XIII

UP, DOWN, AND UP AGAIN:
Bernard’s Bipolar World

“From seventy-five to eighty-two, I worked for Verger,” Bernard was saying. “Starting from nothing, I got two Michelin stars and brought us up to Relais & Châteaux standards. That’s when I told Claude the time had come to sell me the place. He did it, at ten-percent interest. After I paid him off I went to the bankers. I told them that I saw a big future here in Saulieu as a place of repose, a haven of peace and calm.

“They decided they could have confidence in me, and I started building my new hotel rooms. By the end of 1990 I had finished my program. Three months after that I won my third star. I got three Michelin stars with forty square meters of the rottenest kitchen in all of France! Now, eight months later, my turnover is up sixty percent and I’ve made the cover of the New York Times. All told, I’ve invested thirty million francs. I’ll be paying back 250,000 francs a month through to the year 2005, but that’s no problem—at age fifty-four, I’ll be home free.”

Looked at that way, it all seemed so natural, sequential, and almost automatic—bing, bing, bing, the logical steps of his recipe to happiness, wealth, and renown. The traveling salesman’s son was selling me, as he had long ago sold himself and everyone around him, on the quasi-inexorable process that had brought him safely to destination. No one ever subscribed more enthusiastically than Bernard Loiseau to the credo and mythology of traditional capitalism: Everything is possible for those who strive; success is a flower just waiting to be plucked; a hard beginning maketh a happy end. All that.

It was a euphoric moment, but Bernard could not suspect, as he happily laid out his past, present, and future for me in that autumn of 1991, that he was only at the start of something very much like an infernal spiral, that within ten years the 30 million francs of borrowed money would balloon to nearly three times that amount, as one project and one acquisition led to others, that he would find himself owner of not one but four restaurants, or that, in a scramble for more cash, he would be taking the unprecedented step of floating his own company—that is, himself—on the stock market. Within that period he grew more and more speedé with each new responsibility, running himself to the edge of nervous exhaustion as he struggled to keep pace with his burgeoning ambitions. Certainly he progressed toward his goals, but as their proportions grew increasingly grander (or megalomaniacal, as some commentators suggested), each step forward brought him only the view of his personal chimera—the easy resolution of his problems by age fifty-four—disappearing over the horizon.

There was money out there in the banks, and Bernard put his finger into the gears of the machine. His original ambition had been only to become a successful aubergiste crowned with three Michelin stars, but somehow it always turned out that there was more to be done—nothing was ever quite good enough, not yet perfect. To create a physical setting and an ambience worthy of Michelin, it was clear that he had to renovate some and build a lot, but the standards of Alexandre Dumaine’s days were no longer acceptable at the end of the twentieth century. He had seen the Troisgros brothers, Georges Blanc, and Michel Guérard putting together caravansaries of world-class luxury, and he could do no less. Hell, he could do more, and better!

So he borrowed. He saw Bocuse expanding from Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or to Epcot to Tokyo, and into downtown Lyon, where one after the other, he opened a series of gloriously successful brasseries. In Vonnas, Mâcon, Bourg-en-Bresse, and Lyon, Georges Blanc did the same. Jean-Paul Lacombe, owner and chef of the marvelous two-star Léon de Lyon (his cooking deserves three stars, by the way), metastasized in and around Lyon with a gaggle of money-spinning cafés and restaurants, and in Paris, Guy Savoy was building a mini-empire of satellite restaurants even before he had won his third star. And of course, above all there was Alain Ducasse, the gastrocomet, the man who was causing culinary thunder and lightning around the whole damn planet.

Cuisine’s First Division was a rich, racy, glamorous place. None of these adjectives could conceivably apply to an isolated Morvan cow town like Saulieu, but Bernard worked and invented and wheedled and borrowed until he had brought the Côte d’Or’s level of esthetics, comfort, and service up to, or even better than, those of his most distinguished colleagues. Once he had launched his program, its progression barely left him time to draw breath between the succeeding steps. In 1994 came five big, handsome, balconied rooms giving directly out onto the central garden, a new garage, and a “technical center” for a central air-conditioning unit. A year later, abandoning the idea of a bistro, he opened the Bernard Loiseau boutique on the ground floor of the ex-Petit Marguéry. In 1998 he completely renovated the main building’s façade, raised the top floor 1.5 meters, and built nine new rooms.

With that same tranche of construction, Bernard at last got the beautiful, handcrafted circular staircase after which he had lusted for so many years, and which quickly became the Côte d’Or’s marque and identifying symbol. A spidery latticework of noble woods pegged and tenoned together, it was an artisanal chef d’oeuvre designed and erected by the Compagnons du Devoir, the present-day descendants of the medieval artisans who had built France’s great cathedrals. Locked in the staircase’s embrace was a spacious modern elevator, all glass and shimmering stainless steel. Bernard was thrilled with the contrast—today’s technology and yesterday’s materials, indeed, in one gorgeous ensemble.

