzled veterans was young and impressionable, with an innate idealism that was just waiting for the chance to vibrate to the call of a charismatic leader; and secondly, he really meant it—the guy was utterly sincere.
And then there was the flip side of the mantra, the only other one that existed within the hallowed walls of the Côte d’Or: “Vous êtes les meilleurs”—You’re the best. When Bernard turned it around like that and directed it at his kitchen crew or dining room staff, there was not a one who did not soak up the ardor of his enthusiasm and the positive reinforcement that he lavished on them. No one, whether employee, guest, or passing observer, who ever spent more than a few minutes under the Niagara flow of Bernard’s volubility—punctuated by those characteristically sweeping gestures, those big, glistening brown eyes, and that enormous Halloween smile—can forget the charm that the man exuded: direct, primary, muscular, right-now charm, impossible to escape and phenomenally persuasive. When Bernard was “up,” he could wring a grin from an ayatollah, or make a Puritan elder dance a jig. And he was “up” 99 percent of the time.
This, then, was the new personality that he imposed on the staid old barn in Saulieu, the force that motivated his staff far more effectively than the rigid hierarchies and military-style rule-by-terror that traditionally obtained within the French restaurant establishment. And it worked beautifully. Banks lent him great sums of money against all reasonable expectations of return, and not even Fortress Michelin could resist the incessant assaults of his enthusiasm. In 1981, only five years after Monsieur Trichot had grudgingly admitted that his place was a restaurant after all, Bernard was rewarded with his second star. The third would come, too, sure as the earth turned and the sun rose. It was written, and that was all there was to it.
With the second star, the media leaped onto the Bernard Loiseau story with even greater passion. The talented kid whom Verger had led out of the kitchens of the Barrières was now receiving journalists in Saulieu like the lord and master of the house. The press came for the free meals, of course, and, for many of them, entire weekends of sybaritic rustication, accompanied by their girlfriends/boyfriends/mistresses/dogs, or whatever. It was all on the house, but the arrangement was far from being a one-way street. Like all great aubergistes, Bernard truly loved receiving people and loved seeing them enjoying the microcosm of pleasure that he was able to wrap around them. For the time being it was Verger who was footing the bill for all those nonpaying guests, but Verger was a canny old fox who knew all about Bernard’s powers of persuasion. Never mind about a few rooms, a few bottles of wine, and a few slices of foie gras: The press would cough up nice articles about Saulieu, and that was worth a fortune in free publicity.
And cough up they did, too, because Bernard Loiseau was a terrific story. He was bright, funny, energetic, and astoundingly articulate. He had started from nothing and come from nowhere to earn his place among gastronomy’s budding elite. He could always be counted on for the striking quotes and colorful analogies that all reporters love, and just in case they hadn’t heard, he repeated for them the story about Jean Troisgros swearing to become an archbishop. Great stuff.
“It was a regular procession of journalists,” Le Gall remembered. “A lot of them came down on Friday evening at ten P.M. and didn’t leave until after breakfast on Monday. Once we had a guy from the radio station Europe 1. They had this promotion where he drove around in his Renault R16 painted in the orange and black Europe 1 colors, broadcasting live from the car. He would drive up behind cars and announce their license plate number. If they were tuned in to Europe 1 they would hear him, pull over, and win an envelope full of money. Europe Stop, they called it.
“Over lunch he told Monsieur Loiseau he could set up a Europe Stop for his chef, Dominique Hensch. ‘You take your car and head off on the A6 toward Paris, and I’ll come up on you,’ he told Hensch. ‘When I interview you I’ll ask you where you work, and then you can say Bernard Loiseau and the Côte d’Or. Make sure you say it loud and clear.’ They went off and we all gathered in the kitchen with our transistors. In a few minutes the Europe Stop came on. ‘I’m just leaving a village called Saulieu,’ he said, ‘and I’m following a car with the license number so and so. Does he hear me? Ah! He’s got his turn signal on, and he’s pulling over. Now, be careful, monsieur, just park your car and come right up to our radio car.
“ ‘Congratulations, monsieur, for staying tuned to Europe 1 and winning our Europe Stop. Could you tell us your name, and where you’re coming from?’
“ ‘Dominique Hensch. I’m coming from Saulieu.’
“ ‘I see, and what is your line of business?’
“ ‘I’m a cook at the Côte d’Or, the restaurant of Bernard Loiseau.’
