V

THE GREAT ADVENTURE BEGINS:
Paris with Pygmalion, 1972–1975

Summer 1972. His obligatory year of service militaire accomplished, Bernard used his free soldier’s pass on the French rail system for the last time and stepped off the train at Clermont-Ferrand’s main station. Now what?

There was nothing much on the horizon. He moved back in with his parents and started looking for work. It was a bleak, disappointing time. He heard that Claude Perraudin had already gone from Paul Bocuse’s restaurant to the tiny Pot au Feu of Michel Guérard’s in the Parisian suburb of Asnières; before long, his fellow apprentices Bernard Chirent and Jean Ramet would be taking the same route. That was a very good gig, for prestige as well as for instruction. Guérard was the most exciting chef of the moment, a man who had appeared like a sudden meteorite on the Parisian gastronomic scene. Landing a cooking job in his place was like going for an advanced degree from Berkeley after graduating from Harvard.

But there was none of that for him—not for the wise guy, Chef Jean’s bête noire. Bernard found himself back home at square one with strictly nothing except memories of the comradeship of his fellow apprentices, a few savory conneries, some notable victories in pétanque, and a basic knowledge of the cooking techniques of the Troisgros brothers. That and the ambition that still fired him: to somehow reach the level of success that had brought what seemed like half the world’s celebrities and beautiful people tramping down to Roanne, slavering for a chance to open their wallets and see what salmon tasted like with sorrel prepared by seven scared kids in floppy toques. But how do you get there from here?

For want of anything better, Bernard went to work in the charcuterie founded by his grandfather, now run by his uncle. He asked around and wrote a few letters, but nothing interesting came of the effort. He had hung his highest hopes on the Auberge de l’Ill, a Michelin three-star establishment in Illhaeusern, not far from where he had done his service militaire. With its elegant dining room overlooking a storybook garden shaded by weeping willows on the banks of the little river Ill, the Auberge was an idyllically beautiful restaurant that, like Troisgros, happened to be run by two brothers, Claude and Jean-Pierre Haeberlin. Claude, the shy, soft-spoken one, stayed in his kitchen to cook an exalted panoply of Alsatian specialties while Jean-Pierre, his twinkly-eyed kid brother, did the decoration and ran the salle.

In all probability Bernard would have managed to visit the Auberge during his time in Phalsbourg, perhaps dropping by the kitchen and chatting with some of the apprentices and commis, even if he never would have dared to approach Chef Claude or Monsieur Jean-Pierre personally. Had he given it some thought at the time, he would have seen that Illhaeusern nicely illustrated the classic formula for a country restaurant’s success, and that it was the same old, eternal story: location, location, and location. Half an hour’s drive from Strasbourg, the same from Basel, it lay just off the nexus of autoroutes that served France, Germany, and Switzerland, and the high-speeding, high-spending Teutons and Helvetes outnumbered the Haeberlins’ French clients two to one. This vexing question of location would follow Bernard for most of his professional life. The 30 or so kilometers that separated Saulieu from the Autoroute du Sud was a weighty albatross just waiting to be hung around his neck when he finally set up on his own and shot for the stars.

Assuming that the magic Troisgros name would be enough to open the door, he wrote Claude Haeberlin to offer his services as commis, but his hopes were thoroughly dashed: He never received an answer, not even an acknowledgment. In all probability his letter had somehow gone astray or got lost in a shuffle of papers, because the Haeberlin brothers were too polite and professional to simply ignore a job request from an ex-Troisgros employee, but as far as Bernard could see, it was just another snub. Or was it even worse—might they have called Roanne to check, and received a negative report? He was too mortified and proud to follow up by telephoning Illhaeusern or writing a second letter.

This was the situation, and this was his frame of mind that November when he ran into Bernard Chirent, who had popped down from Paris to visit his parents before leaving for his next job. Bernard was having a smoke in the street outside the charcuterie when Chirent appeared out of nowhere: Deus ex machina, just like in the movies. And, also just like in the movies, it proved to be the turning point of his life.

Chirent explained that he was about to quit his job in Paris and go to work for the famous Roux brothers in London. The boss is looking for someone to take over from me, he explained. Why don’t you give him a call? His name is Claude Verger. Bernard made the call. Verger sounded interested. Come on up and see me. We’ll talk.

