XI
THE BIG PUSH
In 1987, a momentous page of French gastronomic history was turned when La Pyramide in Vienne was demoted from three to two stars. The déclassement did not signify a lowering of standards in food or service—neither the sole Colbert nor the truffle in puff pastry reposing on a winsome puddle of sauce périgeux nor any other of the multitude of pleasures on the day’s handwritten menu had lost the edge of perfection that gourmets expected of Fernand Point’s glorious caravansary by the banks of the Rhône. The reason for the demotion was simpler and sadder: the death of Madame Point, “Mado,” who had maintained La Pyramide at impeccable three-star level through all the decades since her husband’s “suicide by champagne” in 1955. With the last tie to le grand Fernand severed, Michelin applied its stern logic and clipped a star, waiting to see how the new administration would perform. As of 1987 only one of provincial gastronomy’s original Holy Trinity, Pic in Valence, now in the hands of André’s son Jacques, remained at the guide’s top level. But year after year—hell, by then it seemed to be just about day by day—observers of the French food scene could see Bernard Loiseau in Saulieu galloping up to join the renowned pack, and getting closer with every step.
“That’s what I want to buy! That’s what I want to buy!”
Bernard Fabre vividly remembers the scene from that same epochal year as a perfect symbol for the Loiseau sprint toward three stars. It was during that strange interim period when, with Chantal already out of Saulieu (but not yet formally divorced) and Dominique not yet moved in, Bernard had reverted to his bachelor ways and to the one marriage that was an unchanging constant for him: the Côte d’Or. Through Dominique’s contacts at L’Hôtellerie, he had begun consulting with Guy Catonné’s architectural firm in Paris to iron out the details of where to go next with his master building plan. Because going he was—there was no question of standing still. The nine new Relais & Châteaux rooms dating from 1985 were only the start, and he was determined to attack step two as soon as the loans he had applied for came through. This step would bring to reality every chef’s most cherished dream—his new kitchen and his new dining room.
Or rather, his dining rooms, because by then he had learned that there was a particular logic that needed to be applied to Saulieu. There had to be a principal dining room, of course, neither too pretentiously vast nor too niggardly small. Seating space for eighty, Bernard figured, would be just about right. But on those dreaded winter days when clients were rare for even the three-star places located out in the sticks where the bankers and stockbrokers rarely roamed, he couldn’t seat the day’s paltry ration of a dozen or fewer diners in a room for eighty. That would make the guests feel uncomfortable while making him look bad by underlining the paucity of clientele. No: He needed two dining rooms—or even three, of diminishing size, but each one nicely located and decorated with similarly good taste, and all three of them giving out onto the garden.
And it was, precisely, in the Côte d’Or’s garden that the two Bernards were tramping back and forth that afternoon in 1987, inspecting the place from behind, taking in the wretched view over Dumaine’s garage and ramshackle kitchen with the goofy stovepipes sticking out of the leaky roof. This rather squalid side of the Côte d’Or was largely hidden from most clients, but Bernard saw it every instant of his life and he hated it. And that was what caused his excited exclamation.
“That’s what I want to buy!” he repeated breathlessly, kicking the wall to emphasize his point. He was gesturing at Le Petit Marguéry,* one of the fifteen hotel-restaurants dating back to Saulieu’s glory days, this one directly adjacent to La Côte d’Or. Like all the others, the Petit Marguéry had suffered grievously from the new north–south traffic pattern, and word was out that it was for sale. Guy Catonné and his associates had already demonstrated on paper how, by combining the space of Dumaine’s garage with the Petit Marguéry, they would be able to devise a splendid U-shaped structure fronting out on the Route Nationale 6, but embracing the garden on three sides behind: hotel rooms in one wing, kitchen, salons, and dining rooms on the other, and the reception area at the bottom of the U, with more rooms above. The portion of the Petit Marguéry fronting out on the R.N. 6 could become the Côte d’Or’s luxury and gourmet shop, leaving room for storage space and offices above it. The scheme was perfect.
“Buy it, buy it,” cried Bernard.
“Well, that’s nice to say, but let’s see if we can,” Fabre replied with the calm, professional deliberation of the true money counter.
They could, as it turned out. In 1988 Fabre arranged to buy the hotel for 1.5 million francs (about $250,000), to be paid out of Bernard’s second big loan package of some fifteen million francs (a bit more than $2 million), most of which was earmarked for his dream kitchen, three dining rooms, and their attendant salons. Fabre did some fancy financial footwork to amortize and combine Bernard’s outstanding earlier loans, packing them in with the new one, and setting a fifteen-year repayment schedule.
Everything seemed set. Bernard was thrilled. With the papers in apple-pie order, all that remained for him to do was meet with the seller and his notaire, sign the act, and take possession of the Petit Marguéry. Too easy, and too good to be true? Yes. Fabre was in his office in Auxerre that morning when his phone buzzed. Bernard was at the other end, distraught, breathless, and bearing catastrophic news: “He doesn’t want to sell anymore!”
Don’t move, muttered Fabre, and jumped into his car. He arrived in Saulieu forty minutes later, just in time to hit a speed trap at the entrance to town. Flagged down by the gendarmes and ticketed for traveling at 75 mph in a 30 mph zone, he had his car immobilized on the spot and was forced to finish the last few hundred meters on foot. He got a fine, of course, and his license was suspended for a month, but even so, the morning ended in triumph: less naïve than Bernard, he pulled off the sale with ease. Exactly as Fabre had suspected, the Petit Marguéry’s owner was all too happy to sell but, like a peasant bargaining over the price of his heifer while facing another who clearly wanted it, he had just been waiting for the sweetener of a little vigorish under the table, that was all: sale concluded. Men of the world know things that cooks ignore.
