XVI

THE THIRD LIFE OF LA CÔTE D’OR

Wedged against the door where he had collapsed, Bernard was already long gone. When a local doctor arrived a quarter of an hour later, he could do no more than certify death by gunshot to the head.

There was no note. This might suggest a coup de tête, an impulsive spur-of-the-moment act that might just as well not have happened at all, but Dominique remembered that a week earlier almost exactly the same scenario had taken place: Bernard had sent Bastien out of the room with oddly uncustomary gruffness. Had that been a near thing? Had he taken up his weapon then, but backed out at the last minute? Who knows. But today, reflecting back on her husband’s behavior during those final months, she is convinced that for some time he had been inwardly caressing the idea of a grand departure en pleine gloire while he was still crowned with the glory of three stars, like a great athlete hanging up his spikes after an Olympic gold medal.

“A question of honor,” she mused. Because, fundamentally, it was honor that he had been chasing throughout his entire insecure life, at least since that ignominious feuille blanche he delivered at his BEPC exam in Massillon. For his part, Hubert shrugged fatalistically. He had seen the fatal issue brewing for weeks, without ever really knowing enough, being quite sure enough, or having enough authority to do anything about it. But of one thing he is certain: When Bernard went through that one last ritualistic folding of his apron that Monday, the story was already played out. It was a dead man who walked out of the kitchen’s back door.

The news was out that very evening, and the country reacted with stupor. Bernard’s suicide was the top item on every TV news program and in every newspaper. The illustrated weekly Paris-Match ran two cover stories on le drame Loiseau. Inevitably, all the stories recalled Vatel, but somehow this event was even more stunning. Vatel was merely an employee of the king’s cousin. Bernard had been of the reigning family, one of the royals of la haute gastronomie française, and probably the most widely known one of the lot. For all the general public knew, this was cuisine’s Sun King himself, the man with the ideal life, the ideal wife, the ideal kids, and the ideal country palace, which was so beautiful that it knocked all his provincial competitors back into second place. But what that same general public could not suspect was that their Sun King was in fact a big, scared kid with an incomplete professional formation, a terrifying load of debt, a mostly empty dining room, and a psyche that he had run to exhaustion by trying to keep pace with the personal mythology he had created. Luxe, calme et volupté was for the clients, not the provider.

The trade reacted with considerable emotion, of a sort and degree that came as a surprise to many. Like a cathartic, Bernard’s desperate act released a torrent of feelings—anger, resentment, injured pride, a sense of injustice—that had been bottled up within the profession for decades. “We can say, we can even affirm, that they killed Bernard Loiseau,” impetuously wrote Jacques Pourcel, president of the Union of Haute Cuisine Française and co-owner, with his brother Laurent, of the Jardin des Sens in Montpellier. Like Bernard, the Pourcel brothers had suffered from Simon’s criticisms and from a strangely equivocal, lukewarm text in the GaultMillau, which had awarded them only 17 points. Paul Bocuse*publicly agreed, singling out GaultMillau’s commentary on Bernard as excessive and needlessly cruel. In short, murderous. “They play with us,” charged the usually placid Jacques Lameloise in Chagny, “raising us up then knocking us down. I think that’s what made him crack.”

There was plenty more comment of the same tone, but rarely as poignant as the words of Jacques Guillo, a modest sixty-year-old chef in the village of Mûr-de-Bretagne. Guillo’s turnover had leaped up 35 percent when his restaurant, Auberge Grand’ Maison, won a Michelin star in 1984, and he had cherished it ever since, offering an impeccably executed classical menu heavily angled toward seafood and local Breton products. But, like Bernard, it was apparently this classicism that did him in with GaultMillau, for in 2000 he was blindsided by an astonishingly malicious critique: “La cuisine of Grand’ Maison is a total failure.”

“I cried for forty-five days,” Guillo said. “I know why Bernard killed himself: It was for his honor. The day of his burial, I took fifteen minutes out of my day to go to the church here in Mûr. I lit three candles and prayed for him, all alone.”