A few days later Bernard hopped back on the train, this time bound for Paris. He was twenty-one years old, and he had never been in the big city. He felt like a hayseed, and he rather looked like one, too, as he fumbled and wandered around the Paris metro system in his shiny new shoes, smelling of Eau Sauvage and trying to locate a place called Porte de Clichy. He finally got there, but what he saw was hardly a reflection of the professional glory he had in mind. Clichy was an undistinguished proletarian suburb in the northwestern corner of Paris out beyond Montmartre and Pigalle, squeezed between a crook of the river Seine, the railroad tracks leading to the St. Lazare station, the boulevard périphérique ring road, and a factory sprawl of the Citröen auto-works. His rendezvous was in a place called Le Bistrot de Lyon, at number 1, rue de Paris, almost astraddle the administrative boundary where Clichy met the Paris city limits.

Standing under the roar of the traffic on the périph’, Bernard found himself before a typically modest turn-of-the-century bistro on the ground floor level of a five-story apartment block: big awning in front, the inevitable bar on the right and the kitchen behind, and seating room for thirty or forty clients. He entered and asked for Claude Verger. A skinny, businesslike man of fifty or so approached, wearing a cook’s apron and a sardonic smile. His face bore the characteristic flush of the wine-drinking bon vivant, and when he spoke, his voice had a curiously thin, high-pitched timbre to it. Bernard-Galatea was about to have his first experience with his very own Pygmalion.

Claude Verger was quite a case. All the important French chefs knew him well, and the mere mention of his name, then as now, was enough to elicit a smile and probably a burst of laughter, too, because he was one of gastronomy’s true characters. Like Bernard’s friend Guy Savoy, but one generation earlier, he was born and raised in Bourgouin, east of Lyon by the border with Switzerland. He reached manhood just in time for the disaster of the Second World War, and his experience as a bombardier in the hopelessly outclassed French air force—first trying to drop bombs on Germans, then getting bombed twice as hard in return and finally limping off with the remnants of his unit into French North Africa, where he nearly died of yellow fever—forged an attitude toward life that never varied from then on.

Claude Verger didn’t give a damn. He was not exactly a nihilist, because he wasn’t a philosopher, but rather a man who had decided once and for all that since human existence was some kind of cosmic joke, you might as well do your best to enjoy your brief moment of participation in it. He tried a number of different trades and a couple of marriages, but what set him on the road to meeting Bernard was the Robot-Coupe. This clever French invention, the ancestor of all the millions of food processors that now take up space in households around the world, was originally designed for professional kitchens, as a quick and handy labor-saving device to perform the slicing, dicing, shredding, and grating operations that from time immemorial had been done by hand.

Soon every chef wanted one, and Claude Verger, a friend of the company’s boss, was the guy selling them and picking up a 15 percent commission on each one. For the best part of a decade he haunted all the top restaurants in France, invading their kitchens to demonstrate and explain his gear. He was good at it, too, surprisingly good, because his manner was a complete break with the usual honeyed, ingratiating tone of traveling salesmen of the traditional school. Quick, nervous, bright of eye and sarcastic of tongue, Verger entered a kitchen like a bantamweight boxer spoiling for a fight, challenging any chef to not appreciate his visit and buy his equipment. Joshing and chivvying instead of flattering, he made a few enemies, but mostly friends, among the chefs, because he knew his business and he knew cooking, too, from the years he had spent running a little restaurant with his sister in Bourgouin. In the sixties, there wasn’t a two-star or three-star chef who wasn’t familiar with Verger’s rubescent face, his crooked smile, his plentiful wisecracks and his criticisms.

Verger was a virtuoso of criticisms. As a professional frequenter of cooks and kitchens, he became, by the simple logic of his work, something like a professional eater, too, and it did not take long for him to feel the dilemma common to all full-time gastronomic critics: Most of the time he wasn’t hungry. Great French food day after day after day was too much to take. He yearned for cooking that was simpler, lighter, and less abundant.

“When I saw the way chefs worked,” he told me, “I figured I wasn’t any dumber [pas plus con] than they were, and I could do at least as well. Since I had no formal training as a cook, I had my own special techniques. Most of the time, I didn’t understand their cooking. Or rather, they didn’t understand mine. When I asked them why they did a dish this way or that way, they told me that was how it had been done for the last hundred or two hundred years, so that was the way it should always be done. I didn’t agree with them. Ninety-nine percent of what I was eating in their places was de la merde.”