Bernard was ecstatic. “What do you want to eat?” he asked Fabre. “I know you like cèpes [boletus mushrooms]. And you like lobster, don’t you? Let’s have lunch!”
By then it was past three p.m., and the last clients had finished their meals. For once officiating alone in the empty kitchen, Bernard himself grilled the lobsters and sautéed the mushrooms for an improvised homard aux cèpes, which he devoured with Fabre, in the company of a fine bottle of Chablis, on a corner of one of Dumaine’s rotten old aluminum-topped worktables.
“Best lunch I ever had,” Fabre told me, glum with the realization that there would never be another one. It was only natural, of course, for a cook to express his thanks, or simply demonstrate his friendship, with an offering of food, and Bernard did it a thousand times for different people on different occasions. Patrice Vappereau, a Saulieu native who went to work in Paris as a young man, then returned to Saulieu in 1980 and was elected mayor in 1995, recalled his first encounter with the town’s star chef, an event that wowed him as keenly as the homard aux cèpes did for Fabre.
“My brother was president of the local tennis club, and he wanted to organize the annual dinner at Loiseau’s place, but he didn’t have much of a budget, so we couldn’t expect anything very elegant. When my brother told me Bernard had decided to cook us carp, I was really worried. I’m a hunter and fisherman, and I know all about carp. It’s a lousy fish—de la merde. But he boned it, cooked it in a skillet like a steak, and served it with a red wine sauce. I was astonished: It was wonderful! That carp in red wine is still one of my greatest gastronomic experiences.”
That tennis club dinner of fish was, of course, an early incarnation of the Loiseau classic, the crackly skinned filet of pike perch (a more three-star style of fish) in red wine sauce that remains on the Côte d’Or’s menu today, but Vappereau could not resist seizing the occasion of having a tame journalist at his side to expatiate from carp to the grander scheme of matters economic and interpersonal.
“Everyone in town loved Bernard, because he wasn’t fier, as they say; not snooty. He was world-famous but he talked with people just like anyone else, and he laughed and joked around with passersby in the street. And he always tried to help out the town, too. For years he was our most important local employer—the Côte d’Or was the livelihood for sixty-five or more people, and he was the one who paid the biggest property and professional taxes. When I’d go abroad and tell people where I was from, they’d say ‘Saulieu—ah, Bernard Loiseau!’ He was our ambassador.”
With the big new loan package assured, the construction crews finally got going under Guy Catonné and his team of architects in the summer of 1990. Although certain later sections of Bernard’s great building plan, essentially devoted to the hotel side, were more expensive, it was this 1990 tranche that most swiftly and dramatically transformed Dumaine’s Côte d’Or and stamped it with Bernard Loiseau’s personality once and for all. The truly historical dining room where Dumaine had nourished a steady flow of movie stars, crowned heads, and political notables was not to be destroyed, to be sure, but it was relegated to the status of a museum of gastronomies past, adorned with menus, photos, and testimonials from the high, the mighty, the famous, and the stinking rich. Intelligently mixing a practical use in with the historical function, Bernard decided to use Dumaine’s surprisingly small dining room (seating for no more than thirty or forty) as an intimate, conveniently placed breakfast room for those guests who foreswore the degenerate pleasure of swimming in a sea of crumbs by taking breakfast in bed.
Dumaine’s kitchen, on the other hand, was obliterated—good riddance. Bernard had toiled in its creaky, insalubrious confines for sixteen years and Patrick for nine, and both of them were so heartily glad to see it go that they pitched in with the construction crews to bash down its walls with picks and sledgehammers. The entrance to the Côte d’Or’s gloomy old garage became a comfortably elegant salon whose centerpiece was a fireplace of medieval proportions. Opposite that stood a vast bar and, at the far end, the entrance to the new high-ceilinged hexagonal dining room with broad windows leading to the English garden. Two smaller dining rooms, for conferences, private parties, or simply the bad days when clients were rare, continued on down at the end of the wing. Naturally enough, the entrance to the kitchen stood on the other side of the hallway, in what had been the rear storage area of the Petit Marguéry. And what a kitchen it was: spacious, glistening with stainless steel and tile, with each separate food section—fish, meats, pastry, vegetables—individually equipped with its own refrigerated space. The three cooking zones—fish, meats, and ovens—functioned now on pure, clean propane gas, and even the garbage cans enjoyed their own separate, refrigerated space out in the courtyard. Bernard had gone from a beat-up old tractor to a Ferrari.
It was an exhilarating time, and the new design spectacularly transformed and expanded the place. In all, the project required six months of work, but Catonné’s planning staggered the various pieces of the architectural puzzle cleverly enough to require the closing of the Côte d’Or for no more than a single month—November 19 to December 21, 1990—at the very end of this crucial tranche of renovation and reconstruction. It is worthy of note that apart from his reluctant one-day Christmas break, this was the only time in his entire Saulieu tenure that Bernard closed his establishment down. One month off for sixteen years of presence on the job works out to something less than two free days a year.*
When Catonné and his associates speak of those six months of working with Bernard to transform the Côte d’Or, their faces show the rueful, nostalgic smiles of those who have shared the trials of an exasperating but still enriching common experience—army basic training springs to mind, or final-exam period in college—but the inflection of their voices bears witness to an admiration and tenderness that seem very close to something resembling love for the simple humanity of the guy who had hired them to put flesh on the bones of his dream.
