XII
THE LOISEAU DECADE
They had to wait a while to celebrate. Superstitious as an old peasant granny, now that the prize so long awaited was at his fingertips but not yet palpably in his hand, and fearful of disobeying Monsieur Naegellen’s injunction about premature publicity, lest the whole bubble burst and the Michelin fairy flutter away with its magic three-star wand, Bernard managed to shut up for the next ten days. He did call his parents, and of course there was no way of keeping the news from Hubert, Patrick, and the rest of the staff, but mum was the word around Saulieu until Monday, March 4.
When his consecration was officially announced on the radio early that morning, though, and when archive footage of his broadly grinning face appeared on the first TV news bulletins, the dam finally burst and Bernard was able to satisfy a twenty-three-year-old fantasy by popping bottles of champagne for his staff in the kitchen, exactly as Jean and Pierre Troisgros had done in 1968. By then the faxes and telegrams were already coming in by the hundreds (including one from President François Mitterrand), and the phone lines remained saturated for two days.
As it turned out, Bernard’s was the only three-star promotion of a rather severe Michelin year, and congratulatory cases of wine began arriving that very afternoon. The vinous flood continued through the week, and by Tuesday the Côte d’Or was riddled with journalists and TV crews, roaming the hallways with their gear, doing their reports out by the front entrance on rue Argentine and interviewing Bernard in the little studio that had been improvised in one of the salons. To them all, he endlessly repeated the same story with more or less the same lines: I started from nothing. The only thing I had when I arrived in Saulieu was my toothbrush.* Never before had a restaurant gone from three stars to zero and back up to three again. But there’s no way I’m going to get the big head now—I’ve suffered too much to get here.
“We entered a new world,” Hubert remembered. “Business immediately went up by sixty percent.” Such was the Michelin effect—and it worked, unfortunately, in both directions. In the cloistered hush of Alain Chapel’s dining room in Mionnay, his widow Suzanne was already beginning to experience the bitterness of the downside: a 50 percent drop in clientele as a direct result of her demotion to two stars.
But the good times were only starting for Bernard. Just nine days after his official ascension to a stardom of three, Dominique gave birth to their son Bastien. By then magazine articles and newspaper clippings were arriving in the mail from Japan, America, and, of course, everywhere in Europe. Early in April, he was welcomed into the fraternity of big-league power hitters at the traditional new-boy dinner held in the grandiose gilt confines of the Hotel Ritz on place Vendôme in Paris. There were some two hundred guests in all, invited by the champagne house that had sponsored the event, but the most impressive place cards bore the names of the entire roster of his eighteen† three-star peers. Bernard stood to applause from the A-Team, the glitterati of gastronomy.
But the real fun came on April 24. With stars or without, Bernard’s character didn’t change, and his natural instinct was to spread the pleasure around. Now he wanted to give some of it back to his staff, so he decided to invite them all to lunch. What else would a chef think of doing, and where else would Bernard choose to go for it but to Paul Bocuse’s? Le grand Paul, twenty-five years his elder, was his godfather in the business, his friend, his mentor, and his idol, but also, in a strange, unspoken but still real way, his rival: the target he must attain if he ever was to think of himself as the greatest chef in the world—or the most famous, at any rate. Because that was in the air now, more so than ever before. It sounds silly and rather puerile—there can no more be a “greatest” chef than a greatest mother, greatest athlete, or greatest flower—but Bernard was such a child of hyperbole, and so totally immersed in the facile stereotypings of the press he had been courting for the best part of two decades, that he half believed in the pursuit of the chimera, whatever his cooler judgment might have told him. One thing is certain: He aspired to be Bocuse one day, because Bocuse was the Commander. You might as well set your sights as high as possible.
By April 24, Dominique and the newly born Bastien were in shape to make the trip to Collonges. For the first time since his arrival in Saulieu, Bernard closed the Côte d’Or on a normal working day and drove the little family down in his car, followed by the bus he had chartered for his staff: cooks, waiters, cleaning ladies, and all. “Look out,” Bocuse had warned him by phone. “I’ve invited two heavyweight guests.”
“Do you suppose one of them is Barre?” Bernard wondered aloud in the car. Dominique shrugged. Possible. Former prime minister Raymond Barre had gone on to be elected mayor of Lyon, was known for indulging generously in the city’s fabled resources of fine cuisine, and his figure was not exactly that of an anorexic. If ever there was a heavyweight guest, Barre would be the one. But who could the other be?