In 1999 he knocked down Dumaine’s old hotel with its cramped quarters, and added nine new rooms and suites, a billiards room, a library, and a salon for conferences and seminars. In 2001 came the Côte d’Or’s grand finale: a spa and fitness center, and a completely redesigned garden with a heated swimming pool, tucked away in a discreet glade down at the bottom. By that year he had also considerably spread his wings beyond Saulieu, having expanded into Paris with the successive purchase of three restaurants in 1998, 1999, and 2000, which he redecorated, manned with personnel he had formed, and renamed as the first exemplars of his “aunts” concept of high-level bistros, suggesting the homey food of family visits to an aunt who was a serious Cordon Bleu cook: Tante Louise, Tante Jeanne, and Tante Marguerite.

And so it came to pass that by the first year of the new millenium, Bernard the penurious apprentice had spent 88 million francs (more than $10 million) of other people’s money to bring his dream to reality. But a cruel irony was lying in ambush for him in an alleyway of his route to success; however impressive his debts appeared to be, it was not the money that in the end would hound him to the most desperate of measures. Obsessed as he was with building his ideal palace and attracting enough clients to pay for it, he could not imagine that after the “Loiseau decade” had come to a close, it would be his creativity and his cooking—that is to say, his very identity—that would be called into question by lesser men than himself. And the worst aspect of the irony was that the attacks would come not from bankers and creditors, but from the coterie that he had assiduously courted through his entire career: the gastronomic press.

When I met with him in that autumn of 1991, though, Bernard was riding the cloud of his personal méthode Coué, and everything was falling into place as it should. The Côte d’Or was beautifully remodeled, and before long it would be even more beautiful and a good deal bigger, too. Everyone was talking about his cuisine, and he had become a true media star. Classy, devoted, and as hard-working as himself, Dominique was seconding him in every way possible, removing the burden of paperwork and picky details that he, the Big Picture man par excellence, had always hated. The technical money matters that were beyond Dominique’s purview were being handled by Bernard Fabre. Bernard now had two adorable kids (a third would be born in 1996), a big, comfortable old house on the hill, a first-rate staff, and the respect of his peers in the business. In short, he had made it.

In a few pithy phrases, he summed up his path to success and the rationale that had guided him. “I was in an impossible situation,” he explained. “I was in Saulieu, and I had a gas station opposite my front door,* not the Mont Saint-Michel or some majestic view of the Alps. To bring people down here I had to do something new and different, so that’s what I did—le style Loiseau. It took me eight years of trial and error to develop it, but I did it. Today, people recognize my snails in nettle soup and my frogs’ legs the way they recognize Robuchon’s mashed potatoes, Troisgros’s salmon, and Bocuse’s black-truffle soup. Now that I’m at the top, I’m going to cash in by selling my name the way the other guys have done.”

Which is exactly what happened. In addition to his deals for soups and ready-made vacuum-packed dishes, featuring his face with that Loiseau grin on the outside of the package, Bernard would go on in years to come to collaborate with Nestlé for a new mayonnaise recipe, consult on wines for Savour Club, sign up for a speaking job for a weekly chronicle on a popular Paris radio station, write a column† for a Sunday paper, and lend (or rather, sell) his expertise as a consultant to a Swiss hotel group. But perhaps more interesting and prestigious than any of these was the deal he struck through JTB, the Japan Travel Bureau, that country’s top “destination management” company: the Côte d’Or–Bernard Loiseau Restaurant on the top floor of the hotel Kobe Bay Sheraton that was being built. Against a remuneration (undisclosed but clearly handsome), he would provide the recipes, train Japanese cooks in Saulieu, send one of his own French sous-chefs to live and work in Kobe, and make a personal appearance of two weeks each year.

Passionate, infinitely curious, and superbly organized travelers, the Japanese have long been fascinated with French cuisine. In addition to the Hermès scarf, the Vuitton bag, and obligatory visits to certain must-see highlights (the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Opéra, and a few select Loire Valley châteaux), no self-respecting Japanese tourists felt their visits complete without at least one high-end gastronomic experience. For the wealthier among them, this meant a Michelin three-star restaurant. Naturally, Paris was the prime destination, and the Vrinats, Terrails, Senderenses, and Passards could count on their share of clientele from the land of the rising sun as a matter of course.

In the provinces, though, there were two restaurants that the Japanese gourmets particularly favored: Paul Bocuse’s in Lyon and Bernard Loiseau’s in Saulieu. This was largely the doing of the late Shizuo Tsuji, the extraordinary Mister Food from Osaka. The École Technique Hotelière Tsuji had begun as a small training center for Japanese cooking alone, but Tsuji built it into a behemoth—the world’s largest cooking school—teaching Japanese, Chinese, French, and Italian cuisine to often as many as five thousand students a year. An indefatigably productive writer and promoter of fine cuisine (twenty-nine books, a national TV show, and a flood of articles), Tsuji had been taken in hand in the early sixties by Paul Bocuse, who introduced him to the aristocracy of the French gastronomic establishment. Over the years their friendship developed into a professional symbiosis that saw Bocuse flying regularly to Japan to open restaurants, consult, and sell a personalized Paul Bocuse product line, while Tsuji bought two châteaux in Beaujolais country, to which he shuttled hundreds of his students for on-site training in haute cuisine française. Long before globalization had become a catchword of management gurus, Tsuji and Bocuse were practicing it to their mutual profit.