He was generous and enthusiastic and appreciative and unstintingly energetic, of course—that was just Bernard—but at the same time, he was impossible. That, too, was Bernard. Never had these professionals worked with a client who got into their hair like this one, who niggled them so persistently or who involved himself so thoroughly with the details, day by day and hour by hour, of what they were doing, and the how and why. In their company he haunted dealers in used construction materials throughout the Morvan and Burgundy regions, picking over and choosing, one by one, the elements that were to go into the building of his ideal palace. Acting with the architects, sometimes in spite of them and occasionally against them, he kept track of the pieces being put into place, the trimming and painting and polishing of them, and the final insertion of them into their positions in the remaking the face of La Côte d’Or.
“He was captivated by materials that had already had another life,” said Christian Daguin, one of Catonné’s associates. “He loved noble old wood and old tile, and he would tell us exactly how he wanted them used in the project, but it was always in conjunction with modern technology—for instance, he would demand traditional Burgundy tommetes [farmhouse-style hexagonal tiles], but with indirect electrical heating underneath them. ‘Today’s technology at the service of yesterday’s materials,’ he would always tell us. He used that expression all the time.”
Guillaume Potel, the youngest of Catonné’s team, was the one who spent the most time in Saulieu, and was doubtless the closest to Bernard. “What was remarkable,” he said, “was that he always knew exactly what he wanted. He couldn’t always articulate his view precisely, but he recognized best-quality stuff immediately, and he was very demanding about it. There was never any doubt about his choices. Once we were walking around a dealer’s yard and he found a big old moss-covered stone lying by the side of a brook. ‘I want that for my garden,’ he said. None of us had even noticed it.
“After sixteen years in Saulieu he considered that he had been adopted by Burgundy, and he felt completely at home with the area’s esthetic traditions. The architecture he asked us to do followed the same intellectual line as his cuisine: traditional, classical, but modern at the same time. ‘I don’t give a damn what people say about the culture of what we’re doing here,’ he told us. ‘All I want to do is to give my clients the best.’ ”
Here, Potel was defending Bernard and his own firm from a charge sometimes leveled by fashionable chatterers of France’s intellectual elite: that with the new old Côte d’Or, they had been guilty of one of the heaviest mortal sins against esthetic correctness in architecture: pastiche. Since he had borrowed such large sums of money, it was suggested, Bernard should have had the guts to make a significant statement with a kind of modern architecture that would grace Saulieu with a new, monumental identity.
Thank God he didn’t. What his native good sense told him was that French modern architecture is often in glaringly stark contradiction with the unique glory of its past. It had seemed that from around the tenth century onward, just about any structures touched by French builders—cathedrals, châteaux, farm villages, market shelters, barns and work spaces—miraculously emerged from their talented hands as beautiful as they were functional. (A plausible argument could be made for the proposition that architecture is the great expression of French artistic talent, ranking above painting, sculpture, literature, and music.) The glass, plastic, concrete, and steel inspirations created by today’s descendants of these builders, however, make a sad comparison: graceless and “cheapo,” for the most part, they tend to be fragile and ill-maintained, and they age badly. Bernard wanted solid, traditional Burgundy materials and comfort for Saulieu, and he was right. The high ceilings, the handcrafted beams, the tiles, the flagstone, and the wood paneling of the new Côte d’Or offered clients the warm, peaceful sensation of leaving the noise and aggression of the twentieth century behind them and of entering a kind of rustic paradise, a soothing, perfectly preserved country manor where every pleasure of discreet refinement except one or two (there are other places in other towns for that) awaited them: luxe, calme et volupté.
In the end Bernard got what he wanted from Catonné and his associates, but it wasn’t a picnic. “By the time we finished he had become a very good maître d’ouvrage [supervising client], so we could tell clearly where it was he wanted us to go next,” said Potel. “But he could get carried away by his enthusiasm. He would start pipe-dreaming, and his megalomaniac side would kick in. Next thing we knew, he was talking about adding the Hôtel de la Poste across the street to his list—he wanted to buy right and left.”
A bit of counting and reasonable persuasion from Fabre usually managed to cool Bernard’s passion for further acquisitions, but a very definite problem emerged with the matter of authority over the work: Who was to be the final boss of the construction, the maître d’oeuvre. Clearly, when push came to shove, there could be only one: Guy Catonné, the founder and director of the company that had been hired to do the job, came down to Saulieu himself for the last month of work. And there he ran smack into Bernard’s meddling into every detail of post, beam, tile, paneling, plug, and paint. With that, push came to shove.
“He’s got to go!” Fabre remembered Guy Catonné’s ultimatum all too well: If Bernard stayed around in Saulieu to emmerder [pester] the architects and the workers minute by minute, Catonné could not guarantee delivery for lunch on December 22, as had been planned. In fact, they might not even make it for the traditional Christmas Eve or New Year reveillons—the stupefying gastronomic blowouts at which the entire French population feels obliged to eat and drink itself catatonic from 8 P.M. to past midnight, for the greater profit of the country’s restaurants. And we’re way over budget, too, Catonné added. You’ve got to find a way to cut at least a million francs.