It was neither Barre nor anyone else. Always a man who knew a thing or two about celebration, stunts, and publicity, Bocuse had shanghaied two elephants from a circus that was in town, and was riding one with a magnum of champagne in his fist when Bernard arrived. Bernard had no choice but to clamber uneasily aboard the second one with another magnum, because the photographers and cameramen were primed and waiting (Bocuse knows a thing or two about shanghaiing the press, too), and the big Michelin Man effigy had already been strategically positioned in the background, crowned with three stars. Bocuse was certain he had set up an irresistible photo op, and, as usual, he was right. The photo was published throughout the country: more publicity for Bernard, for himself, for the circus, for the champagne, for Michelin—everyone was served.
In company with Pierre Troisgros and Claude Verger, who had made the trip to Lyon to honor the kid they had formed, the whole crew adjourned to the big panoramic salon above the main restaurant and sat down to a Brobdingnagian feast of Bocusian style and proportion. After a series of the little tidbits universally known as amuse-gueules—appetite ticklers—matters turned serious when the menu was presented.
Black truffle soup
Red mullet in a jacket of potato scales
Beaujolais ice
Bresse chicken in cream, cooked in a pig’s bladder
Périgord foie gras
Cheeses from La Mère Richard*
President cake with strawberries and vanilla ice cream
Assorted pastries and chocolates
Champagne Moët et Chandon 1986
Château de Rully 1989
Beaune Saint-Landry 1986
Corton Pougets 1979
Nuits-Saint-Georges Clos de la Maréchale 1987
Muscat Beaumes-de-Venise Domaine des Bernardins 1990
Author, as he was, of the most famous wisecrack about Bernard’s cuisine, Bocuse did not fail to add a line at the bottom of the menu: All these dishes have been entirely prepared WITHOUT WATER. After the last coffees and cognacs had been sipped and it came time to pay the check, there was no check. Bocuse knows a thing or two about generosity, too.
I did not see Bernard again until eight months after his big three-star triumph. Fittingly enough, he was on the phone by the reception desk when I walked into the Côte d’Or. “Have you seen?” he was saying. “I’m everywhere!”
He gestured toward a big glossy magazine from Germany or Switzerland, the cover graced with the huge Loiseau grin. “They’ve discovered that I know how to cook, hee-hee-hee!”
It was a great time to be Bernard Loiseau. He was the new kid on the block who everyone was talking about, the hot story in the world of haute cuisine. If Joël Robuchon, the fantastic technician who took Paris by storm in his restaurant Jamin, was the cook who made the biggest splash in the eighties, the nineties might well have been called the Loiseau decade. Certainly Alain Ducasse was gathering stars aplenty, too—by 1998 he would have six, between Monte Carlo and Paris—but his was a different kind of business, more akin to an entrepreneurship in consultancy than that of an independent aubergiste financing, directing, and cooking in his own restaurant. There were other young luminaries in the gastronomic limelight, too, but frequently, they merely stumbled, while Bernard charged ahead. In Annecy, Marc Veyrat came to the edge of bankruptcy after overinvesting on bank loans with high interest rates. In Saint-Étienne the brilliant, poetic Pierre Gagnaire actually did go broke, and shuttered his restaurant for want of clients who would pay enough for him to recoup his investment.* The enormously deserving Michel Bras in Laguiole—doubtless the cook of the first decade of the twenty-first century—was not accorded his third star until 1999.
It was Bernard, then, who was to be the chef of the nineties, but unhappily for him, that entire decade was a period of slump after Europe’s trente glorieuses, and the slowdown was especially bad in France, where crise économique was upon the land. Globalization had brought increased competition from abroad to inefficient French industries with bloated payrolls, and which were heavily dependent on government aid. Seesaw administration changes between socialists and conservatives had resulted in a regime of capitalism hectored by government interference in the form of high taxes and social charges and a thirty-five-hour work week. The pensionable retirement age was lowered to fifty-five and the social security system was disastrously indebted. In this edgy environment, clients who were prepared to throw several hundred dollars at a single meal became noticeably rarer. The steady forward march of bureaucracy had brought increasingly vigilant oversight by the European Commission in Brussels in matters of health and sanitary and veterinary norms, to the point of threatening unpasteurized cheeses and making it nearly impossible to make and use the classical fonds—stock reductions—that had been the backbone of so much French cuisine. As for the national authorities in Paris, the combination of traceable credit card payments, nonendorsable checks, computers, and a beefed-up corps of tax inspectors all but eliminated the hundreds of informal little arrangements by which entrepreneurs had circumvented bureaucratic control and kept their enterprises going.
