X
EXIT CHANTAL, ENTER DOMINIQUE
In Bernard’s energetic dedication to image-building, one harmless but frequently repeated bit of exaggeration was his version of an Abe Lincolnesque rise from nothing to fame and success. The suggestion was rags to riches, but Clermont-Ferrand hardly qualified as the American frontier; the family apartment was no open face lean-to and not even the most put-upon lad could compare the hardships of apprenticeship in Roanne to the chore of clearing Indiana’s virgin forest for dirt farming. In truth, Bernard was but a fairly representative son of the conservative Camembert-and-cabbage petite bourgeoisie that then, as today, forms the bulk of the French population and keeps alive the great old national traditions—the good ones and the questionable ones, too. Dominique Brunet’s story, on the other hand, is much closer to fairy-tale material.
“Journalists liked writing that Bernard came from a poor background,” she says with an indulgent little laugh, “but he never lived anything like I did.”
Dominique was born in 1953 in the very chic, very exclusive Parisian suburb of Neuilly, but her family shared none of the wealth or comforts of their upper-class neighbors: her mother was a concierge and her father a laborer. After the birth of her first brother—two more would follow—they decamped to Saverne, an unlovely industrial city (foundries, machine tools, shoes) 40 kilometers from Strasbourg on the canal that links the Rhine to the Marne.
“It couldn’t have been simpler,” she says. “When we arrived there was no bathroom and no running water. We had to fetch it from a well in the garden. There wasn’t a book in the house. Most of my uncles could hardly read or speak French—in the family they all spoke in Alsatian dialect. When I was a little girl, my dream of luxury was to go to a vacation camp someday.”
Meeting with her today, it is difficult to imagine such a humble origin, but then again most of the monied swells of France’s haute bourgeoisie—like the Neuilly apartment dwellers whom Dominique’s mother served—are rather proud to trace a direct lineage to some chicken-filled farmyard just a few generations earlier. The Industrial Revolution came late to France, and much of the charm of this still profoundly rural country derives from the peasant ways and traditions that continue, just a few miles inland from the high-speed autoroutes.
Slender, elegant, and soft-spoken—you have to cock an ear, because her normal speaking volume is just a notch above a whisper—today’s Dominique could have stepped straight from the modern living pages of some fashionable women’s magazine. She speaks well and thoughtfully, articulating her ideas with the care and precision of the scientific method she learned in long years of studying biochemistry and microbiology for the two masters degrees that she holds from Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg and the École Normale Supérieure Technique in the Paris suburb of Cachan. Her pensive green-eyed gaze, framed by light brown hair cut in a sensibly short pageboy, is as reserved as Chantal’s flash of blue and blonde was enticing and challenging, and Dominique’s delicate features recall the fine, reflective faces of a Van Eyck painting. If Chantal’s allure was thoroughly twentieth-century, then Dominique’s recalled the Renaissance, which was nicely appropriate for her role in Saulieu, because her arrival signaled a rebirth for Bernard from his personal doldrums and those of the Côte d’Or toward the long-awaited glory of three Michelin stars.
It was at the end of 1985 that Bernard and Dominique first laid eyes on each other, at a competition for young cooks in the central city of Vichy, famed for its mineral water of ghastly taste and its inglorious past as the seat of the collaborationist Pétain government during the German occupation. After seven years of teaching applied food sciences at a technical lycée in Paris, Dominique had switched to journalism and gone to work for L’Hôtellerie, the specialized daily paper of the French hotel and restaurant trade. She was covering the cooking competition in Vichy when she cast an eye on the jury and lingered with a more markedly appraising gaze at the big, good-looking guy with the prematurely balding head and the widest smile she had ever seen. New to the business of cook-watching, she took him for Alain Chapel, the three-star magician of Mionnay, who was also afflicted with early hair loss.
Bad start. But after a colleague wised her up, she compensated for her mistake by marching straight up to Bernard a couple of weeks later at a ceremony for the launch of a new travel guide. When she confessed her error, he was not altogether unhappy to have been confused with one of the greatest cooks France had produced since the war. There were no Tex Avery pyrotechnics this time, but she and Bernard spent most of the evening together, and when they said goodbye it was a lot more like “see you soon.”
And so they did, because Dominique made sure to assign herself to cover any functions where she knew the guy with the great smile and the sad eyes would be appearing. One thing, as the expression goes, led to another, and before long she had become his friend, confidante, and lover.
“I discovered a deeply wounded person behind the jovial façade,” she said. “He couldn’t stand his wife anymore, the marriage was a disaster, and on top of that he was in big financial trouble.”
Whenever he could get away—easiest in the long winter months when clients were rare—Bernard jumped into his car after the dinner service and sped up to Paris to stay for a night with Dominique in her small career-girl’s apartment on the rue Claude-Terrasse. “He would cry as we talked,” she remembered. “I had never seen a man cry like that, completely letting go, like a baby. It was very strange, very touching. Then he would get up at dawn so he could be back in Saulieu by nine a.m.”
Those long hours of nonstop talking taught Bernard about Dominique, too, of course. Surprised and not a little intimidated by her considerable academic knowledge—while he had ingloriously quit his studies at sixteen, she had plugged away for fully a decade longer, and spoke fluent German and English as well—he was startled to learn that she, for one, really had come from a penurious background. What impressed him even more, though, was the strength of her ambition and the stubborn work ethic that had lifted her into the mainstream of upwardly mobile young professionals. Chantal was flashy, but Dominique was something else; she was impressive.