“He came to me because he knew I was the only one who had a chance of persuading Bernard,” Fabre explained. “But can you imagine telling Bernard to leave Saulieu? Leaving his baby? I began by telling him we were running over budget. I had all the figures on paper, and it came closer to a million and a half francs. He raised hell, but called me an hour later. He was very, very reluctant, but he agreed to put off the building of the monumental staircase he had set his heart on. That could come later.
“Okay, I said, but we’re running over schedule, too. It looks like we’re not going to finish the work on deadline.
“With that he exploded. ‘Merde!’ he said. ‘Pas possible!’ Now he was really panicked.
“Bernard, I said, there is a solution, but I’m embarrassed to tell you what it is: You’ve got to stop pestering them. You’ve got to leave them alone—you’ve got to get out of here. Go spend a few weeks with your parents.
“He blew up, flatly refused, yelled at me and called me every name he could think of. I told him to think it over. And he did, too. Called me back later. ‘You’re right,’ he finally said. ‘I’ll go down to Clermont.’ Two weeks later he was back, and we had lunch together on the twenty-first of December. Everything was finished and ready, but he looked around the place and decided that a lot of the floors looked too bare. That same morning he spotted the van of a door-to-door carpet seller. He flagged it down and bought fifteen or seventeen carpets. I yelled at him, of course, because the financial situation was so tight, but he saw me coming and cut me off. ‘I bought them with my money,’ he said, just like a contrite kid. A lot of those carpets are still there today.”
As the big 1990 building program was finishing up in Saulieu, the world of French haute cuisine was still struggling to come to terms with two startling events that had occurred earlier in the year, both of which would have an indirect, but nonetheless real, effect on Bernard: the starburst in the gastronomic sky of Alain Ducasse’s third Michelin star, and the death of Alain Chapel.
Chapel had been born to the craft. His father was a restaurateur who had already won a Michelin star in the little town of Mionnay 15 miles north of Lyon. But after Alain returned from his apprenticeships (notably at La Pyramide in Vienne), he leaped miles higher, claiming the third star in 1973 at age thirty-five. With that, the family restaurant, officially La Mère Charles but known everywhere simply as Chapel’s place, became a gastronomic shrine attracting hungry pilgrims from every corner of the globe. Along with Michel Guérard in Eugénie and the Swiss Freddy Girardet in Crissier (near Lausanne), Chapel was one of those who, like Liszt, on another sort of piano, might have been seriously suspected of passing a Faustian pact with the devil. He was a true magician, a kitchen Houdini who dazzled, surprised, and delighted from one end of a meal to the other, from the fabulous friture* of tiny freshwater fish (ablettes, perches) netted in Lake Geneva, or the innumerable ponds and clean, cold marshes of the Dombes wetlands, which he ritually sent out to accompany a glass of perfect sauvignon (a Sancerre Monts Damnés, perhaps) to the last sharp tang of chocolate served with the coffee.
But Chapel was also a perfectionist of the most intransigent sort, a man who worried his culinary details to death and who set his cooking times not in minutes but down to seconds, more or fewer of which would cause him to consider a dish ruined. My personal image of Chapel’s perfectionism takes me back to the afternoon in the late eighties when I was briefly interviewing him over coffee, and a kaleidoscopic selection of little pastries and chocolates (these guys can never leave well enough alone), and his face froze. It froze because his laser eye had darted to a porcelain cream pitcher and spotted a blemish so tiny, so inconsiderable as to be invisible to the normally constituted human gaze. Furious, he summoned the waiter who had carried the offending object to us.
“Take that back into the kitchen and smash it!” he ordered. “I’m not going to have chipped china in my house.”
Chapel was only fifty-two, in the prime of his life and the summit of his glory, when he was felled by a massive heart attack. The brotherhood of grande cuisine was weakened and bereaved by his disappearance—as, indeed, it would be again only two years later when the great Jacques Pic keeled over in Valence—but not enough for Bernard to step back for a few moments and reflect long and hard on the nervous exhaustion that goes hand in hand with overwork. Chapel’s death may have served Bernard in one unexpected and somewhat perverse manner, though. As it had done for La Pyramide when Madame Point died, Michelin demoted La Mère Charles to two stars as a sign of respect for the greatness of its defunct chef.* The guide strenuously denies that there are only so many three-star “slots” open in its pages, but even so, it was the opinion of many that this change left the region with a gaping hole to be filled, and of all of gastronomy’s dauphins in waiting, Loiseau was the one who was exciting the most comment in those days.
As for Alain Ducasse, Bernard could not but regard with an envious and worried eye the skyrocket ascension of this extraordinary prodigy from the southwest who succeeded brilliantly, and with no apparent effort, at everything he touched. While still a boy, he had walked out of cooking school in disgust (too slow, too basic, too easy) and made his first giant steps in gastronomy by talking Michel Guérard into hiring him in his kitchen at Eugénie, an accomplishment that made him comparable to one of those juvenile geniuses who gets into Harvard at fourteen. He then went on to Roger Vergé in Mougins and—justement—Alain Chapel in Mionnay to polish off the training, and immediately applied it in his first restaurant, in Juan-les-Pins. In 1988 he won his first star, and the very next year he became Michelin’s youngest-ever two-star chef at age twenty-seven. In spite of (or was it because of?) nearly dying in the alpine plane crash, which cost him the best part of three years to make a full recovery, he won his third star at thirty-three, fully financed in the undertaking, in the impiously luxurious Louis XV in Monaco. Moreover, Ducasse was already laying plans to conquer Paris. The rest of the planet could come after that.* (And it did, too.)