“In the sixties and seventies, half of our profits used to be ‘black’—that is, not declared to the tax authorities,” a veteran restaurateur explained. “All that’s finished now. You used to be able to get profit margins of seven, maybe even ten percent. Now you’re lucky if you can make it to three percent. Thousands of restaurants are going broke every year. The sector’s not so attractive anymore.”
Jean-Michel Lorain, owner and chef of the three-star Côte Saint-Jacques in Joigny, south of Paris, on the river Yonne, told me that his profit margin was . . . zero. Like Bernard, he had invested heavily (25 million francs) to totally renovate his hotel and restaurant, with the result that he and his wife, Brigitte, were living on the salaries that their little company paid them, while ploughing everything else back into repaying their loans.
“Basically, I work for the banks and the government,” he said with the ironic, disenchanted half-smile so frequently encountered among bosses of small enterprises in France. “Especially the government.”
But it was André Daguin who best summed up the collective humor of the trade. “All the starred chefs are crazy,” he told me. “I know all about that—I was crazy myself for thirty years.”
A big, hefty, handsome rugby-playing bucko from the southwestern city of Auch, near Toulouse, Daguin had brought the kitchen of his Hôtel de France up to two stars, with a culinary gasconnade of dishes based on foie gras, and did more than any other chef to popularize magrets de canard, the thick, succulent cutlets of duck breast that have now become nearly as omnipresent on menus throughout France as veal cutlets in Italy. A few years ago he gave it up, sold the business, came to Paris, and took over the presidency of L’Union des Métiers et Industries de l’Hôtellerie, the national pressure group and lobby of the hotel and restaurant industry.
“As soon as I got my second star, I never made any money from the restaurant, anymore,” he explained in a southwestern accent almost thick enough to require the services of a simultaneous interpreter. “After all the investment you put into the place, and the cost of the personnel, on those winter evenings when you’ve got two or three clients, a business like that is like a vacuum cleaner for your money. You might do OK on the weekend, but then, come Monday and Tuesday—no one, not even a rat, but you’ve still got the fixed charges to pay. Ah, putaing! So what do you do to survive? You do things on the side. You open a bistro next door. You write books. You endorse products. You do special gastronomic weeks. That’s how I got by in Auch.”
In Saulieu, Bernard was hustling in much the same way. His first cookbook, L’Envolée des Saveurs—Flavors Aflight—had just been published, and a second one was in the works. Industrialists were already hounding him about lending his name to various mass-produced foods. He would go on to accept a first contract in 1993 for a series of prepackaged soups. Soon after that he would follow the lead of older confrères like Bocuse, Senderens, and Guérard in signing up for a wide line of ready-made vacuum-packed dishes (beef strips with shallots and scalloped potatoes, veal with boletus mushrooms and mashed potatoes, coq au vin, stuffed squid, etc.) for the French company Agis. Even before his third star arrived, he had agreed to lend his name and expertise for the first Bernard Loiseau restaurant outside France, planned for the hotel Kobe Bay Sheraton on an artificial island, and scheduled to open in 1992.
Taking a break by the coffee machine in the kitchen, Hubert was telling me about another hustle that was in the works. “We’re going to open a reasonably priced little restaurant next door, in the Petit Marguéry,” he said. “It’s going to be called Le Bistrot du Morvan, and we’ll serve a much simpler regional cuisine in it, things like céleri rémoulade, oeufs en meurette, tête de veau, blanquette, and boeuf bourguignon.”
The little bistro next to the expensive gastronomic restaurant was an idea that was very much in the air in those days. Both in Paris and the more prosperous provincial areas, big-name chefs were discovering that they could increase their profits by adopting an ocean-liner system of first-, second-, and perhaps even third-class dining spaces, opening unassuming annexes inevitably called bistro something-or-other, often located right next door to their main establishments, which employed fewer hands to make and serve a less sophisticated cuisine to a greater number of clients. The picky, the rich, the Paganinis of the expense account, and the unhurried would be sure to fill the expensive signature restaurants, where there was always a waiting list for tables in any case; the young and the budget-straitened hoi polloi would flock to the cheaper alternative, and probably not even steal the silverware.*
Unfortunately for Bernard, the economic pep pills that worked in Paris, Vonnas, or Lyon did not apply in Saulieu. Fishing in waters where potential customers abounded, chefs in the choicest locations could keep the two sources of income complementary and separated—haute couture on one side, “ready-to-wear” on the other—both of them feeding off the image of the master. In the Morvan, however, where there were more cows than people, Bernard soon realized to his distress that the principal effect of the Bistrot du Morvan would only be to cannibalize the Côte d’Or’s limited clientele. So the plan that Hubert optimistically limned for me that October morning was finally never consummated, and the idea of the bistro died a-borning.