“When I was little, I had always wanted to get back to Paris,” she told me, reflecting on her long route from her youth of straitened circumstances. “I never felt at home in Alsace, and never saw myself like the people there. At eleven I was sent to a boarding school run by nuns, the Sisters of Divine Providence. I was lucky to get there, and the whole family—aunts and uncles helped out, too—chipped in to pay my way. Some of the girls who were there came from quite wealthy families, but for us it was a big financial effort. When I was twelve—I’ll remember this all my life—two sisters who were my classmates went on a cruise to Greece. Imagine—to Greece! That was like a dream for me.
“I promised myself I’d be like them someday. I already saw myself established in a big city and living in a certain manner. Not necessarily grand but . . . better. I realized I wasn’t good-looking enough to succeed by my beauty, so it could only be by studying that I could get there. It’s not so much that I enjoyed studies, but I knew one thing for sure, and I even wrote it in my diary: Work is the only thing that never disappoints you. Duty always comes first. Duty and work.
“So I worked. I sewed my own clothes, I fixed things around the house, and summers, I glued sneakers in the Adidas factory. Even though I’ve done a lot of studies, I’m still very much a manual person. Bernard and I found out that we were quite complementary. We were both ambitious, but there was a difference in our styles. When I believe in something I take great pains to achieve it, but I’m not audacious. I’ve always progressed carefully, step by step. I admire daring people, though, so I was captivated by Bernard. I was fascinated by the way he looked at life, by his self-confidence, and by his talent for bringing people around to what he believed in. He was like a one-man cavalry charge.”
Through the remaining months of 1986 and well into 1987, as the long, dreary matter of divorce proceedings between Bernard and Chantal followed the bureaucratic route in Dijon, the semiclandestine meetings with Dominique continued in Paris. In the days and weeks between these snatches of comfort, Bernard kept in touch with Dominique, as he always did with everyone else, by phone. Never was there a cook, or entrepreneur of any sort, for that matter, who relied on Mr. Bell’s clever talking instrument more than this one.
“The phone was his office,” Eric Rousseau said. “He never stopped. Often he would make calls lasting just twenty or thirty seconds, for no reason. He’d call television stars to show us that he was on intimate terms with them, but it was also to reassure himself. We would think he had something important to tell them, but then he’d just say: ‘Hi! OK, love you. ’Bye.’ And hang up, with that big smile still on his face, because they hadn’t forgotten him. Then he would say: ‘You see? I say tu to him.’ ”
Dominique remembers the many calls she received during their curious long-distance courtship of 1986 and 1987 as mostly cries of distress. “He was more and more worried about money, and if Hubert and Eric hadn’t been there to support him I don’t know what he would have done. By then he was afraid of his wife, too. ‘I never know what she’s going to say, or what she’s going to come up with next,’ he’d tell me. Four, five times a day he’d call so I could comfort him. It really was time for that chapter of his life to come to an end.
“Bernard told me that he learned about her affair with the maître d’hôtel only in that last year. People had hinted at it to him before, but he never wanted to believe them. And since he was so nice, she took advantage of him, naturally. They had a joint checking account and the credit cards that went with it, but he didn’t close down the account right away. Toward the end of the marriage he got bills from the Club Med in Marbella where she had gone with her lover. I mean, it takes a certain amount of gall for a woman to do that, doesn’t it? But he was afraid of her, because she could be really nasty. He could never know what she would be doing next. So he paid the bills. She even asked him for fifty thousand francs in cash to pay for a marketing course she wanted to take so she could set up a business. He paid. He gave her anything she wanted, just so she would leave him alone.”
Those were edgy, nervous times for the Côte d’Or. Bernard’s marriage was obviously in tatters, expenses were mounting alarmingly, and the ten beautiful new Relais & Châteaux rooms were still not bringing in enough of the expected mass of new customers. Apart from the pleasant surprise of an unexpected influx of Japanese visitors tipped off to Bernard’s minimalist approach to last-minute cooking by Shizuo Tsuji, Japan’s most famous gastronomic expert (apart from being an influential TV personality, he owned the world’s biggest cooking school, located in Osaka), Saulieu was not yet on the map of world travelers. Where were the English, the Germans, and the Americans? Awaiting better days, Hubert led the staff in a draconian cost-cutting campaign, reducing supply orders to the minimum, delaying wine purchases, and turning off unnecessary lights in unused rooms. Between this kind of attention to detail and Bernard Fabre’s rationalizing hand on the larger management picture, the gloomy situation slowly righted itself, and the Côte d’Or climbed back into the black over the following years. But it had been a close call; to keep as much money flowing in as possible, Bernard had, in essence, worked nonstop. From the time of his arrival in Saulieu in 1975 he had never allowed himself more than one day off a year—Christmas—to enjoy the luxury of closing the shop down and getting his wind back. Time and time again over those years, he speculated about taking time off and closing for some kind of vacation break, but he never dared to relax his manic grip on the tiller of his big old boat—not with all those loans outstanding. The result was pretty much inevitable; assiduity became overwork, and overwork monomania.* He had been heading toward trouble for years.
“Monsieur Trichot told me if I filled out my hotel side I’d have the place full every night,” Bernard was saying, in that patented tone of absolute conviction that brooked no gainsaying. The year was 1986. As if his disastrous marital situation was not enough just then, he was in debt up to his neck (the level would soon rise to the top of his toque) and the clientele remained gallingly thin, but Bernard was “up” just then, and when he was riding the cloud of his méthode Coué, not even the horses of the Apocalypse could drag him down into despond. He had recently been to Paris to pay the customary call on Michelin, and André Trichot, then director of the guide, had apparently said a few nice words about his new hotel rooms. From this reticent bit of auvergnat encouragement Bernard had concluded that he had been right all along: salvation and the route to three stars lay in a fuite en avant, a headlong rush to more borrowing, more building, and more luxury.