More celebrated names than Guillo came forward to testify to the man-killing pressures of the trade. In Saint-Père de Vézelay, Marc Meneau, looking worn-out and old before his time, admitted to insomnia so severe that he was obliged to regularly knock himself out with sleeping pills, and having entertained thoughts of suicide. André Daguin told me about a less-known cook, a journeyman in the Paris region who blew his brains out a few months after Bernard. And, he added, there was the case of Jean Bardet, a wonderful chef who holds two Michelin stars in the cathedral city of Tours-sur-Loire. He was saved at the last minute only because his wife caught him in the staircase, gun in hand. Bruno Olivier, chef and grandson of the great Raymond Olivier, who had brought the Grand Véfour in Paris from zero to three stars, declared that the loss of a Michelin star did more than any health problem to kill his grandfather.

“It’s difficult to live with [the critics]” said Guy Martin, the present chef of the Grand Véfour, once again holder of three stars. “You’re there, carrying on normally, working your heart out, and they tell you that you’re one of the best. Then suddenly the next year, you’re not. You can’t take those people seriously. They are the ones who should be asking themselves questions, and who should do their mea culpa.”

There weren’t many mea culpas. The critical establishment circled the wagons and defended itself with fervor, inevitably invoking freedom of the press. GaultMillau hemmed and hawed and said it wasn’t our fault, and mighty Michelin took a chastising hit when Pascal Rémy, the rogue inspector who wrote a book about his life in the citadel, revealed that there had been eleven inspectors when he was hired, but only five when he was fired sixteen years later.* François Simon had the elegance to admit to me that he was touched to the quick by Bernard’s suicide, adding that he had suffered a crise de conscience as a result. Curious guy: In the very same article where he had spoken of Bernard’s third star “legitimately under threat,” he added a couple of lines demonstrating something very much like compassion. “Someone who has not seen a chef on the day of the loss of a star,” he wrote, “cannot imagine the dread that has entered his life.”

Fundamentally, Simon’s fault, if fault there was, lay more in the direction of deontology than any legal malfeasance: He had written rumor rather than fact. Having been limited to restaurant criticism throughout his career (GaultMillau before Le Figaro), he didn’t have a feel for the ethical restraints of journalism. Like so many in his curious craft, he had acted more like a gossip columnist than a journalist. And in truth, it wasn’t Simon who killed Bernard, any more than it was GaultMillau. There was more to it than that. But the concomitance of their negative comments that February, coming after eight or ten months of hard times and bad news for Bernard and the Côte d’Or, was doubtless the proverbial final straw on the camel’s back.

Finally, when all the coals have been raked over and all the jealousies, rancors, and self-serving ambitions have been appeased and the pettiness swept away, there are only two real culprits to be blamed for Bernard’s death: the twentieth century and his own tortured psyche. The laws of the market, the endless competition of the star system, the myth of material success, the easy accessibility but terrifying transience of fame—he joyously swam in it all, but it proved to be much deeper and the currents much stronger than he had ever imagined. He lost his way and drowned from sheer exhaustion after keeping afloat all the way into the early days of the twenty-first century.

Whatever the tragedy and whatever the chagrin, the show has to go on in the restaurant trade as much as it does in show business, so they served dinner that Monday evening in the Côte d’Or to the few guests who had already reserved. Patrick cooked while Hubert and the rest of the staff plugged along on automatic pilot, doing their best to act normally. Dominique slept with the kids in the hotel that night, all four of them piled into the huge master bed of room 35, the biggest in the hotel. Before and after sleeping, they prayed together for Bernard’s soul. At first she didn’t have the courage to unveil the whole truth; she told them their father had died of a heart attack. A few days later, as gently as she could, she told them the full story, which in any case they would not be able to escape in the media or simply in talk around town.

They closed everything down for the next four days while the staff arranged the funeral. Whatever Bernard’s failings and weaknesses had been on the intimate human level at which they knew him, they were determined to give him a send-off as grandiose as the wildest flights of fancy on which he had built his personal legend.