Three stars at thirty-three—and without having to lay out a centime of his own money! That had to be trotting in Bernard’s head while he barked out orders in his gleaming new kitchen as 1990 flopped over into 1991, the milestone year that sent him into the crucial, self-questioning plateau of age forty. Just yesterday, it seemed, he had been the wunderkind everyone was talking about. Now Ducasse had gotten ahead of him, and plenty of other younger chefs were standing impatiently in line, too. Since La Côte d’Or’s second star in 1981, eight others had been promoted up to the glory of three. Was the train passing him by, like the traffic on the Autoroute de Sud? Bernard chomped his nails and fretted. Why were they waiting? What more could he do to please Papa Michelin? Wasn’t he good enough, after all?
Three stars had to come, that was all there was to it. It was one thing to have saddled himself with all those loans—by the end of 1990 he had a reimbursement schedule totaling nearly $50,000 a month (and it would go higher than that a few years later)—but more than that, he had aligned and invested his entire person and purpose and life’s view to that goal. Quite literally, Bernard had mortgaged his future to Michelin. The movers and shakers of the guide heave sighs of exasperation† when they hear of chefs taking the big construction route, because it is cast-iron company policy that Michelin stars reflect the contents of the plate only, and that no chef can build his way up the honor roll of excellence. Even so, seized by the chimera of stardom, wealth, and prestige, chefs try it all the time, apparently undeterred by the blanched bones of preceding victims of this folie des grandeurs gastronomiques lying outside the bankruptcy courts.
Bernard wasn’t buying any of that “company policy” business. He knew damn well that if he were to get three stars he needed more than his cuisine des essences, however perfectly executed. He would have to serve it on Limoges china, and in the beauty and comfort of surroundings that were apposite to and complemented the highest level of French cooking. Now, with the big 1990 building program completed, he was satisfied that he had at last arrived at that level.
Physically, the right indicators were in place, both in the Côte d’Or and up the road in his own house, where he was at last a settled family man, respectably stable. He was ready, then, but the insecurities that dogged him remained as blatant as ever. Every time I saw him in those years, he would press me with the same anguished question: “Do you think I’m going to get them, the three stars? You do, don’t you? Don’t you? Huh?”
His questioning had nothing to do with the many years we had known each other. That was just Bernard being Bernard. Perpetually in need of reassurance, he threw the question out indiscriminately, collaring just about anyone who crossed his path in Saulieu. I have no doubt that among those whom he grilled like that, there must have been a few bemused Michelin inspectors wrapped in their anonymous gray suits.
In his ideal palace, however, there was one aspect over which Bernard could not exercise a total and permanent surveillance: the personnel de salle, the hospitality and table-waiting staff. The decoration of the Côte d’Or was as he wanted it, and in his dream kitchen there was not a detail that escaped his notice, but how were his people treating the guests out there on the other side of the big swinging door? Was everything perfect? Bernard worried, and because he worried, he attempted to make himself ubiquitous. Habitués of the restaurant knew that at most meals they would stand a good chance of catching sight of the chef if they waited until the service was well under way and most of the guests around them had been served. At this point, a glance over at the doorway leading to the hall, and beyond that, to the entrance of the kitchen, would almost infallibly reveal the chef himself, half in the shadows, posted two or three steps back, discreetly masking his presence and taking care to stay out of the way of passing waiters: Bernard was keeping an eye on things.
He was no dope and he was no dupe. He had been around the three-star circuit long enough to know that no restaurant made it to the top unless every last detail of service and comfort matched the quality of the cuisine being served. A revealing passage in Pascal Rémy’s book on his days as a Michelin inspector demonstrates that whatever company spokesmen may say, it is not the food alone that influences judgments for the guide. Even though they do it for a profession, the inspectors are just as human as anyone else, when it comes to making judgments about what they are paying for:
When we test a restaurant we take into account the environment, the quality of the welcome on arrival and departure, the surroundings, the general setup, the service and the atmosphere. For the client, a relaxed and considerate welcome is the first pleasure of a meal. The first duty of the restaurateur is to set his clients at ease. The inspector reacts to the warmth and efficiency of the first person he encounters in an establishment. The proper welcome does not improve or alter the taste of the dishes, but it puts us in a good frame of mind.
Next, if he looks around to see a well-proportioned room and a harmonious décor, he begins to feel just right in his chair. The lighting is soft, the temperature ideal, the chair comfortable. He is ready to consult the menu. The menu is clean, spotless, unmarked, easily readable, proposing dishes clearly and precisely. The tables around him, judiciously arranged, are attractive and well set. The porcelain is often good quality; the silverware is tasteful, the flowers are fresh and the glasses impeccable.
The wife of the owner or the maître d’hôtel, sometimes the chef in person, takes your order with a smile. The inspector asks for advice or clarifications, which are delivered with skill and interest. A pleasant and competent sommelier takes over. He proposes a good harmony between wines and food. A quick trip to the toilets? Obviously you can’t judge a restaurant on the quality of its toilets. There is a legend that tries to make people believe that when a restaurant has clean toilets the rest of the house is properly run. But that doesn’t mean you are going to eat well there.
The amuse-bouches arrive without delay. The water is fresh and cold. The bread crusty. The entrée arrives. Delicious. The maître d’hôtel inquires if you are satisfied. The main course comes at just the right moment. Some more bread? The cheeses have been carefully aged. The dessert is set out. The check arrives discreetly.