“The guy kept the interview going for a few minutes just to be sure, and Hensch must have said Bernard Loiseau ten times. Monsieur Loiseau was ecstatic. ‘Hey, can you believe it, guys,’ he kept repeating—‘we’re live on Europe 1!’ When Hensch came back, Monsieur Loiseau told him to make sure to share the money out with all the kitchen staff. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
In a situation like that, who was using whom? Certainly the media freeloaders never had to crack their wallets, but as long as Bernard had them under his thumb in the dining room they were a captive audience, trussed up like a poulet de Bresse, ready to be overwhelmed by his food, his gab, and his charm. The situation might have made an interesting conundrum for moralists to debate, but on site, nobody gave a damn—both sides were enjoying the free ride, the great cause of gastronomy was being served, and Bernard was discovering that he rather enjoyed the twentieth-century invention of image building.
“Image is everything,” cried the young André Agassi as he bounded around the world’s great tennis tournaments in his flowing bleached hair and psychedelic outfits, and Bernard had concluded the same thing even earlier. Agassi was not a star yet, though, so the one Bernard imitated was the Swede, Björn Borg. Le Gall recalled the afternoon when he casually mentioned that he was going to play a little tennis on the Saulieu municipal courts with some of the guys, and perhaps Monsieur Loiseau would like to join them. Sure, said Bernard. I’ll see you down there.
“We were still warming up when he arrived. He had two new sport bags, four of the latest rackets, five pairs of shorts, maybe ten or fifteen T-shirts, three pairs of shoes and one hundred balls—he didn’t know how to play, but he had emptied the Saulieu sporting goods store! He played maybe three times, then dropped it and gave the equipment to the guys. That’s the way he was—he had constructed in his head this image that he wanted to become. He wasn’t there yet, but Bernard Loiseau had to be someone, and that required some adjustments. So if he played tennis, he had to be outfitted like a star. Other times, he would send me to Autun to buy his socks and underwear, because it didn’t fit his image to do it himself. Chef Bernard Loiseau didn’t walk into a local store and ask for underpants. That just wasn’t done.”
The underpants-and-socks chore is a classic of Côte d’Or lore, and others after Le Gall were charged with the same mission. When he put their purchases on his person, along with all the rest of the clothing that went with them, he was fastidiously neat, with every pleat or crease pressed razor-sharp and shoes as shiny as the day they had been bought. Whenever a waiter or maître d’hôtel accompanied him to Paris for some business meeting or professional function, he underwent a preliminary inspection—shirt freshly pressed, tie in place, shoes glistening—by the boss before being permitted to join the expedition. In the kitchen, Bernard changed his tunic and apron several times a day if the least spot troubled their brilliant white surface.
Like everyone else who worked under him, Le Gall looks back at his Saulieu days with a curious combination of nostalgia, disbelief, and affection, suffused with the kind of feeling that makes a man smile and shake his head at the same time. “His self-image was out of all proportion, but he was the nicest guy in the world. Out of the blue he would throw us the keys and say, take my car to Dijon and go see a movie. He was incredible—we could ask him for anything, he was so generous. He genuinely liked to please people and make them happy—not just the guests, but us, too. But at the same time he had this grossly inflated self-image. We would look at him and say, this guy’s nuts, but then when we saw what he managed to accomplish, and how he had all these journalists and photographers and showbiz people following him around like puppies, we had to admit he wasn’t as crazy as all that. You always take geniuses for nuts, don’t you?”
Bit by bit, brick by brick, encouraged by his showbiz friends and abetted by the stream of flattering articles in the press, the image of Bernard Loiseau the innovative genius and grand chef took on detail and shape until it became unassailable, waterproof, and fire resistant. Le Gall was on duty one quiet afternoon after lunch when he was startled by an engine roar and a squeal of brakes as a flashy Porsche drew up at the front entrance and a stranger burst in, shouted bonjour, strode straight into the kitchen, and began cooking himself lunch.
“I had no idea who that excitable little character was, but he seemed to know what he was doing. I went upstairs and woke up Monsieur Loiseau from his nap. It turned out the guy was Jacques Maximin,* who had two stars at the Négresco Hotel in Nice in those days. A little later, when the kitchen staff was getting ready for the dinner service, he was kidding around with Monsieur Loiseau and he shouted out to the whole brigade: ‘Hey, guys, doesn’t it bother you to work for a chef who doesn’t even know how to make a béarnaise or whip up a mayonnaise? Come on, Bernard—make us a béarnaise!’