“I don’t give a goddam,” he cried. “I’m just in my thirties. I’d rather be in debt now, while I’m young. The future of this business is in the hotel side. It’s not enough to just to have a good restaurant anymore. People want to come to the countryside, enjoy beautiful surroundings, hear the birds chirping in the garden and relax in luxurious rooms. You’ve got to go up a notch. Georges Blanc is the one who really understood what marketing is all about. He pointed the way. He set the example.”
Bernard was quite right. When he inherited the family auberge in the village of Vonnas, young Georges Blanc took advantage of the sharply reduced interest rates available through the government-sponsored crédit hôtelier program in the seventies to transform a little country inn into a rustic paradise of three-star food, five-star rooms, and impeccably modern appointments, including a big heated pool, a tennis court, and the restaurant trade’s very first helipad—an item that drew sniggers at first but was soon copied throughout France. Behind his poulet à la crème, his bar à la ligne, and the signature potato pancakes that had been the glory of Vonnas for time beyond memory, Georges Blanc had been hiding another secret: He was a hell of a businessman.
This was what goaded Bernard, he was determined to do as well as Georges Blanc, and then he would go him one better. Blanc was not only a model, then, but already a rival as well—as were Marc Meneau in Vézelay and Michel Troisgros in Roanne and other stars of the trade, like Marc Veyrat in Annecy, who all would be making big splashes in future years. Relations within the confrèrie of three-star restaurants always have an edge of competitive bitchiness to them, because the tenors of French cooking are locked in a permanent contest to be the best, the most beautiful, and the most seductive before client and critic and God.
“Georges Blanc got his place from his mother,” Bernard emphasized heavily, “so he didn’t have that expense to worry about. Me, I’ve had to bust my balls to pay for this, and that’s slowing me down. If I had gotten it for free, I would have knocked down the old rooms long ago. But I’ll get there. The first priority is to finish all thirty of the new rooms—profitable things first. That’ll bring in the money to pay for the rest.”
The master plan was all worked out in his head, and he was going to get it done come hell or high water. Optimism was the call of the day, then, but Bernard couldn’t resist underlining his hard luck once again, and contrasting it with the good fortune of the “golden boy” in Vonnas. “Georges Blanc has Mâcon right next door, and Lyon nearby, and he’s on the route to Geneva. He’s got it made. Me, I’m in this little Saulieu in the middle of nowhere, so I’ve got to make myself known. You can be the best cook in the world, but people won’t come to you if they don’t know you.”
This, too, was typical of the man. That he was embarked on a permanent campaign of self-publicizing was glaringly obvious. Fair enough, an observer might say, he had an expensive house to fill up, but in spite of his excessive nature, Bernard was not entirely muddleheaded. He knew that there was a potential price to pay for all those silly TV shows he appeared on, all those pages of posed pictures in Paris-Match, and all those snails crawling on his bald pate: he irritated. The more he exerted himself to attract new customers to Saulieu, the more a certain segment of the gourmet public held it against him and deliberately shunned him, with a predictable kind of reaction: Who does he take himself for? Does he think he’s a cook or a TV star?
More cruelly, and a good deal more erroneously, this same segment of public opinion jumped to the damning conclusion that if Bernard was in the press so frequently, it meant he was neglecting his kitchen. None of the carpers* had any idea of his near-hysterical predawn dashes to Paris or the high-speed rush to make it back to Saulieu for the lunch service. Few ever knew about or credited him for his valiant (and perhaps foolhardy) effort to remain open all through the week, the year ’round. Never was there a chef who worked harder than Bernard, but by trying to do too much, he was spreading himself too thin. The man was in permanent risk of nervous exhaustion.
It was on a snowy afternoon in February of 1987 that Dominique made her first visit to Saulieu, on a self-assigned mission to write an article for L’Hôtellerie on the cooking of Bernard Loiseau. Neither Chantal nor the maître d’hôtel was present at the Côte d’Or anymore, but still she and Bernard had to be careful about displaying their relationship too openly, lest this theoretically censurable intimacy lend legal ammunition to Chantal’s side in the divorce proceedings. Still, hormones will be hormones, and after midnight Bernard crept into Dominique’s welcoming room by passing over the railing of her terrace, leaving in the morning by the same route in reverse.
The misconceived, unhappy marriage with Chantal finally came to an end in February of 1988, when the divorce was pronounced in Dijon. As always, Bernard had Bernard Fabre at his side through the proceedings, with his quick intelligence, his knowledge of the relevant statutes, and his pocket calculating machine. He needed Fabre doubly, because he had put himself into a bind at the very start of his married life: blinded by his infatuation, he had insisted on marrying en communauté de biens. In other words, half of everything was Chantal’s. Clear-eyed and infinitely more cautious than his engaging but wildly unrealistic client, Fabre had advised him not to do it. Bernard seemingly acquiesced but he didn’t give up on the idea, not with Chantal around to argue her side of the case. He set up another meeting with Fabre.
“I remember it was a Saturday afternoon,” Fabre recalled, “and Auxerre was playing in the Coupe de France [the most important national soccer competition of the year]. We watched the match, and when it was over he said: ‘Voilà—I want you to give half the shares of the company to Chantal.’
“I don’t agree, I said. I won’t do it. And, anyway, I don’t know how to do a document like that. I did know, of course, but I knew that it would be a connerie. I wrote him a letter the next day advising him against it again, but it never arrived. I’m sure Chantal opened it and kept it from him.”