The service is rapid and efficient, finely tuned by the maître d’hôtel to the rhythm of each client. Conclusion: you will be more indulgent with a middle-range table amiably and attentively served than with a minuscule imperfection on an excellent plate served with arrogance or disdain.
By instinct and experience, Bernard knew all that, anyway, and he badgered his staff unremittingly to see a potential Michelin inspector behind the face of every unknown client over age fifteen. With the passing years, not only did the food on the plates and the physical appearance of La Côte d’Or come to reflect his likes and dislikes, but the staff itself became an extension of his personality. It is inevitable: Every serious restaurant is like a psychological portrait of the person who owns it and runs it. The relaxed bonhomie of the Troisgros brothers’ old dining room recalled the days when local gents gathered and talked football over pastis in the bar, while Jean-Baptiste was serving up extra tots of cognac for the traveling salesmen at the table d’hôte. The always-flawless service in Vonnas today evokes Christian Millau’s admiring description of the place: “Georges Blanc is the train that always arrives on time.” In Laguiole, the waiters are as reserved and soft-spoken as Chef Michel Bras, and the level of their discreet professionalism is just as impressive as the boss’s. Restaurant Paul Bocuse boasts so many winners of the “Meilleur Ouvrier de France”—best French worker, or artisan—diploma that the staff by itself could be taken en bloc as faculty for a hotel and restaurant school. If you have the occasion to visit the Tour d’Argent in Paris, you may feel constrained to kiss the ring of the venerable Claude Terrail, who has frequented the rich for so long, and is so rich himself that, consciously or not, his shop generates an atmosphere of semireligious awe, making newcomers feel they should raise their hands when they want to go peepee. (The Tour d’Argent’s menu has no prices marked on it. If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.) For his part, Bernard had a very clear idea of how the service should be at the Côte d’Or.
“He wanted to be different from all the other places,” Hubert Couilloud explained. “ ‘We’re selling happiness here,’ he used to say all the time, and he insisted on a natural, convivial atmosphere. ‘Just be yourselves,’ he told us—there were to be no chichis, no putting on airs or posing as something we weren’t. The greatest compliment he could get was when people told him they felt right at home. I remember once when a client lay down on one of the couches in the salon while his wife was reading a book. Bosses of other places might have been offended at behavior of that sort, but Bernard was delighted. It showed that the guy was at ease here.”
Couilloud goes out of his way to credit Bernard with creating the atmosphere of unruffled competence that made the Côte d’Or’s service personnel the envy of the trade, because he is too classy to shine a light on himself, but everyone in the three-star circuit recognizes this farmer’s son from the very gastronomically inclined Bresse region (where the world’s sexiest chickens gallop hysterically around barnyards, developing the gorgeous thighs and breasts that make them the pinups of the Gallus gallus crowd) as one of the best maîtres d’hôtel* in France and the key to the excellence of the nonkitchen staff. Bernard discovered in Hubert a man who was as much a natural leader as himself, but of a diametrically opposed sort: cool and understated where Bernard was overheated and hyperbolic. (Physical stereotypes didn’t fit with them at all. Big and strong and gifted with the soft brown eyes that resemble those of the innumerable Charolais cattle that sun their white flanks on pastureland throughout the Morvan, Bernard might have been expected to exude easy, untroubled confidence, but he was a monument to nervous insecurity. Hubert, with his arctic blue eyes and flaming red hair, was calm and controlled as opposed to the redhead stereotype, which is supposed to be quick-tempered and choleric.) The contrasts of character made for an excellent professional marriage. One complemented the other.
The seemingly effortless efficiency of French service professionals like Couilloud often surprises foreign visitors, especially those from America, where “waiting table” is all too often ill-paid, ill-considered fill-in work for amateurs who have found nothing better to do—the summer job syndrome. Hubert represented the best qualities of this specialized category of workers, but it would have been a mistake for any guest at La Côte d’Or to assume that his skill had come easily; he had studied for it and he had worked at it. Like him, most of the men and women who hold these jobs have been trained over four-year periods of advanced studies, exactly like American college students, at one of the numerous écoles hôtelières around the country. Graduates of these programs are competent cooks themselves, have a CAP in cuisine to prove it, and have undergone the same long, arduous years of apprenticeship as the chefs whose food they serve. They know their business backward and forward, and at the high levels of la grande cuisine, they are well rewarded for it, too; in France, remember, 15 percent is automatically added to each client’s bill for the service personnel. In a three-star restaurant, that can make for very nice salaries, indeed. Bernard never tired of reminding his dining room people that their work in La Côte d’Or made them notables, the social equals of any businessman, doctor, or lawyer in the region. They responded by taking their jobs very, very seriously.
“We’re responsible for the comfort and well-being of the client,” said Couilloud when I asked him to expatiate on his role. “To do that right, we have to know everything about the house, the produce used in the kitchen, and, of course, the style of cooking that we have been fighting to promote all these years. All of us are completely convinced of the concept of cuisine that Monsieur Loiseau developed, or else we wouldn’t be here. You won’t find anyone here who was hired just to carry plates. It’s much more complex than that. We’re ambassadors for a style of cuisine. We defend a certain art of living and all the culture and knowledge that lies behind it. It’s our job to transmit this to the client, because we are the face of what is happening in the kitchen.