Hubert had barely finished sketching out his illusory menu selections when Bernard rushed in with urgent concern written on his face. There were no smiles for the press this time, no jokes or anecdotes. This was an emergency. October was the season for fresh game, but he had just discovered that the hunters he had been counting on had failed him this time.
“Listen,” he cried, “we’ve got to change the menu. The partridges aren’t good enough. At least half of them aren’t up to standard. We can’t take chances. We’ll have to substitute venison instead. Quince purée with it. Let’s get going—Il faut speeder, hein?”
Gotta hurry up. Speeder was a Franco-American neologism you heard all the time around Bernard. As phlegmatic and calm as Bernard was agitated, Patrick Bertron nodded and turned to confer with his seconds about arranging the change. Hubert disappeared to handle the rewriting of the carte du jour—no particular problem, because menus were printed up fresh every day.
“Last minute, everything last minute,” Bernard exclaimed, underlining the point with an energetic gesticulation. “This kitchen is clean as a whistle at five minutes to twelve, even when we’ve got a hundred seats reserved in the dining rooms—nothing prepared beforehand, nothing! There’s no other restaurant anywhere in the world like this. All the other guys have their stock pots bubbling and their reductions all set to go—and, of course, their pots of crème fraîche. Not me. We do everything from scratch here, à la minute.”*
In his third and smallest dining room, Bernard was going to be receiving a dozen or so TV and showbiz types that afternoon, part of the shifting entourage of a record company owner who had made a lot of money with the mass distribution of pop music, and who was known to the general public mostly for his penchant for serial marriages (eight, at last count) to aspiring young singers. As we spoke, they were across the way in the public garden above the old ramparts, playing pétanque and building up an appetite for the special lunch that Bernard was to prepare for them.
This group was typical of the copains, the Paris-by-night denizens who had attached themselves to Bernard over the years since his first baby steps in press relations at the Barrières: the kissy-kissy buddies/ friends/pals who were neither journalists nor food critics, and who could not necessarily help him in any direct way, but who moved in the circles of other buddies/friends/pals who could, with an invitation to a TV show here, a radio interview there, or the prospect of multiple magazine and newspaper articles. Anything that could influence more people to come down to Saulieu was grist for Bernard’s mill.
“Do you think I can ask them to pay something?” Bernard asked. What in hell did I know, I who was eating for free myself that day? True, there were a lot of them and true, they weren’t exactly poverty cases, but they were friends of all those other friends, after all. They had to be treated right. Bernard finally decided on a compromise to limit damages: He would make them a country-style buffet lunch featuring ingredients that were not ruinously expensive, much of which could be made in advance, in order to present them with a modest bill that would allow him to at least break even:
Fraise de veau en gelée
Salade de queue de boeuf
Terrine de volaille, jambon et saucisson
Oeufs brouillés aux truffes
Irancy
But not even a picnic in Loiseau’s place could ever be just a few things thrown together. Fraise de veau, the fatty tissue surrounding the calf’s intestines, may not sound like much of a delicacy, but in the Lyon area it was commonly used as the principal ingredient in andouillettes, the slightly intimidating gray sausages confected of tripe elsewhere. For this country buffet, Patrick Bertron cooked it in veal stock, cut it into morsels, added tiny vegetables and hard boiled eggs, then placed everything in a mold, to set in a rich, meaty gelatin. The oxtail was also cooked in a bouillon, its meat stripped off and cut into small pieces, then served en salade, lukewarm, with hardboiled eggs, little vegetables, and sections of fried beef marrow. It was to be seasoned with a nut oil vinaigrette.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Bertron had cooked an entire ham on the bone in an aromatic bouillon, overseen the creation of the chicken and foie gras terrine and personally tended to the excruciatingly delicate scrambling of the eggs (in a double boiler, of course, continuously turning them with a whisk as they congealed), and incorporated a fine julienne of truffles. Only the country sausage did not entirely originate in Bernard’s kitchen. It could have, but since this was a one-off affair, he slightly bent his cast-iron rules and accepted an outside supplier. Irancy, the red wine he served with this little snack, was from the Yonne département south of Chablis. Considerably more modest (and less expensive) than its celebrated cousin wines of the Côte d’Or département further down to the south, it was a true Burgundy nonetheless, and an honest one, too.