The Franco-Japanese trail blazed by this unlikely pair of friends—Tsuji was as restrained and demure as Bocuse was playful, adventuresome, and extroverted—was soon trod by most of the great names of French gastronomy, and it was hardly surprising that the Japanese Travel Bureau would come knocking on Bernard’s door as he rose toward three-star prominence. Both Tsuji and Bocuse had recommended him highly, his media stardom had long since spilled over into Japanese press and TV and—the final convincing stroke—his minimalist style of fast-cooking high-quality ingredients at the last minute bore certain resemblances to Japanese culinary techniques.

So the contract was signed, Bernard made a preliminary scouting trip and, late in January of 1992, flew back to Japan for his first full tour of duty in the Kobe Bay Sheraton. On the flight over and throughout the ensuing two-week obligation, Hubert Couilloud was at his side. But if Bernard’s pertinacious questing after glory and success made him appear like some gastronomic Don Quixote, Hubert was no Sancho Panza. If anything, the aptest analogy would be that of Virgil guiding an overwhelmed and terrorized Dante as he lived the dreadful experience of his visit to the Inferno. Because a dreadful experience it was, that first Kobe trip, and a very significant one, too: Bernard fell to pieces.

Six years earlier, Hubert had seen his friend and boss break down when he finally faced Chantal’s infidelity and admitted it to himself and the world, but that had been readily understandable; Bernard was exhausted from overwork, the restaurant was on the knife-edge of insolvency, and he was the humiliated husband who could no longer hide his horns. Who wouldn’t be tempted to break down under those circumstances?

But this collapse in Japan came like a bolt out of the blue. Bernard was remarried, he had his third star, the Côte d’Or had done sensationally well all spring and summer after going to the top of the Michelin class, and now in Kobe, cohorts of bowing Japanese admirers were blanketing him with honors. Everything seemed perfect, but there, on that artificial island at the other end of the world, Hubert abruptly saw the dark side of the entrepreneurial dream that was supposed to bring Bernard home free and living happily ever after at age fifty-four.

On their second night in the hotel, Hubert was awakened from a deep jet-lagged slumber when his phone began ringing insistently sometime after midnight. “Je ne suis pas bien,” cried Bernard, his voiced trembling with panic—“something’s wrong. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m depressed. You’ve got to come down and sleep here.”

Still in his pajamas, Hubert pulled on his Sheraton dressing gown and shuffled down to Bernard’s room. Once again, as he had done in 1986, he sat for the rest of the night as Bernard poured out an anguished litany of doubts and fears. Everything was wrong, everything was hopeless—his cooking, his business, his marriage, his health—and wherever he turned, there was nothing but black, irredeemable failure. He had seen the third Michelin star as the magic bullet that would resolve all his problems, but Saulieu had turned out to be Saulieu, after all; the euphoric spring and summer seasons had given way to the same cold, wet gloom of clientless winter days. Had he made the wrong choice right from the start in 1975? Had he committed his life to an error?

“It was like a decompression,” Couilloud remembered. “He was away from everything he was familiar with, out of his cocoon of the Côte d’Or, and the recognition and adulation that surrounded him there. Suddenly Bernard found that he was alone with himself in a strange new environment. People were honoring him, but that honor wasn’t love, you see. Admiration wasn’t enough—he had to be loved. That was what always supported him. Now he was like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and he collapsed.”

It didn’t get better. Through the next two weeks, Bernard plodded mechanically through his contractual obligations in the kitchen and with the press like a human soufflé that had fallen. The electric personality, the very one that could thrill blasé Parisian intellectuals with an impassioned description of a snail or a sweetbread, now mumbled lifeless platitudes and returned to his room. The exotic vibrancy and color of Japan that had fascinated his heroes Paul Bocuse and Pierre Troisgros left him cold and inert.

Bernard was in a pit. Fearful and suspicious of Japanese food—even under normal conditions at home, a slightly undercooked shrimp could be enough to trigger a suffocating allergy attack, and the mere idea of raw fish rolled with cold rice made him shudder—he spurned every refined little delicacy that some of the world’s finest sushi and sashimi cooks were hoping to introduce to the great French master. Worse yet, his appetite for any kind of nourishment at all disappeared. Bernard—the big mouth, the big eater, the big personality—Bernard wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t care. It was as troubling as it was astonishing. For two weeks Hubert ordered him room-service pasta, the only thing he would consent to put in his mouth. Sometimes with tomato sauce, sometimes with cheese, but mostly just plain, the twice-daily ration of noodles went into the gullet of the great chef as he sat, head down, torpid, and silent, virtually spoon-fed by his maître d’hôtel.