“That didn’t faze him a bit. ‘Je t’emmerde’ [roughly: Screw you], he said. ‘I don’t know how to make a béarnaise or whip up a mayonnaise, but I’m still the greatest!’ ”
There it was. The image was in cast-iron—a great chef can always hire a technician to make a mayonnaise. Don’t bother me with details. The comparison with Mohammed Ali springs inescapably to mind. No one will ever know for sure how much of the bluster in each of the men was real and how much was whistling in the dark—but Ali did knock out George Foreman, and Bernard did win three stars. Also like Ali, Bernard never hid his thoughts or his purposes—or anything else, for that matter. The man was an open book. Bernard would have been the world’s worst spy, because he couldn’t keep a damn thing secret, neither his chagrins nor his joys. From the day he first met Claude Verger he laid himself wide open to snickering by announcing his three-star ambition, and he shared that ambition every day with his staff in Saulieu, never tiring of reminding them of the goal they were chasing together. Withal, in winter, the cruel season, when the angling rains turned to sleet on the Morvan plateau, and the sleet to mushy snow, it must have been excruciatingly hard to maintain the fire of that relentless optimism.
“He would pep-talk us about those three stars even as he was gnawing at his nails and looking out over the lace curtains at the empty street,” said Le Gall. “I remember one winter day when we had no clients at all for lunch and only one for dinner. And do you know who it was? Guy Savoy, who had come through Saulieu to pick up his son from a skiing vacation. On days like that, even the most solid of men must get depressed and wonder what in hell he’s doing in a place like that.”
When he was feeling the stress of overwork, Claude Perraudin had an infallible remedy for the big-city blues: He would hop onto his Harley hog and rumble peaceably on down to Saulieu, where Bernard was sure to greet him with an icy bottle of champagne, feed him his best creations, put him up for the night, and generally treat him like royalty for as long as he cared to stay. It was rarely for more than twenty-four hours—Perraudin’s own place needed attention, too—but reciprocating properly was almost impossible, because Bernard’s visits to Paris were always rushed, nervous, and filled with one appointment after another. But still he made a point of visiting Le Père Claude, shaking the hands of his kitchen personnel, grabbing a quick bite, and leaving a big tip.
“He would look around the place and ask me, ‘Combien de couverts?,’ ” said Perraudin—How many customers today?—“He had that wistful look, because it was obvious that my place was full while his was empty. But then he would cheer up when the clients smiled at him. ‘You see that? They recognize me! Don’t they?’ ”
To a certain extent, that recognition, the fruit of his love affair with the press, compensated for his own lack of customers: That always boosted his morale. The certainty, even as he was gnawing his fingernails, that his image was one of glory and triumph helped soothe him through those miserable winter months. Strength and joy returned with the leaves and the sun of springtime.
“We just waited for summer to come around,” said Le Gall. “When it did, we took advantage of it as much as we could. After the famine, it was the feast. We never turned away a client, and we put them everywhere—in Dumaine’s dining room, in the entryway, in the halls, in the winter garden. Sometimes, when there had been an accident and the autoroute was closed, the A6 became like the old A6, and they detoured traffic through Saulieu. Then there were plenty of customers.
“Monsieur Loiseau was incredible, super generous. I saw him take in these young couples—kids who didn’t know anything about the sorts of prices we charged—and give them lunch for nothing. ‘I’m proud to see young people interested in French gastronomy,’ he told them. ‘You are my guests.’ Sometimes this generosity could make problems, though. Once he told me to lend my car to a journalist from Channel Two, because his wasn’t free. She ran it off the road and ended up in a field. Monsieur Loiseau was embarrassed about that and apologized to me.”
What were the guests eating in those days? As the seventies turned to the eighties, Bernard’s cuisine was still in transition, but he was beginning to sing a lot of his own songs. His roast lobster on a watercress puree was straight Verger from the Barrières, his vegetable terrine recalled the famous terrine de légumes “Olympe” of Pierre Troisgros, and both the feuilleté d’asperges aux écrevisses and the tarte légère aux pommes harked straight back to the pâtissier’s legerdemain of Michel Guérard—even if, in occasional moments of rhetorical transport, Bernard would claim unwarranted fatherhood of that celebrated little masterpiece. There were interesting adaptations, too, taking a fellow chef’s idea for a certain ingredient and shifting it to another. In Roanne he had watched Chef Jean and Chef Pierre go through the delicate steps of their tomate à la tomate, a surprising, quirky little dish in which tomatoes were sautéed, then cooked in the oven, and finally stuffed with cream and a mixture of chopped tomato, garlic, onions, and aromatics. Bernard conceived of a dessert based on the same principle of redundancy: orange à l’orange, the fruit slowly cooked in syrup and served with slivers of its own candied skin over a sharply flavored orange coulis. For the classics, he continued to offer items like Bressane chicken in a tarragon cream sauce, foie gras terrine, and the banal but eternally popular sliced Morvan ham.