Faced with Fabre’s refusal, Bernard got his local notaire to do the fateful paperwork instead, and within a few days Chantal was officially présidente of Bernard Loiseau S.A. Now, at divorce time, he was stuck with the fruit of his amorous folly. If it came down to a courtroom dirt-slinging match between divorce lawyers, Bernard probably could have carried the day, considering the relative flagrancy of Chantal’s long-standing matrimonial delicto, but that would not remove her from 50 percent ownership of the company, and the whole messy procedure promised to be long, embarrassing, expensive, and damaging to Bernard’s image—or at least his image of his image.
Fabre found a better way; he reminded Chantal that as half owner of La Côte d’Or she was also responsible for half of its liabilities. By then Bernard was more than seven million francs in debt for the first nine new Relais & Châteaux luxury rooms. He was struggling with a budget overrun of 30 percent and paying his suppliers and staff salaries on a hand-to-mouth basis with the daily receipts from his clientele. With Chantal as an expensive ornament, as long as she was still officially his wife, and a mere two Michelin stars and a frustratingly moderate flow of customers—the curse of Saulieu still held, even in the prosperous mid-eighties—he was teetering dangerously close to the knife edge of bankruptcy. There was not a banker who would spring for any more cash.
The situation was bleak, then, but its very bleakness offered Fabre the opportunity for a little southern-style persuasion to direct at Chantal. He conferred with the bankers, explained the divorce situation, and persuaded them to expedite a few judiciously unfriendly mises en demeure—formal demands—for payment on accounts bearing her signature as well as Bernard’s. Faced with the terrifying figures, she rapidly caved in and, in exchange for the promise of an amicable divorce settlement (no blame assigned either way), left Saulieu with her black BMW, her white poodle, and two years of alimony. Bernard heaved a huge sigh of relief, and Dominique was finally able to come down to Saulieu openly for weekends in the scruffy little apartment above Dumaine’s dining room.
When, on the second of December, 1988, Dominique and Bernard had a proper church wedding in Alsace, it was Fabre who was Bernard’s best man. Later, at the birth of his first son, Bernard asked Fabre to be the godfather. This complicity—the dreamer and the counter—was a rare kind of hybrid symbiosis, but neither in business nor human relations did Bernard Loiseau’s style follow convention.
“I considered him as my best friend,” said Fabre. “Almost a brother. We felt that the two of us formed a unity. One was extroverted and gifted for publicity and the media; the other was more measured, gave advice, reined back excesses, took care of the numbers, and was careful about what he said. We felt this unity was bound to succeed.”
If his devotion to Bernard and dedication to the Côte d’Or were exemplary, they were not particularly profitable for his business—“Eighty percent of my time and twenty percent of my revenues,” as he put it—but there is little doubt that without Bernard Fabre advising him during the most complicated phases of the renovation program, Bernard’s dream of building a Burgundian Xanadu would have been very seriously compromised.
With the departure of Chantal and the arrival of Dominique, the atmosphere in the hallways and salons of the Côte d’Or changed dramatically. What this second marriage was lacking in sexual provocation, passion, and bewitchment, it gained in reason and commitment. For their wedding night, the freshly minted couple had offered themselves nothing more exotic than to crash at Dominique’s mother’s little house in Saverne, and the next day they were both back at work. It hadn’t been much of a honeymoon, but this was a different, far more serious, kind of union, bringing a new optimism with it. With Dominique’s brains and dedication now added to his formula, Bernard was seething with energy and more determined than ever to go whole-hog and finish his dream palace. No half measures. From now on it would be nothing but the best.
Bernard was chuffed good and proper then, but, ironically enough, he didn’t have Dominique literally at his side—not full-time, in any case, not at the start. For the first fifteen months of their marriage she gamely tried to carry on as before, returning to her little Paris apartment while working at L’Hôtellerie during the week, then hopping on the train south on Friday evenings to join Bernard for weekends in Saulieu.
There was also a new development, motherhood, accomplished by the step-by-step procedure of achieving goals that the scientific method had taught Dominique. Postulate: They both wanted kids. Given: The union with Chantal had been barren. Proposition: Seduce Bernard at the right moment. She did her calculations, chose exactly the right moment of the right phase of the moon, warned Bernard to be ready, and arrived suitably estrous in Saulieu on a Wednesday evening. Nor, for his part, had Bernard been inactive. He prepared a special dîner intime (what else would a chef think to do?) of a once-in-a-lifetime quality—ortolans. The tiny, fat, delicious melt-in-the-mouth little birdies did their duty, the plucky little things, and that very night Dominique conceived their first child, Bérangère, who was born in a Dijon clinic in July 1989.
For the following eight months Dominique maintained her back-and-forth routine between Saulieu and Paris, now with an infant in her arms. As the weeks passed, though, it became increasingly evident that this long-distance commuting wasn’t right for Bernard, for their daughter, or finally, for herself. After all, there had to be another career awaiting her at the restaurant, she reasoned.
Yes and no. There was an immediate problem: Chantal’s profligate ways had left their mark. The big economy drive was still on, and everyone, even Bernard, in spite of himself, kept a keen eye on the new Madame Loiseau. Would she turn out to be a spender, too? Dominique did not, of course, and she wished for nothing better than to go to work. But what work was there for her to do? Logically enough she was entirely shut out of Bernard’s domain, the kitchen, but she knew nothing about the hotel side, either, and with all her years in the university, she had never done any management studies. The dining room staff under Hubert was a well-oiled machine that needed no help and was highly unlikely to tolerate any meddling from outside. Like Napoleon’s grognards—the scarred old veterans who formed the emperor’s inner circle—they had their ways and were best left alone. So what was left for Dominique?