On Friday, Bernard was the uncontested star of the cooking world one last time, accompanied by an honor guard composed of all twenty-four of the country’s three-star chefs, who had responded magnificently to Hubert’s and Eric’s calls. Michel Bras flew in from vacation in Peru, and Joël Robuchon, a “virtual” three-star since handing his place over to Alain Ducasse, came from Japan. Ducasse was there, too, and some celebrated names of cinema, radio, and TV, plus an official representative of the government (secretary of state for commerce and light industry), but they were swallowed up by the swarm of three thousand–plus mourners who flowed into Saulieu that afternoon, most of them spontaneous arrivals who had not been formally invited. The twelfth-century basilica of Saint-Andoche, with a theoretical capacity of six hundred, had probably never been as full as on that Friday, going a hundred or more over capacity with the mass of humanity that occupied every inch of standing room on all sides of the central seated area. When no more could possibly be crammed in, the crowd spilled out onto the square in front of the basilica’s monumental entry, or took themselves to the adjacent park, where a giant television screen showed a rebroadcast of the ceremony.*

The government rep spoke, and the mayor, and Paul Bocuse, but it was the great, hulking André Daguin, the voluble rugby-playing Gascon with the impossible accent, who got it just right. Hunched over the lectern—it looked like he could splinter it into pieces if he just squeezed his fists a little harder—he gazed down toward Dominique, self-controlled and erect, sitting with the children in the front row next to the coffin with Bernard’s white apron folded on top. Daguin spoke as a fellow restaurateur who had intimately known the pressures and pains of the race after stars, but also as a friend who, like so many others in the audience, had enjoyed the warmth and generosity that Bernard loved to shower on anyone who took the trouble to come see him in Saulieu.

“For the first time we’re with Bernard and he’s not making us smile,” Daguin said. “For the first time we’re with him and we feel terrible. There’s always a final rendezvous, and now it has happened, but it’s really too soon. The artist has left the stage in full glory. We feel as much like applauding as crying.”

The funeral cortege halted for a few moments before the front entrance of the Côte d’Or on the way to the cemetery, as the staff stood bareheaded in homage. Then the family and a few close friends buried Bernard in a hastily arranged tomb on the site that Dominique had purchased only a few months earlier. Following immutable French custom, the bereft were expected to offer a collation, or light snack, to the mourners. A couple of thousand persons walked down to Saulieu’s cavernous exhibition hall where, on an endlessly long line of linen-covered tables, Gaston Lenôtre, France’s most famous caterer, had laid out a Pantagruelesque selection of cold meats, cheeses, pastries, sand-wiches, mixed hors d’oeuvres, and a selection of wines and fruit juices. It wasn’t exactly a party, but Bernard’s staff had made sure that no one would face the drive back home on an empty stomach. They had no doubt that this was exactly the way Bernard would have wanted it.

The media people threw themselves at Dominique, of course, and she received them with the same graciousness that she had always proffered when it was Bernard they had come to see. She gave interviews to reporters and sat for the TV cameras in a hot, brightly lit studio that the technicians had improvised in the little library next to the billiards room, speaking with calm, thoughtful reserve, reflecting on each question, and trying to answer it as forthrightly and intelligently as possible. There were no histrionics; she sought to create no effects or pull any emotional heartstrings. Dominique remained Dominique. She did not weep for the camera. She refused to. She was too proud and too honest to hoke it up.

She paid for her pride and honesty. In the days after the funeral, a kind of national consensus developed. Wherever you went those days and spoke with anyone who had watched her on TV—and who hadn’t?—the comment was almost automatic. She was so calm. She didn’t cry. She’s cold. She’s heartless. Men were generally willing to at least give her the benefit of the doubt, but women, like the tricoteuses clicking their knitting needles at the foot of the guillotine, were implacable. They had been prepared to lend tearful sympathy, but they had been cheated of the wailing they wanted. Dominique hadn’t fulfilled her side of the bargain.

Guy Savoy, Bernard’s closest friend and longest professional companion since the days of apprenticeship in Roanne, had a better, much closer view. “During the whole awful thing, Dominique was much stronger than any of us. A few days after the drame, one of the waiters came to get me in the kitchen—Madame Loiseau is there, he said. Oh, God, I thought, I don’t know if I can handle that. We’re all such wimps. I was sick, sick. I couldn’t keep from crying. When we sat down together, I couldn’t help her at all. Finally it was Dominique who comforted me!”

Savoy’s handsome bearded face twisted into a grimace as he recounted the experience, and before I quite knew what was happening, he burst into tears in front of me. “Excuse me. We’re in the business of happiness. We’re no damn good at handling grief.”