I followed Bernard around for a couple of hours that morning and afternoon. His decision on the menu, and the simple fact that he finally opted to make the copains pay for it, gave me the chance to see how far he had come in recognizing the weight of his identity as a top chef, and assuming his responsibilities in managing what by then had become a not-inconsequential enterprise. Largesse there would always be, because he was wildly generous by nature and there was nothing he enjoyed more than pleasing people, but he was beginning to set some limits.
“You know,” he said, “I turn down an average of seven applications a day now to work in the kitchen. Everyone wants to come here!” The tone of his exclamation was typical Bernard: half bluster (I’m the best) and half wonder (who am I?), as if pinching himself to see if it really was true. Several years later, after the whole sad drama had gone to its final dénouement, his younger brother Rémy, the calm engineer, calmly installed in a calm job in Michelin’s IT department in Clermont, recalled an evening stroll with Bernard in the Côte d’Or’s garden. “ ‘Sometimes I really have a hard time believing all this is mine,’ he told me. The higher up he rose, the more worried and the more insecure he became. All that business of ‘I’m the greatest’ was just bluff, to reassure himself.”
That morning in October 1991, as a pot of boeuf bourguignon (lunch for the personnel) bubbled away next to a large skillet, where shallots were slowly melting down to the fondu that would accompany the crackly skinned pike perch in red wine sauce, and as white-bloused commis and apprentis busied themselves with freshly delivered sticks of frogs’ legs, and picked and sorted nettles from a big plastic garbage bag lying on the floor, Bernard was sipping a glass of Vichy water and holding forth on le style Loiseau and what went into it. To begin with, it was clear that he had learned his lesson from Bocuse’s wisecrack and those clients who had wondered about the thin sauces of his famous H2O period.
“I don’t do cuisine à l’eau,” he insisted. “Please don’t call it that. It’s not water cooking. What I’m doing here is traditional French cooking with a new look, updated and modernized. To be at the top level you’ve got to have a style, the way Michel Guérard did in the Pot au Feu. He left the scales on his sea bass and cooked it in the oven with seaweed and virgin olive oil, and served it with a watercress puree. Fantastic! He was twenty years ahead of everyone else—he created nouvelle cuisine.
“Now I’ve created my style here. Nothing is disguised with sauces the way they used to do in the old days. I do sauces, but their role is just to let the ingredients express themselves and really taste of what they are. I’ll never have more than three, maybe sometimes four, flavors on the plate. I do each element separately, then put them together on the plate, and they join up—schlak! Explosions of taste in your mouth!
“Sixty percent of my work is finding the best providers of my ingredients. I’m perpetually at war with producers and suppliers, because I can’t make my cuisine unless I have perfect materials to work with. Clients come here from all over the world, and they’re expecting a miracle. A lot of them have broken their piggy banks to pay for a lunch or dinner chez Loiseau. They’re following a dream—happiness!
“If I can’t give it to them, I’ve failed. That’s why I changed the partridges, because if I don’t have fresh, absolutely irreproachable produce, I will fail. So I’m riding my providers’ asses all the time. And they know I won’t forget if they make a mistake or try to sell me second-rate stuff. I’ve got a memory for everything. Look at the quality of this stuff!”
He yanked open the stainless steel drawer of a refrigerated seafood compartment to present a dazzling still life of little blue Breton lobsters—demoiselles, they were called—and pattes rouges crayfish, mean little buggers waving their claws to nip at any intruder who would imprudently venture a finger. It was all so beautiful. Bernard loved it and was proud of it. His big, round, utterly persuasive moon face loomed forward, led by that strong, willful chin and a smile that brooked no arguing or gainsaying. If I had been wearing a jacket that morning, I do not doubt that he would have seized me by the lapels.
“This isn’t a luxury hotel like some emirate’s palace in the Persian Gulf. This is the Morvan. This is old tiles, old wood, and period furniture that smells of wax. This is the heartland, this is nature and churchyards and farms and chickens and cheeses and vegetable gardens—this is la France!”
The crescendo of Bernard’s bucolic rhapsody was cut short when a young, white-jacketed waiter entered to announce that the carreleur—the tile man—had arrived. Ah, the carreleur, good. Bernard had a bone to pick with him. He charged out of the kitchen double time.
It was the white cloud that was bothering him.
Something of a white cloud himself in his immaculate chef’s tunic and apron, he bounded out of the swinging door and fairly pounced upon the artisan who was kneeling in the hallway outside the dining room, reflectively gazing down at the red Burgundy tommettes that he himself had laid some months earlier.