“You’re la patronne [the boss] now. Watch over things,” Bernard said vaguely. “Mix with the clients.” He meant well, but that wasn’t really much help. What he really was saying, without putting it into so many words, was that consecrated old French expression: débrouille-toi—work it out by yourself. He was much too busy with his grand-hotel project, his image-building and, above all, his cuisine to establish a change-of-career plan for his wife.
Dominique was no dummy, she got the message. So she watched and waited and learned. Once again, scientific as ever, she went toward her goal step by step. Her slow rise from Bernard’s shadow through those early years of the marriage created a nice historical hiccup for the Côte d’Or. Whether it was deliberate emulation or pure chance, she transformed herself into Jeanne Dumaine, half a century later. The parallels between herself and Alexandre Dumaine’s wife were quite extraordinary. Jeanne Dumaine, too, had been university-educated, which was very rare for French women in the thirties. She spoke German and English, and had worked as a journalist (Harper’s Bazaar) before marrying the famous cook. Dominique soon lent the same extra touch of class to Bernard’s operation that Jeanne had done for Alexandre.
Dipping her toe gingerly into the waters of the day-to-day operations of a machine of haute gastronomie, she began by greeting clients as they entered the dining room. With her soft voice, understated, articulate manner, and elegantly cut two-piece suits that advantageously set off her slim figure, she could not fail to impress any passing members of the Michelin crowd. Clearly, this was a three-star woman. Reorganizing the reception desk, she ruffled a few feathers with her suggestions for change, but she was la patronne, after all, and sooner or later she had to act the part. Bernard had never hired a secretary to watch over correspondence, had never organized a filing system or put together any properly written press material. Dominique took over all these chores. She cast around for a new team of architects to handle the big expansion plan, remembered the Paris firm of Guy Catonné from her days with L’Hôtellerie, and brought them down to Saulieu for a long consultation. One job led to another, and before she quite knew what had happened, she found she had more work than she could handle. That was her style—work always bred more work with Dominique. Before long she was obliged to hire her own assistant.
Then she discovered that she was pregnant again, even without the help of ortolans this time. Dumaine’s little apartment was already crowded enough for a one-child family, but with two (or more) kids, it would clearly be impossible. She nosed around, found a big old house in town going for a bargain price (who wants to live in Saulieu?), closed the deal, and moved her little family in, extracting Bernard from the quarters above Dumaine’s dining room as she would have extracted a snail from its shell. With this move, the last significant remnant of his boyish past—that sordid bachelor pad to which Verger had assigned him more than a decade earlier—was assigned to history.
Things were shaping up. In 1989 the Côte d’Or won the Relais & Châteaux prize for the best breakfast of the entire chain. A prize like that doesn’t sound like much—in France the standard continental breakfast, even in quality hotels, is rarely more exalted than fruit juice, coffee, and croissants—but Bernard was out to distinguish himself any way he could. He invented a sophisticated country platter to be delivered to the rooms with pomp worthy of an oreiller de la belle Aurore: a pot of coffee, tea, or cocoa with freshly pressed fruit juice; a basket of warm pastries fresh from the oven (fruitcake, brioche with almonds, croissants, minibaguette with butter and homemade jams); a plate of the famous Morvan ham; a bowl of chilled ewe’s-milk yogurt; another of fresh fruit salad or prunes infused in tea; and finally a third one of rice pudding, as a kind of dessert. How anyone could consume this and be able to tuck into lunch a few hours later is a mystery, but French clients, paradoxical as always, managed it with aplomb.
By the late eighties, Bernard was in full stride, confident in his architectural ideas for the hotel and vibrantly certain that he had now fine-tuned his cuisine, ridding it of its occasionally Maoist rigor and bringing it into an integrated, logical summation of his gastronomic experiences: food light and easily digestible but still gloriously rich in taste and texture and—a far more important factor than many people realize—beautiful to the eye. No great cook reaches the top without the inborn sense of esthetics that instinctively produces a pleasing, harmonious presentation on the plate. It should be pointed out, however, that certain of the culinary grandmaster crowd, some trying to outdo their competitors and some simply imitating, recently fell into weird excesses with the plates themselves. God knows who started the trend, but there was a period early in this century when otherwise sensible cooks felt constrained to serve their beautiful creations on oval plates, rectangular plates, smoked glass, and see-through plates—plates tagged with surrealistic designs and then retagged with artistically deposited streaks of sauce—not to mention a profusion of amorphous multicolor plates of the weirdest forms imaginable, resembling the prizes you win for throwing hoops over dolls in country fairs. Bernard, to his credit, never fell for this strange fad, and stuck with classical round plates discreetly decorated around the edges. His confrères who went for the weird stuff soon realized that they had spent ruinously for ceramic oeuvres d’art that no one wanted and that only distracted attention from the food.
Early in 1990, the Association of French Wine Writers voted to give the prize of the best wine list to the Côte d’Or. Something was in the air. Bernard was hot, and the wind was in his sails. Journalists and critics, ever on the lookout for the next culinary fad, began writing about him with words like “leader,” “visionary,” “precursor.” It is an old truism that very often the most interesting cooking often occurs not in established three-star restaurants but in two-star places where the chef is on a roll and gunning for the third star. Now, in Saulieu, the smartass kid, Bernard Chirent’s “worst apprentice ever,” seemed to be turning into not just a trendsetter but something akin to a prophet. This was heady stuff.