At the end of the contractual ordeal, Hubert nursemaided his boss back to Saulieu and told Dominique what she already knew: Her husband needed some kind of treatment, and fast. A specialist in Paris prescribed Prozac. Bernard obediently took the pills.

“Bipolar disorder” is the currently accepted term for what medical people used to call the manic-depressive syndrome. There is great variation in the onset and force of its symptoms, but it occurs equally in men and women, and various experts estimate that it affects about one percent of any given population. An illness marked by periods of sustained disruption of mood, distorted perceptions, and impaired social functioning is about as broad (and vague) a definition as any med school primer might give, but it is in the enumeration of its well-documented symptoms that a picture of Bernard emerges. He could have stood as the archetype.

The “up” symptoms are inflated self-esteem or grandiosity; racing ideas; extreme talkativeness; excited, elated behavior; increased goal-directed activity; excessive pursuit of activities that carry the risk of painful consequences—spending lots of money is frequently cited; distractibility; decreased need for sleep; and general extravagance. For Hubert, Eric, Patrick, and the others, this could not be the description of a sick person. It was simply the Bernard they had known from the moment of their hiring. If it was illness that had engendered his zealously uncompromising perfectionism, then they could only applaud the illness, because that was what had made the Côte d’Or what it was.

Like a machine without an over-rev governor, Bernard was “running hot” all the time—it was simply what everyone identified as his normal behavior. When he plunged into the abyss, then, it was doubly disturbing, because it happened so rarely. What no one could suspect was that the abyss might be as deep and black as the elation was exalted.

Medical science has a laundry list of the bipolar personality’s “down” symptoms. Among them are a generally depressed mood; sluggish manner; diminished pleasure in activities; fatigue, energy, and weight loss; indecisiveness; and feelings of worthlessness or guilt. Hubert saw the whole panoply of symptoms in Tokyo, just as he had in Saulieu in 1986. What he could not believe, what he could not even conceive of—not with this force of nature, this human monument to positive energy and optimism—was the last symptom invariably described in all literature on the bipolar syndrome: recurring thoughts of death or suicide. “The life expectancy of individuals with bipolar disorder is significantly reduced,” one expert succinctly put it. “Between 25 and 50 percent of people with this diagnosis attempt suicide, and 15 percent die by suicide.”*

It never crossed anyone’s mind. Not Bernard. He loved life too much.

For three or four months in that winter and spring of 1992, the staff of the Côte d’Or anxiously watched as the boss struggled with himself and with Eli Lilly’s mind-bending molecule. Of course they all knew everything about his treatment because, even in a diminished state, Bernard told everything to everyone. And he was diminished, too; the pill had calmed him down, certainly, but the electric personality was replaced by an amorphous Loiseau caricature who needed a lot of sleep but still complained about feeling constantly tired. For the first time in seventeen years of activity, the Côte d’Or’s staff saw what it was like to work with a “normal” boss, one who wasn’t endlessly yelling at them and cheerleading for them and finding fault with them—in short, one who rode their asses, to use Bernard’s consecrated expression—from eight in the morning to midnight. But they didn’t like it a bit.

Neither did Bernard. The spark may have gone from his character, but it was still there somewhere within the chemical cloud, and he hated his situation. He took his treatment back into his own hands with a razor blade; day by day, he carefully sliced away incremental parts of his Prozac pill.

“We all encouraged him, of course,” said Eric Rousseau, using the nice French expression pour lui remonter les bretelles—to raise his suspenders—“because he saw his illness as shameful, as if he had the clap or something. Appearances were everything for Monsieur Loiseau. The idea that he, this big, strong, famous chef should be on Prozac was intolerable for him. We told him that there were plenty of business leaders and big-name politicians who were doing the same thing, but that didn’t make any difference. He was Bernard Loiseau, after all. What if it got into the press?”

The press—quelle horreur! The mere idea of an article suggesting any kind of psychiatric treatment drove him to an obsession with liberating himself from the pill. And he succeeded, too. By May, he had razorbladed the dose down to a sliver, and little by little, the real Bernard Loiseau reappeared. “The machine started up again,” said Hubert. “He recovered his taste for life.”

With all due respect to Eli Lilly, to the Paris specialist who prescribed Prozac, and to Bernard’s methodical razorblade, it was in all likelihood mostly thanks to the tilt of the earth’s axis that Bernard recovered: winter turned to spring, and with the dry, balmy days, the clients began returning to Saulieu like migrating birds. There is nothing to warm the cockles of a chef’s heart like a full dining room. To generalized grins around the Côte d’Or, Bernard became impossible again.