“We don’t need to and we don’t try to sell one dish or another—they’re all equally good.* Our job is to explain Monsieur Loiseau’s cooking to those clients who aren’t familiar with it. We can get the message across, because we grew up with him while he was developing his style, and we know it by heart. We participated in its elaboration, too: Bernard always had the intelligence to lend an ear to the people around him. He knew that on our side of the door we were the ones who listened to the clients, and could let him know when something was going wrong. You’ve got to adjust. A guy who stubbornly camps on his position, even if he’s a great chef, runs the risk of emptying his dining room. Bernard understood that, even if he was working to make a name for himself through a new style of cuisine, he still had to take into account what the customers wanted.”†
It is an interesting exercise to follow, at some length, Couilloud’s discourse on the years together with their boss, and to note how frequently the “Monsieur Loiseau” slips into the familiar “Bernard.” It underlines the curious mix of intimacy and formalism that existed with this different kind of chef, one who wore his emotions on his sleeve and was unable to hide anything from anybody. Bernard’s true nature was to wish to be on a first-name basis with the world’s entire population, and hence to use the intimate tu form in speech, rather than the formal vous, but Couilloud’s sense of professionalism led him to insist on maintaining a certain formalism in the workplace; hierarchical organizations require barriers. The result was pure dissymmetry: In day-to-day communication, Bernard addressed Hubert with tu, and Hubert responded with vous.
“That’s all right,” Couilloud laughed. “That never stopped me from telling him vous me faites chier” [roughly: You’re a pain in the ass].
Exchanges of that sort happened often enough, given Bernard’s unpredictably explosive personality, but both men were in agreement about the fundamentals of their work, especially the friendly, easygoing atmosphere that they wanted to establish as the mark of the house; there would be no bowing and scraping, no third-person fake politesse (“Is monsieur disposed to give his order now?”), none of the obsequious rigidity that obtained in so many luxury establishments, and never any kind of dress code, even implied, for clients. Gourmets made the detour to Saulieu to relax and eat, not to participate in a fashion show. In truth, though, the matter is almost always self-regulating. People who respect great food (and the considerable price they are paying for it) rarely dress like slobs. T-shirts and flip-flops have never been frequent sights in La Côte d’Or.
Thanks to Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Michel Guérard, and their brothers-in-arms of the nouvelle cuisine movement, it is the cooks who have become the undisputed stars of the restaurant trade today, each one sought after for the particular twist he or she puts on their cuisine. Everything considered, this is natural and right, but the cult of personality that has developed around the chefs tends to leave the dining room staff in the shadows, a mere half-forgotten adjunct to the kitchen gods in their high white hats. With this, the pendulum has swung too far to one side. All serious professionals know that a first-rate dining room staff is central to the success of any restaurant that aspires to excellence, because they are the ones who execute the theater that is blocked out on the other side of the swinging doors.
“Everyone’s got his style,” explained Couilloud. “To begin with, ours was very much against unnecessary flash. For instance, we never used silver cloches to serve dishes, the way Michel Guérard and Georges Blanc do. Monsieur Loiseau thought they were too showy, but in any case they would be a technical heresy for his style of cooking. When you take the trouble to get a nice, crackly crust on the pike perch, and then put a cloche over it, the steam will settle down on the skin and soften it up. A lot of his cuisine was based on an initial cooking, very rapid and at high heat, to get a crunchy crust on top of soft elements, like sweetbreads. If you put a cloche over that, it’ll go soft in thirty seconds—you’ve defeated your own purposes.
“Bernard couldn’t stand pretentious mannerisms, but he opted to have some professional display in the dining room. This is why we brought back certain old-style practices that had gone out of fashion. We decided, for instance, to do tableside carving by a maître d’hôtel of legs of lamb, beef ribs, and the poularde Alexandre Dumaine.* It made an interesting little spectacle for the client to watch, and it gave the personnel a chance to show their skills. The nouvelle cuisine movement had pretty much devalued this kind of work, relegating dining room staff to the role of plate carriers. Bernard backed us a hundred percent in showing customers that ours was a real profession, with its own specific techniques and psychology.
“None of this happened by accident. He and I discussed these matters all the time. There would be no convoluted terms on the menu, no ‘secret’ ingredients, no precious, poetical language that made clients wish they had a dictionary at the table. Each dish would be presented simply and clearly as what it was, and when we delivered it to the client we would simply announce it without going into further detail. If you spend a minute going into lyrical descriptions of the dish and its recipe, it’s just getting cold while you talk, and the client has already forgotten what you’ve said by the time you’re finished. Eating here is for pleasure, not for education. We’re a restaurant, not a cultural center.
“All this was in agreement with Bernard, of course. He was enormously concerned with every last detail of what went on in the dining room, and he had a sixth sense for problems or blemishes. All of us knew that if there was anything wrong, anywhere in the house, he would find it immediately. It was as if he had a kind of heat-seeking sensor built into him. I can’t tell you the number of times when he would arrive, after we had spent hours making everything absolutely perfect in the dining room, and he would suddenly pounce on one thing—a tiny detail, a speck—that we had somehow overlooked in spite of all the trouble we had gone to. So he’d yell at us and gloat over how he was the one who found the crumb, but his emotion was disproportionate in relation to the reality of the event. Other times, when some really serious problems arose, he paid hardly any attention at all and left it to us to work them out as we wanted. That was Bernard for you.”