“Cuisine of essences”—la uisine des essences—he officially called his cooking now. His use of sophisticated variants of simple deglazings with water had not slowed, but he wisely abandoned his enthusiasm for the aqueous label. For one thing, his earlier insistence on the term cuisine à l’eau—“water cooking”—had led to the frequent misperception that he had developed a specialty for serving boiled food, which could not be further from reality. And secondly, there was Bocuse’s famous wisecrack. Although he was Bernard’s mentor, model, and father figure, le grand Paul was and is an incorrigible joker in the iconoclastic tradition of the lyonnais wise guys who are always on the lookout for any bombast (preferably Parisian) to puncture. It so happened that, invited to Saulieu along with a few of his confrères, and taking an after-lunch stroll, Bocuse and the group crossed a little river where the trout used to swim in the days of Alexandre Dumaine.
“Now, isn’t that a shame,” reflected Bocuse. “We should tell Bernard about all that good sauce going to waste.”
The jape instantly made the rounds of the cooking establishment, and from there it spread throughout France and even worldwide. Bernard shut up about water cooking after that. Never mind; the celebrities, the beautiful people, and the freeloaders—TV and showbiz names that made French teenagers squeal but were utterly unknown beyond the national borders—were coming to Saulieu in growing numbers eating and talking and praising. Presently François Mitterrand himself, président de la république and a notorious sensualist (wine, women, and politics, and plenty of great food to grease it all along) insinuated himself into a private corner of the specially secured Dumaine dining room for a dinner of crayfish fricassee, truffled celery-root “cake,” and calves’ liver with a fricassee of wild Morvan mushrooms.
In presentation and content, Bernard’s menu by the end of the eighties had reached the mature form that thereafter would be identified with le style Loiseau. Graphically, the sober off-white card with the beige and brown decorative border in Burgundian tile motif recalled the façade of the building itself. La Côte d’Or à Saulieu held the place of honor as the first line on the cover sheet, but directly below came the personal identity: the big BL logo and, underneath that, his name writ large in fancy cursive script: Bernard Loiseau, front and center, right along the bottom of the page. Image was served.
What was being served in the dining room sprang almost entirely now from Bernard’s hyperactive imagination. If the old ultraclassical entrée of smoked Morvan ham was still clinging on for a few more years, along with the beef filet with poached marrow (straight from the Troisgros experience) and the eternal hot apple tart (which traced its ancestry right back to Michel Guérard via Claude Verger), the rest was much more Loiseau and much more adventuresome. The nettle soup with snails (which could also be called snail soup with nettles) still held its starring place among the entrées, along with a lobster terrine served with tiny vegetables and a sauce built around its own coral juice. Little filets of red mullet now reposed on a truffle vinaigrette rather than the thin chervil purée that had raised eyebrows a few years earlier, and the sweet, tender langoustine—small lobster—tails were served with a fresh tomato coulis flavored with nut oil. One of his most curious novelties in this creative period was a caramelized cauliflower purée that he often served with his pan-fried slice of fresh foie gras. Caramelizing cauliflower was an ingenious manipulation, to be sure, and Bernard was rather proud of, but it never quite impressed the customers as much as his own infatuation with it. Eventually he gave it up and moved on to more rewarding culinary pursuits—ris de veau, for example. This unprepossessing little gland with the oddly inappropriate English name of sweetbreads is an omnipresent classic of three-star French cuisine, but Bernard had a problem with the soft, spongy texture of the meat, which he frankly found offensive. He solved the problem by searing it in a hot skillet until the surface was golden brown, flipping it over to cook the raw side for a quick fifteen seconds, and finally setting it under the hot grill of the salamandre for a few minutes to finish the crust to a crackly caramelized consistency.
For a modest 290 francs (about fifty dollars then), clients of the antimeat persuasion (but not excessively so) could by then enjoy an all-vegetable menu of tomatoes stuffed with celery-accented basmati rice, a ragout of mixed vegetables in a reduced beef broth (that’s the “not excessively” part), zucchini flowers with creamed garlic and sweet pepper juice, and finally, before turning to the cheese platter, a plate of sautéed wild mushrooms. Encouraged by the success of his vegetable experiments, Bernard would go on, a few years later, to develop an all-potato menu—pommes en fête—featuring the lowly tuber in different forms, from crisp pancakes to a smoothly seductive truffled purée, and dancing the tango with asparagus tips sauced with his famous butter-free béarnaise. Dessert was a sweet potato croustillant accompanied by a green-apple sherbet. Why apple? For a wink and a play on words: Pomme is how you say “apple” in French; pomme de terre—“earth apple”—is how you say potato. Bernard adjusted his potato menu with the seasons, but his truffle-flecked purée was so sensational that he was stuck with it from then on. In the future, Loiseau could no more give that up than Ducloux could renounce the use of beef fat in his quenelles de brochet, lest clients stage a dining room rebellion.*
On the seafood side, Bernard was serving his salmon filets with truffle juice and, justement, the fabulous truffled mashed potatoes, while his lobster medallions were delivered with caramelized carrots and a light purée of onions accented with cloves. Following the tradition-breaking modern school of gastronomic anarchists who did not hesitate to drink red wine with fish or to confound the terrestrial and the oceanic, he seized on the bland taste of merlan—whiting—to present their filets not in a classical seafood sauce but with a veal reduction. For poultry, he borrowed a trick from the Chinese in serving his duck breast with its skin cooked crackly and sweetly accented with honey. From two snooty Parisian palaces, the Tour d’Argent and Lucas-Carton, he adopted the old trick of preparing the sauce for his roast pigeon with the blood of the very animal he was roasting.