Re-energized and apparently secure in his three-star prestige, his lucrative contracts, his fecund marriage, and his enviably skilled, supportive staff, Bernard coasted—no, that’s not right, he couldn’t coast, he galloped, Loiseau-style—through the nineties, king of his ideal castle, national TV and radio personality, international ambassador of French cuisine, buddy-buddy with President François Mitterrand, who frequently came by for dinner and to spend the night (he slept in the duplex room 31, and he was partial to crayfish with tarragon, the huge veal chop, and the poularde Alexandre Dumaine), and leading light of the French culinary establishment. How thoroughly and indubitably Bernard had become a leading light was underscored in pop culture when, in 1996, fresh after Mitterrand had awarded him the legion d’honneur in a formal salon of the Élysée Palace, his effigy joined Bocuse’s—le grand Paul himself—in the Musée Grevin’s waxworks in Paris. Quite a time. Top of the world.

Even an apparent disappointment proved to have a silver lining. In 1995 the Kobe earthquake had so shaken the Sheraton and its owners that a rethinking of their long-term plans made them decide to end the Loiseau restaurant experiment, but that was fine with Bernard, because it gave him a face-saving excuse to free himself of that dreaded two-week Japanese exile.

Probably the most extraordinary year of all was 1996. In March, the mighty, haughty, hoity-toity Tour d’Argent—Claude Terrail’s unassailable temple on the Quai de la Tournelle opposite Notre Dame de Paris, where gastrotourists from everywhere in the universe mentally genuflected before the maître d’hôtel who carved their portions of canard ausang with solemn priestly gestures—was demoted to two stars. Bernard’s place was above the Tour d’Argent! A dream. Unbelievable.

Baby Blanche was born in that same signal year—Bérangère, Bastien, and now Blanche, three little BLs to add their juvenile presence to the little gold BL logo in cursive script that the maîtres d’hôtel and chefs de rang wore on their lapels, and with malice toward none and any latent schadenfreude well contained, Bernard could not help but notice the setbacks of two of his young three-star confrères whose energy and media prominence inevitably made them rivals in the glory game. First Pierre Gagnaire, the poet-cook in Saint-Etienne, was forced to scuttle his restaurant for want of clientele. It was the first time ever that a three-star establishment had gone broke, but Gagnaire’s problems were soon shared by Marc Veyrat in Annecy, who was very publicly teetering on the precipice of bankruptcy and crying for help.

For many in the trade, it was a time of introspection. Beyond the fierce competition reigning within the brotherhood of top restaurateurs—a real beauty contest, and frequently a bitchy one at that—increasingly rigid government regulations and supervision were making it harder and harder to turn a profit without raising already high prices up to absurd levels. The restaurant trade is hard, unrelenting sleep-deprived work to begin with; at its highest level, fatigue is compounded by the same kind of nervous tension that drives operatic divas to seek relief in the extravagant behavior that frequently characterizes their ilk. After Alain Chapel’s and Jacques Pic’s premature exits, the brilliant Joël Robuchon in Paris concluded that the strain of three-star perfectionism twice a day was too much to expect of mere mortals. He quit his great restaurant on avenue Raymond Poincaré* and retired from competitive cooking to write books and lend his name and considerable talents to television cooking shows. Far too many great cooks were dying young, he said. I don’t want to join them. You’ve only got one life.

If Bernard was introspective around this time, it certainly didn’t show, not to the world at large, at any rate. Monsieur Speed, he was up and down simultaneously, all day every day, in a permanent saw-tooth pattern: everything was either fantastique or nul. Hyperbolic, Manichean, and absolutist, Bernard was Bernard, and that was that. But what the clients saw was only the “up” Bernard, standing in his immaculate white garb by the reception desk as they came and went, boyishly attentive and helpful, shaking hands, opening the door for them, explaining his cooking and his career with all the easy skill of a seasoned vaudeville trooper, repeating the same stories with the same lines that his staff already knew by heart, all the while grinning that irresistible Loiseau grin—looming chin-thrustingly forward to make his points,—then crying Voilà! Voilà! Voiiii-là! as his interlocutors agreed with him, as agree they must, under the irrefutable, surging plenitude of his affirmations.

It was in this auspicious period of the mid-nineties that a few questions I wanted to ask him about culinary matters brought me to Saulieu again. I had thought we could handle my queries by phone, but after some minutes Bernard said, look, this is getting too complicated, why don’t you just come on down to Saulieu and we’ll talk it over at lunch, OK? I suppose I was secretly hoping he’d say that, but when he added that we’d be sharing the table that day with his accountant and his lawyer, I thought, ah, hell, there goes the fun.

The main action in the dining room that afternoon was being provided by a woman from the medieval fortress town of Semur-en-Auxois who was marking her ninetieth birthday by inviting fourteen of her family members to ingest enough food to stupefy a wild boar. French grannies know how to celebrate. Skirting this gaggle of senior sybarites, Bernard ushered me into the smallest of his dining rooms, where a round table was set for four. The lawyer and the accountant—none other than Bernard Fabre himself—were already in place.