But Bernard was thinking, and le style Loiseau was peeping up from under the layers of the classics and the borrowings: perfect preparation of perfect ingredients, light, fast, undisguised, recognizable for what they were and easily digestible. His warm salad of mixed greens and sweetbreads went with a vinaigrette redolent of nut oil; he served fat turbot slices with quickly sautéed cèpes—mushrooms; river trout cooked in a court bouillon and stuffed with a vegetable julienne; and there was his old favorite, the gibelotte—fricassee—of rabbit, but now accompanied by buttery cabbage leaves rather than the turnips that had the gourmets salivating all over Clichy. His bavaroise of artichokes with a puree of fresh tomatoes was as light and attractive as his fricassee of vegetables with lemon grass—citronelle—and GaultMillau labeled his varieties on the theme of crayfish “phenomenal.” (His devotion to the little critter that he had so enthusiastically trapped with Rémy and his father during summer vacations in Messeix was a Proustian reflex that never left him.)
But Le Gall recalled most particularly three other dishes, because each one in its own way was a precursor of the full-blown symphony of le grand style Loiseau that would be coming in later years: soupe d’escargots aux orties; bar au jus de truffe; and sandre au vin rouge à la moelle—snails in nettle soup; sea bass with truffle juice; and pike perch with beef marrow in a red wine sauce.
The first dish—soupe d’escargots aux orties—is probably the most significant, because it tells volumes about Bernard as a person, a cook, and an entrepreneur. Ardently determined to make a name for himself but still under the influence of the thrifty traditions of his native Auvergne, he decided to reinvent nettle soup, an old peasant classic that his mother had occasionally made at home, as did thousands of other penny-pinching housewives. Young nettle shoots from the top of the plant can be treated exactly like sorrel, softened in butter to make a vegetable dish accompanying meat or, if meat is lacking, simply with potatoes. More commonly, though, the shoots are cooked in water or bouillon to make a cheap, healthy soup. (No need to worry—cooking destroys the formic acid that gives nettles their sting.)
Bernard was thinking. Pirouettes were turning in his head—creators love jokes, puns, plays on words, winks and nudges. To begin with there was the ancient regional specialty of escargots de Bourgogne, the fat snails that are perpetually enshrined in the pantheon of Burgundy cooking along with boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin. It would be right and proper to have snails on his menu, then, but how could he do them differently, in a way that would jump out and say hi to a Michelin inspector? He winked at tradition by making humble snails even humbler, presenting them in a peasant pauper’s soup. He began by shelling fresh snails and cooking them on low heat very slowly (four or five hours) in a strong court bouillon. Set aside, they awaited the two-step confection of their bath: tender nettle leaves cooked à l’anglaise in boiling water, then quickly chilled to maintain their brilliant green chlorophyll. Puréed in a mixer and thinned out with bouillon, the soup was thickened to a velvety consistency with a mash of leaves cooked in butter and puréed. The final presentation had the snails reposing in an intensely green bath of concentrated essence of nettles, greener even than the buttery persillade of the traditional Burgundy recipe. It was a daring stunt for a restaurant that aspired to three stars, but it was funny and surprising—“I rehabilitated nettles!” he cried—and it became an instant hit. Within only a few months, all of France knew that Loiseau was the guy who went out into the Morvan fields and meadows with a begloved crew of waiters and maîtres d’hôtel to handpick nettles for gourmets.
With that little dish, Bernard may have been responsible for a great deal more than he could have suspected. After a few more years had passed it became apparent that with this little inspiration he had lobbed into the tranquil waters of high-level cookery a stone whose ripples would continue outward far beyond Saulieu. His nettle stunt set colleagues to thinking about the advantages—both in the kitchen and in the media—of hunting and gathering. One of the most widely publicized offshoots of contemporary French cooking, clamored with voice stentorian by the self-celebrating mountain maestro Marc Veyrat in Megève and Veyrier-du-Lac,* is the use of wild plants and herbs to astonish clients with flavors and combinations never heard of before. Married to a public relations professional, Veyrat built an extremely effective media campaign, complete with regional costumes and Disneyland-style accessories (notably a floppy black mountaineer’s hat which never leaves his head, indoors or out), to advertise his system urbi et orbi as a fulsome new creed of natural cooking unique to himself, while scornfully dismissing the entire corpus of French classical cuisine as “has-been.” Veyrat now has established a firm lock on the plants-and-herbs image, but there is another colleague who was there long before him, and with considerably less noise: the great Michel Bras. Son of a blacksmith in the little aveyronnais city of Laguiole, famous for its goat-horn knives, Bras is as genuine as Veyrat is hokey, a marathon runner and fanatic of nature and organic foods who spends long, contemplative outings roaming the lunar landscape of his Aubrac plateau in search of new surprises for himself and the customers of his wonderful restaurant, crowned by Michelin with three stars in 1999. He pioneered the use in cuisine of the local wild plants that thitherto had been known only for their medicinal and curative qualities—things like wild sorrel, meadowsweet, broom, purslane, and amaranth. Veyrat saw what Bras was doing, liked the idea, and ran with it, banging the drum as he went. But with his nettle soup, Bernard was the initiator, the first to bring the fields and meadows into haute gastronomie.