Like that of any great restaurant, Bernard’s menu adapted to the market to offer whichever meats, seafood, and vegetables were the best available and happened to be in season. Perspicacious diners could note, around mid-April, that the color of the salty butter he served with his breads had taken on a deeper, more brilliant, hue of yellow, because the cows had gone off silage and were eating fresh grass again. If ad hoc dishes could arise from the discovery of some particularly fine mushrooms, turbot, or quail, the general rule was that the Côte d’Or presented two menus a year: spring–summer and autumn–winter. Whatever the seasonal changes, though, certain of the standards, the Loiseau classics, could never leave his card. The huge veal chop, the chicken breast with foie gras, and the pike perch with the tangy red wine sauce enjoyed permanent residence in Saulieu. But even more than these, it was another dish, an entrée, this one, that went on to be seen as his true banner and standard: jambonnettes de grenouilles à la purée d’ail et au jus de persil. If ever one dish were to be singled out as Loiseau’s signature creation—like the Troisgros salmon in sorrel sauce or Bocuse’s truffle soup or Michel Bras’s gargouillou of young vegetables—it would be this one: frogs’ legs with garlic purée and parsley juice. It had everything: taste, beauty, the surprise of originality, and total relevance to the region.
Ever since he arrived in Saulieu, Bernard had struggled to square the culinary circle: reconciling Burgundy’s grand old traditions of lavish feasting with his own theory of a modern gastronomy that was light, easily digestible, and largely fat-free. How better to accomplish that than to take a few of the great Burgundian classics of bourgeois cuisine and set them on their tradition-bound ear with a flip of the skillet and a wink of the eye? When you think of Burgundy you think of frogs and snails and chickens in the farmyards, and trout and pike in its rivers. Well then, Bernard had already put the snails in nettles, the chickens with foie gras, and the pike with a punchy red wine reduction as intense and vigorous as his own character—but what about frogs’ legs?
There had to be a new way, a better way, to attack this ancient regional specialty whose creation and enjoyment over the centuries had caused countless millions of these comically unlovely amphibians to croak, their legs ritually sautéed in hot butter and served in a super-garlicky persillade—parsley-green and butter-yellow, oily and delicious and slippy-sliding all over your fingers and hands, and who cares? For several months in the mid-eighties Bernard turned over in his head the idea of this dish, talking it over with Patrick and his sous-chefs and commis, but in spite of all the experiments and suggestions, the answer never came. Then, one morning in 1985, it was suddenly there.
“On est con,” cried Bernard—“we’ve been jerks, driving ourselves crazy for nothing. I know what we’ll do. We’ve just got to do a persillade without all that greasy cooked butter—that’s okay for a bistro, but not for three stars.”
Butter, parsley, and garlic were consecrated as absolute essentials to accompany the plump thighs of Burgundy frogs,* so Bernard could not reasonably renounce any of the three—but he could use them differently. First, the legs themselves. Keeping only the top of the thigh, where the bulge of meat attaches to the bone like a miniature ham (the jambonnette of the recipe), he discarded the rest, leaving a kind of lollipop that could—should—be eaten with the hands. It’s easy to spot the genealogy of this as a direct descendant of Michel Guérard’s chicken wing lollipop idea in the Pot au Feu.
Now for the three great ingredients. The first part was easy. He sautéed the jambonnettes in butter and then, uncompromising as ever about oily excess, patted the hot, golden meat dry with paper towels. After that, the evolution of his soon-to-be signature dish became more complex. The parsley—flat parsley only, because it is thicker and has more body—he cooked like spinach in boiling water, then puréed it under the blade of a Robot-Coupe and thinned it out with water to the consistency of a coulis.
The hardest part to deal with was the garlic. It was unthinkable to offer frogs’ legs without garlic—that’s like serving cheese without wine—but how to moderate its flamethrower punch and civilize it to three-star level? Bernard’s solution was to tame it by slowly leaching away its notorious bite. Following the same system that French housewives had used for centuries to remove impurities and scum from the veal of their blanquettes de veau, he started the garlic cloves in cold water that he brought it to a boil. After a few minutes of cooking he discarded the hot water, poured in fresh supply of cold, and renewed the process all over again. After four or five changes of water for summer garlic (seven or eight for the winter version), he was left with a pile of softened garlic cloves that still tasted like garlic but were bereft of their fiercest astringency. They had become polite. Puréed and smoothed out with a touch of milk, the garlic was ready to be assembled into its place in his little chef d’oeuvre.
First onto the plate was a ladle of brilliant green parsley coulis and then, in the middle of that, an atoll of purest white garlic purée. For the final presentation he laid the golden brown jambonnettes in a fetching circle around the edge of the plate. It made a gorgeous, stunningly original tableau—gold, green, and white—when set down at the table, and the maître d’hôtel had the pleasure of announcing to first-time clients that they should eat it with their hands, dipping the froggy lollipops first into the parsley and then the garlic. (If they felt adventuresome—go ahead, live a little—they could take it in the opposite order.) Kids loved the dish, of course, for the opportunities for discreet play that it offered—milk-white contrails of garlic artfully traced into the sea of green—and even the most fastidious, tradition-bound French gourmets, the kind of people who eat chicken wings or bananas with a knife and fork, were persuaded to abandon themselves to the enjoyment of the world’s most sophisticated (and expensive) finger food.