By all rights, it should have been a pretty doleful affair. Between taxes, mortgages, interest rates, and ironing out some final details of his divorce settlement with Chantal, the afternoon hardly augured to be bathed in jollity. I took my seat, inwardly fearing a tiresome hour or two.

I should have known better. The French are the French, after all, and if that nonagenarian granny had the good taste to celebrate her long life in style, lawyers could be like Hubert de Montille. On the downside, the charges against him were heavy: He was the former president of the Dijon bar association, had pleaded innumerable cases, and had been guilty of an incalculable flow of whereases and res ipse loquiturs, in his long and distinguished career, but that was all right, because there was a major extenuating circumstance—he was also a wine maker. Scion of a line of vignerons who had been making a superb Volnay as long as anyone can remember, Hubert had subpoenaed two pieces of evidence to place before our jurisdiction at the start of proceedings. To wit: Exhibit A, a Puligny-Montrachet 1993 and Exhibit B, a Bâtard-Montrachet 1988. In choosing these two bottles he was making something of a professional pirouette, in that he hadn’t brought along any of his own Volnays. Everyone with any enological culture already knew the de Montille’s Volnays, n’est-ce pas, but how about these babies? Hubert had just acquired some strips of vineyard in Puligny, and he was excessively proud of his new production, even if the 1993 was admittedly a little thin compared with, say, ’88, ’89, or ’90.

Bernard was trying hard to be a good boy. Blindingly white in his chef’s blouse and the dazzling smile that not even a tax declaration could erase from his visage when he was face to face with his own culinary creations, he listened obediently to de Montille’s figures, as Bernard Fabre sighed and clucked, but it was obvious that it was all going in one ear and out the other, because Bernard’s attention was riveted on the plate of hors d’oeuvres that a waiter deposited before us: tiny tartelettes of rabbit liver on a brunoise of young vegetables, and breaded snails deep-fried with parsley and star anise.

“Taste that!” he ordered, passing the plate my way and making sure it continued through the circuit until there was nothing left. “C’est bon, hein?” he said, dropping an anvil-sized hint to which the only truly acceptable answer would have been a standing ovation, but which we watered down to mere unconditional approbation. I have often wondered at the pressing urge for seduction that inhabits all great chefs, as characteristic of the species as a dog’s bark. With Bernard, it was very much like lifeblood.

“C’est bon, hein?” he repeated, and it was. It was wonderful. Bernard beamed.

With the arrival of the first course, it became apparent that Bernard had honored us as ad hoc (but still more or less official) tasters, willing guinea pigs on whom he could try out some new ideas that he and Patrick had been tossing around in the kitchen. Serious matters began with a lentil soup thick with duck giblets, served in wide flat bowls, each of which had a poached egg reposing like a sunset in the middle of the deep amber liquid. Bernard fixed his bright brown eyes on my dish, growing visibly impatient as the seconds passed and I still had not taken the essential step for bringing out the cascade of flavors he had so carefully planned.

“Casse-moi ça dedans!” he ordered, reaching over with his fork to mimic the gesture I was to accomplish. I had to act fast, or else he would have done it for me. It was only after I had mashed the sunset down into the leguminous dusk—orange-yellow fingers of yolk flowing like solar eruptions into the pottage’s celestial night—that he was satisfied and I was permitted to proceed with the savoring of the contrasts and mellow interminglings of taste and texture. I had hardly mingled my own self with it all by the time Bernard was already wiping his plate squeaky clean with a piece of bread, unwilling to lose the least atom of goodness before the waiter spirited his bowl away.

When the second dish arrived, creeping déjà vu arrived with it, the old, familiar apprehension of an exam that turns out to be harder than one had bargained for. This one was pure Loiseau, a construction as hard-edged, linear, and complex as a Schoenberg string quartet: a ragout of baby green asparagus with scallops caramelized in olive oil and a sauce of blended sea-urchin tongues bonded by a celeriac purée. Chewing under Bernard’s imperious gaze, I mentally weighed my responses to the exam. Was this dish:  good    excellent   extraordinary  none of the above?

“The asparagus are from Blanc,” he felt constrained to point out.

“Georges Blanc?” I wondered in dull-minded incomprehension. The ageing wunderkind of Vonnas had so many irons in the fire that I couldn’t help wondering if he had gone into the grocery business, too.

“No, no, Blanc the farmer. Best vegetables anywhere. Just taste them—nothing’s disguised there. The taste springs out at you—schlak! That’s what it should be like each time you take a mouthful. It’s the taste—the real taste. Each time, it should be like an explosion in your mouth. Paf! Clack!”

I mentally marked the third box.