By January 13, 1991, as he quietly celebrated his fortieth birthday with Dominique, Bernard truly felt that he was ready for Michelin’s empyrean. The kitchen, dining room, and salons were as perfect as he could make them. Patrick, on one side of the swinging door, and Hubert on the other, had so completely mastered their domains that Bernard couldn’t imagine how they could do better, and the people under them were also beyond reproach. On the home front, Bérangère, the daughter Dominique had given him eighteen months earlier, was absolutely adorable, and now a second child, their son Bastien, was due in March.
What more could Bernard ask for? Of course the garden outside the dining room wasn’t quite right yet, and he had finished only a third of the building program for the thirty or thirty-two luxurious new hotel rooms outlined in his master plan, but Michelin always said that the hotel side didn’t count in the awarding of stars. Still he worried, as he mentally ran through the Côte d’Or detail by detail. How about the wines? Certainly the 25,000 or so bottles sleeping in the cellar couldn’t match Georges Blanc’s huge collection (Georges had inherited not only his mother’s restaurant but his father’s wine business, too). Even so, Bernard’s own assortment was already worth more than a million dollars, and it was tended by a very dedicated sommelier.
Ah—the sommelier. Could that be a problem? He wasn’t sure. Maybe. Lyonel Leconte had come to the Côte d’Or as a trainee two years earlier, a reserved, grave-eyed twenty-two-year-old fresh out of the hotel management school in Tain l’Hermitage. He was really good, too, so good that Bernard had named him sommelier chef only a year after that. Lyonel lived for wine, and Bernard had never known anyone with such a vast knowledge at such a young age. If anyone on his staff had clearly been born for the specialty in which he was engaged, this was the one, and furthermore, Mother Nature had proven it by providing him with the superbly efficient tool of an XXL nose: long, elegant, finely formed, and fairly twitching with sensor cells. If this nose was not quite of Cyrano dimensions, it was such a magnificent organ that if you lined up the entire Côte d’Or staff without any identifying signs, you’d pick out the sommelier without any problem. And Lyonel had the character to go with it, too. He was so single-minded about his work that when you asked him where he hailed from, he replied not with a place name but a wine map.
“Germolles,” he would say. “Just south of the Côtes de Beaune in the Côtes Chalonnaises, about halfway between Mercurey and Givry. Pinot noir for the reds, chardonnay for the whites.”
Of course no one knew it just then, but the grave-eyed lad was destined for professional glory. In 1992 Lyonel would win the Ruinart Trophy as Best Young French Sommelier, and two years after that, go on to win the Best French Sommelier competition. These honors could only enhance the prestige of the Côte d’Or—a three-star sommelier for a three-star restaurant—but the vague, inchoate reservations that niggled, half-repressed, in a recess of Bernard’s mind were to develop into a real problem with time. As he grew to something like celebrity status, Lyonel began spending more and more time doing independent wine consulting. In the dining room, some clients occasionally perceived his mix of knowledge and youthful gravity as self-importance. Other staff members worried that his passion for enology was leading him to lose sight of what lay beyond its perimeter and to forget the most fundamental imperative in the house: to be a team player, entirely devoted to the Côte d’Or and its chef—the locomotive, the one and only star. As Eric Rousseau had said in reference to Chantal: there could be only one rooster in the Saulieu coop. In 1995 Lyonel left the Côte d’Or, not so much fired as rejected, like a foreign body. With his undeniable competence and the great prestige of his titles, he had no trouble remaking himself as a full-time wine consultant, doubtless considerably more prosperous than he ever could have been on his sommelier’s salary alone.
During the winter of 1991, though, Lyonel was still well integrated into Hubert’s crew. As January turned to February, everyone of the Côte d’Or knew that up on avenue de Breteuil in Paris the Michelin editors were putting the final touches to the guide that would be coming out for general sale in mid-March. Through those endlessly bleak days, the staff arrived for work in the dark, heads bent against the lashing rain that the Morvan plateau inevitably threw their way, varied only now and then by a shift of miseries over to sleet or mushy snow. They would change into their tuxedolike uniforms and make their way through the burnished hallways, usually empty at those early hours—all the more so as it was winter, when no one ever came to Saulieu. Like as not they would find the boss already at his timeless post by the reception desk, telephone in hand, bantering with journalists and food critics or, more seriously, taking in the trade’s gossip of the day with Paul Bocuse, Guy Savoy, or Claude Perraudin.
It was on just such a day as this—Friday, February 22, 1991, at about ten A.M.—that the morning receptionist answered a buzz and said, Monsieur Loiseau, I have a call for you from Paris: Monsieur Naegellen of the Guide Michelin.
Electroshock: Bernard bounded to the little bureau near the reception desk with Dominique half a step behind him and picked up the receiver, punching the loudspeaker button.
“Monsieur Loiseau,” said Bernard Naegellen, “I am calling to announce to you that your establishment will have three stars in our next guide. I am telling you in advance so you will have time to prepare yourself. I know that you are very médiatique, but I beg you not to let the press know before our official announcement on Monday, March 4.”
“Oui, monsieur,” said Bernard, as quietly as a chastised schoolboy.
“You will probably find that you will have more clients now,” Naegellen added in the inimitably avuncular tone that thousands of restaurateurs around France cherished and feared. “They might be more difficult than before, and come looking for things to criticize, but there’s no need to panic. Don’t change anything in the way you work. Just keep on doing what you’re doing now.”
“Oui, monsieur,” said Bernard. “Merci.”
When he hung up, his eyes were brimming with tears. He took Dominique in his arms. “This is the greatest day of my life,” he said.