Singular type, this Verger—somehow he got away with his outrageous rants without being conked on the head with a potato masher, because chefs generally liked him. Not only was he funny and entertaining, but it was also clear that behind his provocative exaggerations there lay an undeniable germ of truth. Just as Henri Gault and Christian Millau had seen, much of French cooking had become too heavy for modern tastes. After the deprivations of the gray, hungry war days, when fear of the occupying Germans had been compounded by an almost total lack of decent food, it had only been natural for a famished population to dive joyously into rich feasts of sugar, cream, butter, milk, and all the other luxuries they had been dreaming of for six long years. By the seventies, though, the orgy had begun to pall. It was time for a change. Claude Verger was one of the point men of the movement to make that change a radical one.

His greatest ally in this gastronomic jacobinisme was Michel Guérard. By the time Verger met Guérard in his minuscule Pot au Feu, on the other side of the Seine from Clichy, he had sold so many Robot-Coupes that he had a wad of cash just waiting to be spent. Although they were entirely different in character—Guérard was a visionary, one of the rare cooks who deserved to be called an artiste, while Verger was an opportunist, a clear-eyed businessman who knew how to count—the two men became fast friends. Guérard appreciated Verger’s humor and blunt honesty; Verger recognized a true genius in Guérard. You know, you ought to open a bistro, Guérard idly told him one afternoon as they were exchanging ideas. Verger did some quick mental calculations, took a second look at Michel’s situation, and came to a quick conclusion: The guy was right.

Michel had bought his doll’s house restaurant in 1962, not long after his thirtieth birthday, at what the French call a vente à la chandelle—a colorful but nerve-racking style of property auction dating all the way back to the fifteenth century. The auctioneer opens bids by ceremoniously lighting two small candles—or rather tallowed wicks—one slightly longer than the other. The bidding briskly follows, because the wicks last no longer than fifteen or thirty seconds. The first candle goes out (the tallow’s greasy smoke the undisputable sign of its extinction), and then the second, giving bidders one last chance, because at this moment the auctioneer lights the third and final wick, and the suspense mounts as the bids fly. The last one to shout or make a sign before the third candle winks out and the black smoke rises is declared the winner. The Pot au Feu, situated on an impasse next to some old factories in an undesirable corner of Asnières, wasn’t exactly a prime piece of real estate. Michel got it with a princely bid of 18,000 francs—about $3,600 at the time.

It was the gastronomic deal of the century. Soon word went round the foodie grapevine that extraordinary things were happening in Asnières, and the Pot au Feu morphed into the most coveted eating address in France—getting a table reservation there became the gold standard of challenges for the concierges of every ritzy hotel in Paris. By jamming one table behind the bar and another against the door to the toilet, Michel was just able to squeeze in thirty clients, both lunch and dinner. That was it, and anyone who wanted to pee during chow time would have to go outside and find some other solution.

Who, everyone wondered—as they swooned over his salade gour-mande (mixed greens, asparagus tips, string beans, shallots, truffles, and foie gras), his feuilletés of asparagus tips, prawns, and truffles, his John Dory with a pepper sabayon or justement, the peasant pot au feu that he dressed in formal clothes—was this guy Guérard? Very interesting case. Short, puckish, bright of eye, and quick to smile, he was cute as a button, but he was also devilishly smart and reeking of creativity. Son of a modest family of butchers in the riverside town of Mantes la Jolie, 30 miles west of Paris, he had been apprenticed at a tender age to a pâtissier-traiteur of the old school, working impossible hours for next to no pay but learning a thousand tricks of the trade, everything from making a perfect, and perfectly delicate, pâte feuilletée (puff pastry) by laborious hand-rolling, to vinifying the pressings of his boss’s grapes into drinkable wine, to slaughtering a calf when quenelles de veau were required for a vol au vent.

“It was a fabulous experience for opening the mind,” he says today. “I had the luck to see every side of the business. My apprenticeship was unbelievably rigorous, but good God—after you’ve gone through that, you’re at ease anywhere.”

After the army, young Michel soared through the triennial Meilleur Ouvrier de France—Best French Artisan—competition, easily winning his diploma in the pastry chef category, and went to work at a couple of the most prestigious addresses in Paris, the Hôtel Crillon and the famous Lido music hall. It was enjoyable work, and the pay was good, but his extraordinary talents were eclipsed as pastry chef in what was a large, anonymous brigade. It was only when he struck out on his own, abandoned pastry, and turned full-time to general cuisine that the French came to the sudden realization that they had a monstrous talent out there in a musty little corner of Asnières. More than Paul Bocuse, more than even the Troisgros brothers, it was Michel who became identified as the pope of the cuisine called “nouvelle.”