On Saturday, the Côte d’Or opened its doors again, and the kitchen and dining-room staff plunged back into their well-oiled routine. That weekend and all the rest of weeks and months of 2003 fulfilled the distressing augury presented by Bernard’s death: clientele was down 20 to 25 percent over 2002. Even with this, though, they could count themselves lucky. In 2003 the entire hotel-restaurant sector in France was devastated by one of the worst years in memory, and many of their colleagues suffered 30 and 40 percent losses of clientele.

Withal, 2004 opened with great news, the best that they could possibly hope for: as it had done when Fernand Point died and Mado took over the reins of La Pyramide, Michelin maintained the Côte d’Or’s third star.

“We looked at Saulieu very carefully in 2003,” Derek Brown assured me. “In all, the inspectors had ten or twelve meals there during the year. Obviously it was a very emotional time, but we had to try to be completely clear and objective about what was happening—you can’t make judgments on sentiment. We saw no reason to change our rating. They were really motivated, and everything was at a very high level. If that continues through 2004, I see no reason why they shouldn’t maintain their three stars in the 2005 guide.”*

Since that awful February, a lot has changed but at the same time very little has changed. The biggest difference is a new name. To honor her late husband, Dominique has officially renamed her establishment Relais Bernard Loiseau. The final touches of decoration that Bernard had been overseeing with the architects that winter have been carried out, and now the hotel is pristinely finished to the last detail, exactly as he wanted. Naturally enough, Dominique has become the new president of the publicly quoted Bernard Loiseau Group. The group is debt-free, because the 20-odd million francs that Bernard owed to the banks at his death were covered by the insurance policies that Bernard Fabre had been prudent enough to take out several years earlier on Bernard’s head. Bernard was aware of this, of course, when he committed suicide, and it is anyone’s guess how much, if at all, this influenced his terrible decision.

Ironically enough, Fabre is no longer associated with the operation. In the months after that February it became increasingly apparent that without Bernard, he had become something of a dinosaur, a holdover from the free-swinging old days when the chef as the jovial commander-in-chief delegated entire sections of his domain to those whom he instinctively trusted. Working out of his accountancy office in Auxerre, Fabre had handled all the money matters that bored and baffled Bernard and, as the sole signatory for most important documents, had virtual carte blanche over the enterprise’s finances. His manner was Dickensian, his tools were pen, pencil, and pocket calculator, and he hated computers. This approach would not do with diligent, attentive, up-to-date Dominique. As president, she was responsible not only for the livelihood of the Côte d’Or’s sixty-five employees, but to the shareholders of Groupe Loiseau S.A. as well. She asked Fabre to come and set up his office in Saulieu and demanded her own overview of the books—naturally with a joint signature for all major documents. In short, she decided to demonstrate that she was the boss. At that, Fabre quit.

Reorganizing the company’s administration, Dominique replaced him with Isabelle Proust, a dynamic young graduate of the prestigious École des Hautes Études Commerciales, in the new position of directeur general. What the group has lost in the sympathetic folklore of Bernard’s easygoing personalized business style, it has gained in Proust’s computer-wise efficiency. Dominique also took stock of the times when clients had always been rarest in Saulieu and made a decision that was long overdue but impossible while Bernard was charging around, working himself to death: to close shop for two mornings a week (Tuesday and Wednesday); and to shut the place down entirely for a month between January and February. It is entirely conceivable that Bernard would be alive today if he had dared to take this step and allow himself the time to relax and decompress.

“The old team had their way of working, but I had trouble imposing my ideas,” Dominique said. “It wasn’t easy. They were accustomed to a little enterprise that was essentially the restaurant in Saulieu. Now we’re more than that. We’re a group that’s quoted on the stock market, with an image to manage and everything that goes along with that. Now I have very qualified people, each one working in a particular domain.”

Madame la présidente Dominique surely is, then, but as far as visitors to the hotel are concerned, the role in which they knew her is unchanged. Twice a day at mealtimes she descends from her office above the kitchen and, dressed in the conservative monochrome tailleurs that she prefers, circulates in the dining room to greet guests, answer questions, and exchange comments about the menu. Her temperate, composed manner is about as different from Bernard’s as could be imagined, but the explosive days ended with her husband’s death. Today’s style of luxe, calme et volupté is more low-key, more feminine, and more refined.