The second of Le Gall’s list of Bernard’s memorable dishes—sea bass with truffle juice—was typical of his mature cuisine. Truffles are ruinously expensive, and any restaurant’s supply of the odoriferous little black tubers must be husbanded with great care. Profligate dishes like Paul Bocuse’s soupe aux truffes, featuring big, luxurious slices of them, are relatively rare. But truffle trimmings, mere specks infused in water or bouillon, can give a depth of flavor that otherwise would be impossible without recourse to classical wine reductions, fumets, fonds, and the liberal use of butter, all of which Bernard chose to eschew (or at least limit) in his later years.
As for the sandre au vin rouge, it may have caused less of a stir at first than his little food joke with nettles, but it finally turned out to be a dish like Guy Savoy’s truffled artichoke soup, the Troisgros brothers’ salmon with sorrel, and Bocuse’s sea bass stuffed with lobster mousse—an irreplaceable, ineradicable icon that he could never remove from his menu, even if he wanted to, lest gourmets denounce him for criminal behavior. Today, still, it is one of the two or three dishes most frequently ordered, an exemplary archetype of le style Loiseau.
And a beauty of a creation it is, too, as light and delicious as it is intelligently conceived and pleasing to the eyes: a blaze of gold and white on a background of deep crimson. Gold: the pike perch, a delicate freshwater fish native to French rivers and lakes, is cut in generous unskinned filets and quickly seized in a hot pan on the skin side, turning the surface to a luscious mahogany-gold color, then covered and finished over low heat. White: the pure, virginal flesh of the fish beneath the skin. Crimson: the sauce—Bernard’s famous sauce au vin rouge. By itself, something of a little masterpiece, the sauce is a potent reduction of red wine—strong, sun-baked wine from the south of France—seven liters of the stuff boiled down to a single liter, tart, tangy, and thickened to the consistency of blood. Too tart and tangy, in fact, obliging the chef to finish it with a large, plump lump of fresh sweet butter, a last-minute adjunction that balances the tastes just right. (Not even Loiseau, the high priest of antifats, could entirely and always do without the magic of butter.)
He made an elegant variation on another great Burgundian classic, oeufs en meurette, setting poached eggs on a bed of puréed onions and slivers of smoked lard (the French cousin of American bacon), all of which reposed on a glistening puddle of the same pungent red wine sauce, ringed by tiny tête de clou mushrooms sautéed at the last minute. And what might a young cook in Burgundy do with appetizers to stand out from the crowd? Bernard constructed tiny bite-sized delicacies to send out with flûtes of the finest champagnes. Those guests who looked closely enough discovered that what they were eating was . . . pizzas! Ah, mon cher, que c’est drôle! Que c’est exotique!
Bernard was having fun. The French economy was doing well in the eighties, and the restaurant trade prospered along with the rest of the nation. Even with the gloom of the barren winter season, the Côte d’Or was turning a good profit, because Verger was already charging nearly as much as many three-star restaurants. Once again, his Barrière formula was proving successful: everything for the food, the service, and the staff, and to hell with the décor and the rooms—that was just needless expense. But Bernard was beginning to see things differently.
Having passed his thirtieth birthday, he had matured as a cook and a man; now the entrepreneur inside him awakened, as he tramped around Dumaine’s domain and imagined what he could do with it. It was obvious that something would have to be done, and sooner rather than later, because the Côte d’Or environment was on its last legs. Henri Gault had famously described Bernard’s kitchen as worthy of the cargo hold of a Panama tramp steamer, while speculating that Loiseau would soon be moving to Beaune, Dijon, or Paris, where he could find an installation worthier of his talents. There was no garden, the façade giving out onto the main road was cracked, the halls mildewed and creaky, and the rooms cramped, ugly, and totally outdated for the last quarter of the twentieth century. Nor were there enough of them; during the well-frequented summer season Bernard was frequently obliged to send potential guests across the street to the bigger Hôtel de la Poste, instead of taking their money himself. Verger’s formula of indifference to décor had reached the absolute limit.
There was no way, Bernard was certain, that the Côte d’Or could hope for three stars in its present condition. Ah, but he envisioned it vastly expanded, with a big new dining room, a new kitchen, and new rooms—no, suites—for the hotel, he could see in his mind’s eye the silk purse he could make of it, a piece of paradise comparable to Troisgros or Bocuse—or, better yet, like Georges Blanc’s place in Vonnas (which was rapidly mutating from Blanc’s mother’s little country inn Chez la Mère Blanc into the luxurious caravansary now proudly renamed Georges Blanc) and favored with a gratifyingly dispendious international clientele. Bernard ached for something like that. With his name in big fat letters up on the front of the building. He began pestering Verger to sell it to him. Later, Verger said. When you get married. You’ve got to settle down first.