Michel the magician invented the way Mozart composed, the way a bird sings, seemingly without effort. Endlessly spinning new ideas from what he happened to find in his local markets, he never felt the need to reach for the exotic spices, chemical stunts, or foreign ingredients that a clutch of lesser chefs were to brandish a generation later. Any follower of his career in Asnières and then later in Eugénie-les-Bains (500 miles to the south, where he continues a no less dazzling career today) could cite dozens of remarkable creations that Michel pulled out of his toque in Asnières, but the cleverest one of all has to be the ailerons de volaille aux concombres that for years held pride of place on his menu.

It was elegant, it was original, and it was cheap—exactly the kind of haute cuisine that any entrepreneurial chef dreams of. From his days at the Lido, Michel knew that the easy-eating legs and filets removed from the chickens and served up to tourists who came for the music hall’s lush spectacle, the winsome bare breasts and the oh, là là, but only incidentally for the food, left hundreds of orphaned wings to be thrown into the garbage every day. Moving into high finance, he negotiated a deal to officially purchase the wings for one symbolic franc (twenty cents), laid out a bit more for a few cucumbers, shallots, mushrooms, and tomatoes and, with that, had the makings for a little masterpiece. He blanched the wings, removed the central bone and pushed the meat forward to make a kind of chicken lollipop that he sautéed to a lovely golden color. He did the same for the cucumbers, which were turned into little olive shapes and blanched before taking their place in the pan of hot butter. Make a quick little sauce of diced mushrooms, shallots, tomatoes, and herbs mingled with white wine* and a bit of cream, and you have a dish to tickle a millionaire’s fancy at a cost to you of peanuts. No business school can teach masterstrokes like that.

Claude Verger was no fool. He spotted Guérard immediately as a culinary grand master, but saw something else: He was also a capitalistic wunderkind. Completely apart from the great food, the relaxed, low-key atmosphere that he created in the Pot au Feu at minimal cost rapidly became an obligatory part of the city’s chic, the place where the Parisians, eternal slaves to fashion as they are, had to go see and be seen—le must. Verger saw a gold mine and was determined to go out and dig into the lode for himself.

The times were propitious for it. With les trente glorieuses well under way, the French economy was booming, and a new class of prosperous young professionals had money to spend on la belle vie, but for the most part felt uncomfortable in the grandiose three-star places. (Guérard at the time had two Michelin stars, even if his cooking was easily worth three. But the guide’s Nomenklatura hesitated to give the ultimate accolade to Asnières. How could you rate a restaurant at three stars when clients had to wander outside to go to the bathroom?) Paris was wearing miniskirts and long hair now, and the kids were dancing to an exciting new zeitgeist. Rock and discos had left the fox-trot and the paso doble irretrievably in the dust, and if you could serve innovative cuisine—all the better if someone qualified it as nouvelle—customers would appear out of nowhere to gobble it up, even in crummy surroundings. Especially in crummy surroundings: Slumming it was fun, mon cher. The Parisian beau monde was learning to revel in refined simplicity—smart new bistros, the chewy sourdough loaf of Lionel Poilâne, the pungent raspberry-and-banana nose of Georges Duboeuf’s Beaujolais Nouveau.

And the Barrière de Clichy of Claude Verger. Claude followed Michel Guérard’s lead to the letter, avoiding the stratospheric prices of Paris intra-muros and snooping around the seedy suburbs until he found a bistro in Clichy so cheap that even if it didn’t work, he would not be too seriously out of pocket. He signed for it in October of 1972, named it Le Bistrot de Lyon, and called Roanne for help. Jean-Baptiste told him that an ex-apprentice named Bernard Chirent was doing some extras at Castel’s, the most fashionable disco in town, located on the pleasantly named rue des Canettes (Duckling Street). Chirent was happy to take the job, but he warned that he was just marking time before he left for London to go to work for the Roux brothers. Find me someone to take your place, then, Verger asked. And that was how Massillon’s ex-king of gab, the best pétanque player ever to work in the Troisgros kitchen, landed in Clichy on a typically lousy November day, talking with this improbable character named Claude Verger.

No sense in beating around the bush. “I want three stars,” Bernard announced.

“You start January first,” Verger shot back.