The menu, too, has undergone a sea change. Now entirely in the hands of Patrick Bertron, it is evolving in reflection of his own tastes and inclinations. At forty-three, after more than twenty years of working under Bernard, he is as zealous as ever about the quality of the ingredients that suppliers bring into his kitchen. Le beau produit was the basis of Bernard’s culinary philosophy, and the network of suppliers he built up in Saulieu was unsurpassed anywhere in France. Although sticking generally to Bernard’s low-fat, cream-free approach, Patrick is taking liberties with his Maoist purism for the unembroidered, hard-edged essence of each ingredient. Patrick does not fear to deglaze with wine or stronger alcohols, employs many more riffs and minor chords than did Bernard with his C-major cuisine, and is far more open to the spices and herbal accents that his former boss rejected en bloc. He has already been known to include péquillos—lively little peppers—in certain of his creations.

“I don’t rule out any ingredients at all,” he says. That’s hot news for the Côte d’Or. The menu is now about two-thirds Bertron and one-third Loiseau. A special separate section is devoted to Bernard’s great classics, starring the obligatory jambonnettes of frogs’ legs, the crackly-skinned pike perch in red wine sauce, the crayfish with tarragon, and the golden sweetbreads with truffled purée. While allowing that he is open—in principle, at least—to any ingredient he deems useful, Patrick remains devoted to cuisine à la française, and studiously avoids the fusioning world-food craze that has enthralled so many of his confrères. On the other hand, he is a far more technical and sophisticated cook than Bernard, and he is leaving behind the quasi-puritanical absolutism of his former boss’s old culinary style and striking out on his own into new territory.

“In the old days,” he explained, “when we were showing new ideas to Monsieur Loiseau, he always went straight to the heart of the dishes and refused all the touches we had put with them and around them. ‘Take this out, take this out, take this out,’ he would say: ‘I don’t want it, that serves no purpose, c’est nul à chier’ [no damn good], and one after another, they would all disappear from the plate. But the client today wants to see du travail, some inventiveness and fantasy on his plate.”

After more than two years as sole master of the kitchen, Patrick has incontestably imposed le style Bertron, and by all indications it is going down very nicely with the clients. Those who stay for a day or two often opt for a two-meal solution: lunch on the Loiseau menu, dinner on the Bertron, or vice-versa. On Patrick’s menu they might start with crayfish tails and a jellied infusion of their reduced essences with fresh pea shoots and a winey savagnin mousse, or a slice of foie gras quickly seared in the skillet, served with a rhubarb charlotte and tiny candied onions with a gingerbread vinaigrette. Popular seafood courses include a filet of féra from Lake Geneva cooked à l’unilatérale, with a “melt” of young onions and fromage blanc. His duck filet with caramelized skin is already on the way to becoming a Bertron classic, and his stuffed pigeon breast is a professional tour de force whose complexity of preparation would doubtless have sent Bernard into scandalized tirades, but Patrick’s eyes light up and something very much like a lilt comes to his voice when he describes the steps that go into its making.

“First we remove the two breasts. With the meat from the thighs we make a stuffing, compounded with foie gras and a bit of lard. We place this stuffing between the two breasts, which we roll together, cover with a little sheet of crêpine, and tie up. Then we roast it, very gently so it remains nice and pink inside. While this is going on, we make a little jus from the carcass, lightly accented with vinegar—just enough to excite the taste buds. We make a side dish of tiny girolle mushrooms with snow peas, and another of a potato ‘marrow bone.’ This is a potato that we have cut and hollowed out to resemble a marrow bone; in the cavity we put the pigeon’s heart and liver, which we have sautéed, and we close the cavity with a little potato ‘biscuit’ that we have cooked separately. This goes on the jus, which we have further flavored with a bit of sage, and next to it is a candied shallot which has been slowly cooked in the oven on a bed of rock salt, until it is soft and creamy on the inside. We half open it up, like the petals of a flower, and lay inside it the pigeon’s wing tips, which we have previously glazed in the jus. I like to send out a somewhat more complex finished product like this. It shows the client that we have been working for him, that we’ve really put some thought into his plate.”