There didn’t seem to be much chance of that. Neither Saulieu nor the neighboring farm villages had produced any available women who attracted him and, being anchored to his kitchen by those imperious twice-daily services, he hardly had the chance to move in the Parisian circles where lightning might strike. And besides, there was that old thing of his shyness with the opposite sex.
“He was such a surprising guy,” Le Gall said. “I remember a time when there was a lone woman among the guests at the hotel who Monsieur Loiseau liked the looks of. He asked us to go talk to her for him. We thought that was great—maybe the patron was going to get laid. We set her up for a date and she said OK, so he took her to a nightclub after dinner that night. Some of us went to the same club later and we found the girl all by herself, while Monsieur Loiseau was playing 421 [a dice game] at the bar. He never touched her. We finally took her back ourselves. He was very uptight with girls. He just didn’t dare. That sort of thing happened two or three times.”
But was it simply shyness? There’s something more than academic hair splitting to the question, because the matter of a deep-seated, fundamental insecurity is something that all those who knew Bernard well, and were able to see through his smokescreen of optimistic bluster, wondered about all the time. Especially now in retrospect, when they reflect on the last six months or so of his life, those fatal months when whistling in the dark no longer worked, and he lost it.
There was not a trace of shyness when it came to promoting the restaurant and himself. Even before age thirty he was a boffo media hit, and in later life he became a true national celebrity, actively sought out by radio and TV producers when they needed a colorful character to liven up shows and broadcasts. No: there was something else, something more. Plenty of people more qualified than I have seen evidence of a fundamental, longstanding self-doubt in the mere fact that he felt the need for such endless self-promotion. Even mighty Michelin saw it.
“I was worried about him,” said Bernard Naegellen, the Michelin guide’s director before Derek Brown. “He was just too excessive.”
As early as 1979 GaultMillau had been rating Bernard among the ten or twelve best cooks in France, and in that same year his Burgundian neighbor Jacques Lameloise won his third star in the town of Chagny, south of Beaune. The regional restaurant scene was beginning to look very encouraging, but it was neither toward Lameloise nor toward Marc Meneau in nearby Vézelay that Bernard turned for inspiration. His eyes were fixed on Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or, a little village just this side of the Lyon city limits on the River Saône, home of Restaurant Paul Bocuse. He had already decided that Bocuse and no one else was to be his professional and personal model.
In itself, this was a sign of excess, because Bocuse was—still is—an enormously important individual, the great national father figure of the French culinary scene, a presence that dominates the business like the Commandatore in Don Giovanni. With the passing years it became apparent that Bernard had fixated on Bocuse as both his idol and, in a curious way, his deathly rival. If ever he was to reach the summit toward which his soaring ambition was carrying him, sooner or later he would inherit—or take over—Bocuse’s position as chef de file, symbolically killing him to become leader of the pack in a battle of personalities, like the famous battling kings imagined by Frazer in The Golden Bough. Farfetched? Perhaps, but Bernard was stubborn beyond belief once an ambition became an idée fixe, and even if he didn’t reason it out in detail, the end result was this: He aspired to become Paul Bocuse.
Verger had heard his young commis announce a ridiculously cheeky three-star ambition, and trace a comparison between himself and Björn Borg. The only thing that interested him was being first; second didn’t count. It was inevitable, then, that he would aim at the top, and Bocuse definitely was the top. But if supplanting Claude Verger in Saulieu was one thing, becoming Paul Bocuse was quite another matter.
We need a few words here to define Bocuse and his position in the French culinary establishment, because without understanding the phenomenon it is impossible to understand the scale of Bernard’s ambitions. Favorite pupil and surrogate son of Fernand Point, Bocuse descends from a family of cooks in activity since the eighteenth century. Genetic modification takes longer than a couple of centuries, they say, but Bocuse’s knowledge of food is so vast and his skill in manipulating it so adept that he appears to have sucked them all with his mother’s milk. Born in 1926, he was making his preferred dish, sauté de rognons, in the kitchen of his father’s restaurant at age nine, and was apprenticed at sixteen. From those earliest professional days it was apparent to everyone around him that he was headed for the top. He got there in 1965, when Michelin awarded him his third star, and his uninterrupted grasp on those stars ever since has made him the record holder for continuous years at the guide’s summit.