The jambonnettes was an exceptionally standout dish, remarkable in every sense of the word, but few clients in Saulieu could ever imagine the range of subterranean complexities lying behind it—or, indeed, any of the other artifacts of Bernard’s new approach to cooking, neither the sacrificial cuts of expensive meats that were responsible for the depth of taste of the “juices” he cooked up every day, nor the double deglazings that reinforced the taste further, nor even the simple day-to-day gestures like the punctilious, obsessively neat dabbings with paper towel to remove cooking fats before sending a dish out. Guests who ordered the house fruit drink, a mixture of orange, grapefruit, and lemon, may have suffered an unexpected pucker at its startling astringency (uncompromisingly, Bernard suffered no sweetening beyond a small dash of grenadine syrup), but rare were those who could guess that he was also watching over their health and their waistlines with the pastries he developed over the years, containing 40 percent less sugar than the standard recipes. An even more fundamentally important aspect of the unseen manipulations underlying le style Loiseau was his handling of sauces.
Whatever any fashionable cooking rebels may decree in their hours of fame—and, for that matter, whatever lèse majesté Bernard himself had inflicted on tradition in his early days in Saulieu—sauces are and always will be the soul of French cooking. Bernard had struggled mightily to come to terms with the whole idea of sauces, so much so that at one point he veered dangerously close to dismissing them altogether. Fortunately, his native good sense stepped in and set him straight, but his essential dilemma still remained: how to reconcile the light, modern, cooking style he aspired to with all those tasty but wicked elements of stockpot reductions flavored with a multitude of extraneous ingredients, thickened with one trick or another and rendered voluptuously appealing with great infusions of cholesterol-laden butter?
The grandmother of sauces is, of course, the simple deglazing: Fry your chop in a pan and, when it is done, discard the excess grease* and pour in a liquid (plain water is the most basic) to free the concentrated cooking essences sticking to the bottom of the pan. Boil that down a bit, and the sauce is done—but it is an unappealingly runny, watery sauce. Since the days of the first baby steps of la grande cuisine, French cooks have sought ways to thicken their deglazings into an appealing velvety consistency. In medieval times they found they could do it with a roux of pig fat and flour, and occasionally even fish liver, but that was pretty gamey stuff, and not exactly raffiné. Ground almonds and toasted bread crumbs were better, but they gave the sauces a grainy consistency. Chopped mushrooms created a kind of thickening by adding a mass of solids, but they did not bind the sauce.
That was the big problem: the binding, the liaison. Flour will bind liquids beautifully, as any kindergarten kid discovers the first time he makes flour-and-water paste, but that tends to turn into a wad of chewing gum in the stomach. Arrowroot and potato flour work similarly, while cornstarch is the binding–thickening agent of choice for most Chinese cooking. Butter, egg yolks, and cream are infinitely nicer and smoother—no normally constituted human being can resist the taste of a proper hollandaise or béarnaise or a poulet à la crème—but none of these could exactly be called light, and their cholesterol count is redoubtable.
Bernard found the salvation for binding his sauces with vegetables—more precisely, with purées of certain vegetables cooked in water. After months of experimentation, he and Patrick Bertron settled on puréed carrots and onions for most of their sauces, and occasionally garlic, fennel, and turnip purées for others, depending on the savors they were seeking. It was an ingenious adaptation of the modern technology of the blender to solve a very ancient problem, and it was entirely successful: fat-free, velvety in texture, similar to but interestingly different from run-of-the-mill sauces—and also delicious. (Pushing the antifat crusade to a final, logical conclusion, The Chef and the chef went on to create an ersatz but surprisingly convincing “béarnaise” of thickened egg yolk and mustard vinaigrette.)
Whether Bernard was fully aware of it or not, his purée-based sauces put him in the footsteps of one of his greatest masters. As early as 1972, Michel Guérard in Eugénie-les-Bains was developing the theoretical underpinnings of the dietary gastronomy that was destined to make him an international celebrity and enrich the little Landais community where he and Christine had settled. Four years later he published La Grande Cuisine Minceur, which included very precise directions for making sauce liaisons with vegetable purées. “This is one of the fundamental principles of my cuisine minceur,” he wrote, along with a typically didactic explanation (there will always be something of the professor in Michel Guérard) of how the bursting of cellulose cells in the vegetables avoided the deposit of acidic residues in the human organism.
Bernard, then, cannot be given the credit for inventing the system of binding sauces with vegetable purées, but he was not attempting to create a gastronomy for slimming, as Guérard had done so successfully at Eugénie. “You’re not going to lose any weight here,” Bernard frequently explained, “but you’re not going to gain any, either—and my cuisine is so healthy and so digestible that you can enjoy your lunch and still have an appetite when dinnertime comes around.”
Well, that may have been just a bit on the exaggerated side—doing justice to a couple of three-star meals a day, even of Bernard’s light, minimalist style, may have been a joy, but it was not a task to be undertaken by any belly-come-lately, especially when the cheeses and desserts had been factored in.
And anyway, they weren’t three-star meals yet, were they? Not officially, at any rate, because, as the eighties edged toward the nineties, Michelin had not yet bestowed its ultimate papal blessing upon the Côte d’Or. Still, with his fortieth birthday just around the corner, Bernard had come of age personally and professionally: he was well-married, father of one child, with another on the way (before long there would be a third, too), precariously solvent but solvent nonetheless, his reputation growing by the day. He had attained the stability so prized by those crusty auvergnats who published the only bible that really mattered for him. In short, he was an attractive candidate for the gastronomic beatification of three stars. Like his fourth decade, that was just around the corner. First, though, he had a little more building to do.