“Look at this,” Bernard cried. “White—it’s gone white! It’s got this”—his quick brown eyes suddenly spotted an infinitesimal speck of dust on the floor and he swooped down to remove its offensive presence from his view—“this nuage blanc over the red. I can’t stand that! It’s got to be fixed.”
The mason thoughtfully ran his hands over the lovely old tiles—they looked fine to me, but Bernard, adamantly perfectionist, remained horrified—and said learned things about porosity and lime leaching out and maybe an earlier silicone treatment. Bernard contained his patience for a few moments, then abruptly brought the conversation to a close with a single lapidary command whose import everybody in France would recognize and understand.
“Well, mon pauvre monsieur, you’ve just got to make me a three-star floor.”
No way to argue with an injunction like that. The matter was clear and closed. Now it was up to the mason to speeder.
High on Vichy, Bernard hurried me into the ladies’ room to show off his latest equipment, the twin Belle Époque, barbière-style wash basins of glistening copper that stood under a wall-length mirror, even then reflecting a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers. He snatched up an errant petal that had drifted down to the tiled platform, profiting from a moment when the chef had his back turned, but not even this floral indiscipline could still his pleasure. He was delighted with the look of the place.
“Pretty good, huh?”
It was. It was very nice, very three-star. Bernard beamed. He led me on to the other end of the house to show me every single one of the new rooms. They were just as he had said—old stone, old tile, and old wood contrasting harmoniously with the ultramodern bathroom equipment. “Quite impressive, Bernard,” I said.
“March 15, 1968,” he cried, slapping his thigh for emphasis. “The Troisgros got their third star. And now, twenty-three years later, I have them, too. Hee-hee-hee!”
He loped off to badger other suppliers or sweet-talk other journalists by phone, and I returned to the kitchen for another lesson from Patrick Bertron on the realities of three-star life. Severe and unsmiling under his high white toque—he always wore one, and Bernard never did—he was already starting to prepare some of the lunch dishes.
“The restaurant trade in France isn’t too strict about hours,” he said with a shrug. “We start here at eight in the morning and there will always be someone working until at least eleven p.m. As long as there’s work to be done, we stay here. That’s just the way it is, if you want three stars.”
He was just finishing off a filet of red mullet with olive oil (extra-virgin, of course) in a Teflon pan—one side only, two minutes exactly. He delicately patted the filet with paper towel to dry it of oil, slipped it onto a toasty-hot plate, uncooked side down—the heat of the plate would finish the cooking on that side—and passed it to his left, where a sous-chef added the garnish of steamed zucchini flower and laid down a few spoonfuls of sea-urchin sauce. Just as a white-jacketed waiter was bearing the offering away to the dining room, Bernard burst in, quivering with agitation. He had just tasted a sample of the country buffet for the copains.
“We’ve got a problem,” he announced. “We’ve got to leave the walnut oil out of the oxtail salad. It’s too strong—much too dominant. Kills the taste. And we’ve got to add carrots, and more onions—sliced, not diced, hein?”
Bertron nodded and Bernard dashed back out. Just before he hit the door he threw a last thought back over his shoulder. “And put in more parsley, too.”
As it turned out, Bernard finally joined the copains at their picnic that day. It was a breach of his routine—almost unexceptionally, he took his own lunch at 11 A.M. (the universal cooks’ midday eating hour), standing alone in the kitchen, with a bottle of Vichy water as his sole liquid sustenance—but, justement, the presence of this Paris showbiz crowd was an exceptional event, so he took himself to dining room 3 and presided at the table. Chattering, joshing, and chivvying one another, they were a joyous band who had nothing more serious on their minds that afternoon than the results of their pétanque tournament but, good French men and women as they were, their mood changed to earnest attention when the waiters brought the series of dishes to the table, and they listened with respect as Bernard explained their composition.
“Les enfants,” he intoned, as Bertron’s ever so carefully scrambled and truffled eggs arrived, “these are eggs from today, laid on the farm this morning—no comparison with the merde that you get in Paris!”
Sausaged, truffled, egged, and oxtailed, their innards generously oiled with long swigs of Irancy, the copains were willing victims for Bernard’s sales talk about the Côte d’Or and le style Loiseau, and the luncheon passed in pleasant conversation that could not have been more cheery, encouraging, or flattering to Michelin’s newest three-star chef. When at last he took his leave and drove up across town for his daily nap at home, it seemed to Bernard that Saulieu for once was the best of all possible worlds.