But what is most remarkable about Paul Bocuse is not so much his longevity as his influence on the cooking trade and his fellow artisans. It is a toss-up between him and the Troisgros brothers as to whose restaurant first inspired the term nouvelle cuisine (there are various different accounts), but no one doubts who was the big personality of the movement, and who did the most to popularize it around the world. (When the movement spun out of control into a silly caricature, he distanced himself from it altogether. Now Bocuse cooks just Bocuse.) The man’s quick intelligence, his often hilarious wit, and immensely charismatic style led the way for a whole generation of chefs out of the servant class, where they had languished since ancien régime days. Enfranchising themselves as owners of their establishments, these artisans became model entrepreneurs at the same time, the social equals to any of the capitalists for whom they cooked and with whom they chatted after the service in their dining rooms. So they remain today, whether they are self-financed like Bocuse, Guérard, and the Troisgros, or professionals in partnership with outside financiers, like Alain Ducasse, Alain Senderens, or Pierre Gagnaire.
If Claude Verger invited journalists by calculation, Bocuse did it by the ancient instinct of the innkeeper, and all the world’s press flocked to Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or to hear his anecdotes, take in his explanations of cooking history and technique and, not incidentally, lay into his poulet en vessie, gratin de homard, and loup en croûte. Unfailingly he passed the good word and sent the media visitors into a circuit of more free lunches and more explanations, history, and anecdotes in the restaurants of his friends and colleagues, from one end of France to the other. Bocuse was the first great educator of postwar French cuisine, doing more for its renown than all of his confrères put together. It is not for nothing that Pierre Troisgros (no slouch himself) calls him the man of the twentieth century.
When Bernard cried “I’m the greatest!” he was subconsciously thinking: Someday I’ll be Paul Bocuse. But that was a lot easier thought than done. For the moment, he was at the point of cultivating the great man, like a young actor hanging around an established star to share in a bit of his glory, meet his contacts, and, accessorily, maybe pick up a trade secret or two.
Half charmed and half amused by the overflowing vitality of his ingenuous young confrère up in Saulieu, Bocuse adopted him into the informal, protean grouping known as the Bocuse gang (la bande à Bocuse), and before long the two men were telephoning back and forth almost every day. With a few notable exceptions (Michel Bras, for one), the great cooks of France are inveterate gossips, eager for tidbits of news about their little brotherhood—who’s in, who’s out, who’s having professional or marital problems, who has come up with something new*—and, for men who are sitting on top of the world, almost pathetically concerned about what people are saying about them. Even though shifting rivalries and jealousies are as common in this club as among starlets or fashion designers, there is a certain basic solidarity that springs to life where the food guides are concerned. The exact whereabouts of Jean Didier’s red Lancia was known to every chef in every area he visited long before he drew up before any restaurant, of course, but where Michelin is concerned, this professional early warning system—le téléphone arabe—works double overtime. Bocuse is the world’s heavyweight champion at smelling out inspectors and ringing the alarm bell.† For this, for his experience, for his enormous stature in the profession, and for all the other qualities that long ago inspired journalists to commonly (and only half jokingly) refer to him as l’empereur, Bocuse impressed Bernard very, very deeply.
“When Monsieur Loiseau heard that Paul Bocuse would be coming by for lunch on his way to Paris,” Le Gall recalled, “it was like getting ready for a state visit by the président de la république. I never saw him more concerned about making everything perfect.”
There’s that adjective again. “Perfect” is a word that resonates incessantly around three-star restaurants, and none more so than at the Côte d’Or as Bernard charged along on his obsessive quest for recognition. That and its natural pendant, the other great house password, “les meilleurs”—the best. Although he had no way of realizing it, the autumn of 1980 was to be of signal importance to Bernard, because fate was preparing three momentous events for him: On avenue de Breteuil, the Michelin druids were preparing to award him a second star, to appear in the 1981 edition; he made the acquaintance of a strikingly alluring, twenty-nine-year-old blonde divorcée named Chantal Lebras; and his premier maître d’hôtel hired an assistant.
As trifling as it may have appeared at the moment, it was this third event that proved to be of the greatest and most lasting importance to the future of La Côte d’Or. Hubert Couilloud, who came aboard as second maître d’hôtel in October of that year, was distinguished by flaming red hair, sparkly blue eyes, and a solid line of experience: hotel school, a stint at the Savoy in London, a few years aboard liners and cruise ships, and finally back to hotels in metropolitan France. At twenty-five, he was three years younger than his boss, and in character as calm and low-key as Bernard was volatile, but both men discovered that they shared the same kind of unyielding perfectionism. On a personal level, Hubert was to grow into Bernard’s confidant and best friend in Saulieu. Professionally, he became by far the most important member of the noncuisine staff. What Loiseau was to the kitchen, Couilloud soon was to the salle.