Under de Montille’s disapproving eye, Bernard briefly upstaged the lawyer’s wines by thrusting a bottle of mineral water my way. He wanted to be sure I knew this one—Châteldon, it was called—because it deserved attention, swimming as it was against a flood tide of the more widely known Perriers, Evians, Volvics, and Vittels.

“Goûte!” he ordered. “Taste. It’s the best mineral water in the world.”

Of course. What else could it be at his table?

Now, in spite of himself, in spite of the facts and figures tumbling from de Montille’s agile memory, in spite of Fabre’s sighs and frowns, Bernard had slipped totally into his Joyous Provider mode, the only one he was really comfortable with. He gave dutifully unstinting praise to the 1979 Corton that de Montille had also brought along to accompany the main dish—it’s always a pleasure to see old folks standing tall—but it was the appearance of the roast chicken that captured his sincerest attention.

“Look at that!” he cried. “Isn’t that beautiful? That’s the real barnyard fowl, the kind you’ll never find in a store.” He bent as reverently as a supplicant over the steaming platter. “It even smells a little bit of merde, just the way a real chicken should. Wing or thigh?”

Serving us, he explained that immediately after graduating from the oven, the bird had been injected with truffle juice, a neat application of the hypodermic syringe that might usefully be added to med-school curricula for the benefit of future gourmets among the corps of French doctors. With each portion of chicken he scooped us a generous ladle of stuffing (boned pigs’ feet, truffles, and foie gras), decorated with little golden chips of thrice-blanched, and then deep-fried, garlic. Alongside lay individual galettes fashioned of potato and the bird’s chopped giblets.

By the time the great wicker-basket loads of cheeses, nuts, and figs arrived for our perusal and choice, the divorce settlement got only the shortest of shrifts and taxes were as well as forgotten. De Montille made a stab at returning to business by checking something or other on Bernard’s cell phone, but his heart wasn’t really in it. When dessert followed—the house’s own silky off-white version of real bean-rich vanilla ice cream (beans from Madagascar and Tahiti) Bernard’s Joyous Provider mode was beginning to veer dangerously toward feeding frenzy.

“Take a tuile, take a tuile,” he insisted, passing around the table a gleaming plate of pastries, chocolates, and petits fours and watching every single one of them disappear into our maws. Tuiles, named after their resemblance to meridional roof tiles, have always been something of a mystery and bafflement at La Côte d’Or, marrying metaphysical lightness (look out—they rise to the ceiling if you let them go) with a depth of taste that—every rule’s got an exception—bespeaks not only almonds and sugar, but, yes, butter as well, and plenty of it.

Around and around the pastry platter went, the most dissolute of gormandizing excess for a lunch crew already deeply plunged into satiety. On came the coffee and the cigars and the delicious mirabelle, the world’s most sophisticated white lightning.

The afternoon was drawing to a close, but Bernard didn’t want it to end. His cooking, his pursuit of food’s purest essences, had made him famous around the world, but now his role as host—the ultimate expression of that cooking—was on the line, and there was nothing more that he could offer us.

He couldn’t accept it. There had to be something.

“Have another tuile,” he said.

I couldn’t. Not even that.

“How about another glass of wine?” Already, a young sommelier was hovering with a bottle of beet-red Maranges Clos des Loyères.

No, better not. I had to drive, after all.

“Some more mirabelle? Another cigar?”

No thanks. I felt positively guilty in refusing.

“You sure you don’t want to rest before you go? I can have one of the maids turn down a bed for you.”

Not a bad idea, but I really had to be getting back.

Bernard was close to desperation. What else could he try? There had to be something else to offer, but what? He darted his eye around the room, then back to the table. Aha! He spotted the cell phone.

“Here,” he said, thrusting it across the table to me. “Don’t you want to make a phone call? Long distance?”

So there it was, Bernard being Bernard more emphatically than ever. Several years afterward, the scene of this cascade of offerings jumped back into my head when Eric Rousseau, reminiscing about his years at the Côte d’Or with this singular boss, summed him up with a single lapidary phrase. “Monsieur Loiseau was so generous himself that he just couldn’t understand it when people weren’t generous with him in return.”

That little lunch with Fabre and de Montille could not have offered a better view of Bernard at his best, in every direction: his cuisine, his enthusiasm, his total dedication to quality, his charismatic character, and his amiability—the simple, downright niceness of the guy. Never was there a chef who genuinely liked to make people happy more than this one. “If I could afford it, I’d like to give away the meals here,” he frequently said, and he really wasn’t lying.

Bernard was flying high in those days, no doubt about it. His depression of 1992 was a thing of the past, and he was once again tall in the saddle, looking forward to the next challenge. In 1998 he came to the foot of a big mountain to climb, and he scaled it, too, but, Bernard being Bernard, he did it direttissimo style, taking a route that no one in the restaurant business had ever thought of before—the stock market.