Were it not for his native Breton reserve, Patrick would be veering close to the rhapsodic here, and it is abundantly clear that he feels and is cooking like a man whose handcuffs have been removed and knows exactly where he is going. He has the kitchen well under control with a new staff that he has handpicked, and his head is full of ideas. With that, with Hubert’s practiced management of the dining room staff, with Dominique presiding over the business side, and with the memory of Alexandre Dumaine and Bernard Loiseau imprinted on every square inch of the place, the rebaptized Côte d’Or is well launched into its third life. How it fares now is entirely up to the new crew.

In the dining room, the crew is still composed mostly of Bernard’s old soldiers, but with new impetus and the new style of management, the manner and course of the big old boat are gradually changing direction. The last time I was in Saulieu, Hubert set up a menu for me that was half Loiseau and half Bertron. Between the jambonnettes of frogs’ legs and the golden brown filet of John Dory accompanied by an artfully stuffed little tomato and a brochette of glazed young fennel, I could scarcely have imagined a better or more refined lunch, but the memory I retain most strongly of that afternoon concerns not so much the food on my plate as the ghost of the man who had created the ineffably pleasant atmosphere that pervaded the place.

I was not, of course, the only one to feel the presence of that ghost. It was all around me, in the traditional architecture that Bernard had loved, in the refinement of detail in the food being served, in both the dignity and natural friendliness of the staff, and the fluent professionalism with which they were busying themselves everywhere in the dining room: no rigid mannerisms, no forced gestures, no obsequiousness, nary a pat, predigested phrase. They were as their old boss had formed them, each one acting out his or her part in the theater of gastronomy as an intelligent human being, independently shouldering responsibilities, and damned if it didn’t seem like they were actually enjoying their work.

About halfway through the meal, Manu, the sommelier chef, dropped by the table to check my glass, but after refilling it, he did something that I think could only have occurred in the Côte d’Or that Loiseau had built. Very quietly and discreetly, he broke a cardinal rule of the trade: He had a drink with me.

Or rather, a toast. It was very quick, so quick that no one else even noticed his gesture. He took another glass, filled it halfway, lifted it and gently clinked it against mine. “To Bernard,” he said, and drained the glass.

He turned and went back to his business with the other guests, cool and faultlessly professional. But the unrehearsed and unfeigned sincerity of Manu’s breach of normal rules only underlined how amazingly successful Bernard had been—big scared kid that he was—in motivating his people to excellence. With all his childishness and glaring faults, they really had loved him, admired him, and been inspired by him. More than his Maoist recipes, his media stardom, or his fervent sales talks, this was the most important, and certainly the most moving, legacy he had bequeathed to the historical old Burgundy palace that he had taken over and transformed by sheer force of will. He had breathed life into it, renewed it, and given it a genuine personality.

“Restaurants are the last refuge of civilization on the planet,” Guy Savoy likes to say. There’s a good dose of exaggeration in an affirmation as broad as that, but Guy can be forgiven for it, because it’s not so far from the truth, either. Certainly, restaurants are businesses engaged in seeking profit, but it is remarkable how often they can be something very much like a calling, how often the artisans engaged in that calling are stricken by the artist’s imperative to transcend the dreadful, passionless bottom-line mentality that more generally rules the modern world.

It’s an odd kind of business, taking money to give pleasure, but no one who has spent some time observing these artisans—people like Jean Ducloux, Michel Bras, Pierre Gagnaire, or Jacques Lameloise—can doubt for an instant the utter sincerity with which the best of them approach their craft. In the big cities, given the nature of big cities, the pleasure is frequently centered on the dazzle and flash of novelty, but in a great provincial inn, the restaurant is only the centerpiece of a larger whole: an escape for a few hours or a few days into an enveloping haven of peace and repose: luxe, calme et volupté.

By the centuries of tradition lying behind them, by their matchless treasury of culinary expertise, and by the sheer weight of their numbers, the inns of the French countryside are an unequalled example of that civilization of which Savoy speaks. It’s a moot question, I suppose, whether in the greater scheme of things, a provincial chef’s life may be placed in the same balance alongside the grand, the rich, and the lofty of the world, but Bernard Loiseau made a passionately sincere and very respectable contribution to that civilization. He is to be honored for it. Indeed, as Guy Savoy cried that afternoon in his restaurant on rue Troyon, he gave his life for it.

He’s not too far from the truth there, either.