Hubert is an interesting case, a first-rate example of the upward social mobility that the gastronomy business affords young people in France. Like most restaurant professionals—like Bernard himself, for that matter—Hubert was born into modest surroundings. Son of a farm family, he went to hotel school as a callow country boy, and depth, sophistication, and worldliness came to him in the elegant world of grande cuisine. As the shabby old Côte d’Or slowly mutated with the passing years into the magnificent Relais Bernard Loiseau, Couilloud’s position as the boss’s friend and top assistant made him, in effect, vice president of a business that totaled some sixty-five employees, with a turnover of several million dollars a year. As premier maître d’hôtel, he learned to move with skill and elegance in an environment peopled by clients who were usually rich, frequently famous, often high-strung, and occasionally impossible. He handled them all with ease, and the affably efficient service staff he built at Saulieu became much admired in the trade. It is very unlikely that Bernard could have built his success without Hubert.
It was a close thing, though: Bernard almost lost him right at the start. Hubert’s hiring and his subsequent accession to power were both owed to his predecessor as premier maître d’hôtel, a man who became briefly famous for a breach of professional etiquette so extraordinary that it scarcely seems believable, putting Bernard and his restaurant into deep hot water: The guy kicked a client in the ass.
It was Claude Verger who hired this choleric individual late in 1979 as the replacement for old Joseph, the last relic of Dumaine’s dining room staff. A year later, he, in turn, brought Hubert in as his second. As much as he was a remarkable discoverer of kitchen talent, Verger got it all wrong this time on the other side of the service door. For reasons no one was ever able to fathom he gave his new maître d’hôtel a higher salary than Bernard himself, the official directeur of the establishment. Arrogant and self-assured, apparently taking his paycheck as the token of hierarchical superiority, this former maître lorded it over the rest of the staff, creating cabals and jealousies and paying little more than lip service to Bernard’s orders.
Faced with a detestable and deteriorating atmosphere, Hubert was ready to quit. Luckily for everyone, he decided instead to try to save the situation. Taking one of his waiters with him as a corroborating witness, he drove to Paris to warn Verger that the Côte d’Or was facing disaster if he didn’t get rid of the offending character. “I don’t give a damn about that guy,” Verger barked. “Loiseau’s the boss down there. Let him work it out—but I don’t want this to cost me any money.”
What Verger was worried about was les indemnités de licenciement—the painfully high compensation payments that France’s labor laws require a boss to fork out to any employee he fires. The only way to avoid paying the bundle of cash is to prove gross professional incompetence or malfeasance. Which the premier maître d’hôtel promptly handed to Bernard on a silver platter. God knows what got into the man’s head to perform such an egregious stunt, but Le Gall was right there when it happened, and he remembers the event vividly.
“It was in the spring of 1981. We had just won the second star, and I was the waiter serving the gentleman in Dumaine’s salon. He was having the aiguillettes de canard, the duck we did in two servings, first with peaches and then a green peppercorn sauce. The gentleman called me over and said the duck strips were a little too firm, not cooked enough for his taste. Naturally I told him we would change them. I was about to take his plate back to the kitchen when the maître d’hôtel came over and said: ‘No—we won’t change them!’
“I guess they must have had words earlier or something, but in any case he never got his duck changed. When he got up to leave after the meal he came over to thank me. ‘Thanks to you, I have had a very nice evening,’ he said. At that, the maître d’hôtel blew up. He yelled at me, said I wasn’t doing my job right—and then grabbed the gentleman by the scruff of the neck, gave him a swift kick in the ass, and shoved him out the front door into the hedge. And Monsieur Loiseau was there—he saw it all, but he didn’t budge. He was hiding behind the door!”
Poor Bernard. Big strapping guy, Ferdinand the Bull, afraid of girls—now this. All his life he had avoided confrontation, and this one was much too fast for him to do anything but stand there and watch, petrified with indecision. Within days Michelin was on the phone demanding an explanation. Bernard hid in the kitchen. Hubert went in to settle the matter once and for all. He found the boss calming his nerves by peeling asparagus, his favorite form of tranquilizing activity. This time the guy has to go, he told Bernard. It’s either him or the rest of your dining room staff.
At last, at long last, Bernard reacted. Forcing himself into unaccustomed and unwanted aggressiveness, he charged out of the kitchen in an explosion of rage, gave the startled maître d’hôtel a Homeric dressing-down worthy of a marine drill sergeant, and fired him on the spot.
“Never, in my twenty-three years in the house, have I seen an outburst that could match that one,” Hubert said. Without further delay Bernard appointed him premier maître d’hôtel. Now the way was finally cleared for the two men to team up for the attack on that third star they could already dimly perceive over the red tile roofs of Saulieu. Before the year was out, that strikingly attractive blonde joined the team. That proved to be a mixed blessing.