This was how things stood as the year began: Bernard had his new kitchen and dining rooms, his beautiful, monumental staircase, twenty-three Relais & Châteaux rooms of the highest standards of luxury, but the Dumaine wing of the hotel—the very one whose rotten old rooms Hubert and Chantal and anyone else they could shanghai into hard labor had painted in the eighties—was still in place, prettied up as well as he could make it but still cramped, dark, and unprotected from street noise. His development plan absolutely called for an additional nine spacious first-class rooms, the library, the billiards and conference rooms, the pool, sauna, fitness center, and a relandscaping of the garden—not to mention a couple of other restaurants in Paris that he had his eye on, the future Tante Marguerite and Tante Jeanne.

Trouble was, he had maxed out on traditional bank loans and had an outstanding debt of nearly five million euros. At this point, a client suggested (in the euphoria, we may suppose, that invades one after a great meal accompanied by great wines) the intriguing idea of raising a war chest for finishing off his building program by going public. Conservative as ever, Fabre was against it—too many imponderables, too complicated—but Bernard was predictably seized with enthusiasm. He took the plunge.

So it happened that in the very last days of business in December 1998, the 129th and final initial public offering on the Second Market of the Paris Bourse was something called le Groupe Bernard Loiseau, which was able to boast a turnover of less than 5 million euros a year. Counseled by BDO Gendrot and underwritten by the Caisse Centrale des Banques Populaires, Bernard offered himself, his restaurants, his contacts, his industrial gigs, and his prospects for the future for sale—600,000 shares at 7.42 euros apiece.

Damned if it didn’t work. There were plenty of drawbacks—changing from a private to a public company entails a vastly increased amount of paperwork and bureaucratic detail, but Bernard was careful to keep 53 percent of the stock in his own pocket, thereby protecting himself from possible future takeover bids and meddling from stockholders. He had to go through the rigamarole of electing officers to the new company, opening up his books, presenting annual reports, and holding stockholder meetings, but at least no one could oblige him to put crème fraîche in his sauces. All the hassles were offset, though, by the wonders of the stock market that a few entrepreneurs had discovered before him: the IPO gave him enough cash—4.5 million euros—to finish off his building program and buy his last two Tantes.

Unsurprisingly, many of the new stockholders were affluent sorts—bankers, brokers, doctors, and business and professional people who had been frequenting the restaurant for years, who had succumbed to Bernard’s overwhelming charm, and who felt something like a national duty to support the man who had brought the grand old Côte d’Or back to glory.

“A lot of it was emotional—affectif,” said Bernard. “They knew me and they knew my cooking. Many of them bought shares to give away as Christmas presents.”

Within a few years the revenue of the group had more than doubled (up to 11.6 million euros by 2001, for instance), and the overall business was turning a respectable profit just shy of 1 million euros a year. In later years the stock generally followed the downward trend of the Paris Bourse, but Bernard was quick to point out that his shares fell less than most, and that on average he proved to be a better performer than any number of mighty industrial giants and golden-boy dot-com flashes in the pan.

“Those jerks with their start-ups de merde are gone now, and I’m still here!” he crowed with a defiant Mussolinian chin thrust. A few seconds later, though, he plummeted right down into the other pole of the bipolar personality.

“I pass my time trembling,” he admitted, sotto voce.

In mid-December of 2002, I came to Saulieu again to do a little article for the Wall Street Journal on the whys and wherefores of his stock-market adventure. Most of the details of that reporting job—the facts, figures, and dates—have by now slipped into the approximations of vague memory, but I recall with perfect clarity the scene of my lunch that day.

As luck had it, I enjoyed the signal honor of sharing lunch with Dominique in the best seat of the house—the chef’s table in the kitchen with its red leather bench and stainless steel top, set on a raised dais just a couple of meters from the passe where the chef makes his last examination of plates before passing them on to the waiters. As a gastronomic teaser before the rest of the lunch, Bernard had decided on an off-menu treat for me that afternoon: huîtres chaudes, six huge (triple-zero) Belon oysters quickly grilled under the salamandre, and sauced with a reduced coulis made of the oysters’ own juices, to which a little touch of balsamic vinegar had lent a slightly acidic bite.

On my side, the conversation with Dominique was lively and rich with factual information; while taking notes, I earnestly endeavored to limit my sips of the chilled, lemony, deliciously alluring Chablis in my glass, lest I bungle on some date or figure.

On his side, behind the stainless steel counter separating us, Bernard officiated, inspecting and barking orders as he supervised the succession of plates going out to the dining room. He was a very busy guy, as chefs invariably are twice a day, but at the same time he was preparing my oysters himself. He was in profile as he stood holding his hand under the orange glow of the salamandre to test the heat, when suddenly, out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, he whirled around, looked me somberly in the eye, and made an announcement.

“C’est jamais gagné,” he said—the battle’s never won.

At the moment I took it for a total nonsequitur, and a rather puzzling one at that, because there wasn’t a trace of a smile on his face. Two months later, I learned that it wasn’t a nonsequitur after all.