That was the gist of it, anyway. In truth, both of them were improbable characters, and this intersecting of orbits was so right that it was as if it had been preordained, because each one’s strength played to the other’s. Behind both their hyperbolic natures there also lay a good measure of purely rational calculation. Verger was willing to hire Bernard without having seen him work because he knew Troisgros University and the quality of its instruction. Even its lowliest apprentice would be better (and cheaper—that was part of the equation, too) than some weary old journeyman from a placement bureau. Bernard, for his part, had heard plenty about Verger from Chirent, notably his friendship with Michel Guérard. And of course he was very well aware of Guérard’s meteoric rise in the culinary world. Announcing a three-star ambition may have been something of a youthful fanfaronade, but it was not entirely out of place within the context.

Most restaurant owners would have laughed in his presumptuous face, but Verger neither mocked nor criticized Bernard for this outlandish naïveté. He was intelligent enough to know that some personalities flower through rigor and discipline, others by suggestion and encouragement. Instinct told him that this kid, with his ingenuous enthusiasm and illusions of glory around the corner, was definitely the second kind. Not having undergone the caste system of traditional kitchen brigades himself, Verger had no prejudices or preconceived notions about seniority on the professional ladder. All he cared about was the result. If the kid could work hard and cook the way he wanted him to, he could imagine himself as Escoffier reincarnated, for all he cared.

“His ambition was there right from the start,” Verger told me, “and I never put him down. He was the kind of guy who would be destroyed if you discouraged him.”

Verger’s intuition proved to be tragically prescient, but it was also perfectly apt. From the very start there seemed to be a chord vibrating between these two men that made the fit exactly appropriate for each one’s purpose. Destiny is a big, heavy word, but there was something like it there. By whatever chemistry that courses between human beings, Bernard decided almost instantly to hitch his wagon to Verger’s star, and Verger’s habitual filter of world-weary cynicism softened up enough to perceive more in this big puppy dog from Clermont than just another rawboned auvergnat hick. Over the next decade he would evolve from Bernard’s boss to his adviser and guru until finally—as awful as the platitude sounds—he was very much like Bernard’s spiritual father. An often tyrannical father, to be sure (those flinty opinions of his didn’t go away), but a father figure nonetheless.

Bernard’s class at Troisgros University was a rich vein that Verger mined assiduously as he built the success that was to see him multiply his restaurants into a minichain, building on the success of one to create another until, at the high point, he had seven bistros scattered around Paris. The gold mine that he dug proved to be even richer than Guérard’s, and to keep it turning over at a good clip he hired not only the two Bernards, Loiseau and Chirent, but, later, Claude Perraudin and Guy Savoy, too, as the empire expanded. He also made a firm offer to Jean Ramet, but Jean was not a gambler. After passing a few months learning magic at Michel Guérard’s place, he opted for the prestige of René Lasserre’s three-star kitchen on avenue Montaigne. Of all the Troisgros crowd, though, it was Bernard who felt the deepest affinity with Verger, adopted his style most closely, stayed with him the longest, and learned the most.

It was quite a ride. The first thing Bernard noticed when he reported for work two weeks before his twenty-second birthday was that his new boss had changed the name of his place. What he had seen as the Bistrot de Lyon was now La Barrière de Clichy. This was further evidence of the salutary influence of Michel Guérard—or rather, of his girlfriend and future wife, Christine, a cool, brainy woman of strong opinions strongly expressed. “Bistrot de Lyon is a ridiculous name,” she snorted. “Call it La Barrière.”

She was right—her suggestion was a much better, more original, and appropriate name, harking back to the medieval days before France was entirely unified into a single modern capitalist state and trade became free, when customs barriers stood at the gates to all large cities—one of them hard by the address of Verger’s new restaurant. So Barrière de Clichy it was. Bernard’s job was to build on its remarkable start and keep it turning over smoothly. Claude had already made a successful launch, with a little help from his friends.

He had opened the restaurant a few days after signing for it that same October. With Guérard behind him for advice and recipe ideas and Bernard Chirent in the kitchen, he had felt reasonably optimistic. “I was the boss, the chef, the waiter, the sommelier, and the dishwasher,” he told me ruefully as he recalled his first few precarious weeks. “For the first two months there were strictly no clients—empty, nothing. Do you know what it’s like to go four days in a restaurant without a single client, when you’ve got fresh food on hand that will spoil if you don’t use it up? My only clients in those days were Michel Guérard and our friend Jean Delaveyne,* who had the Camélia in Bougival. I had always gone to their places to eat, so now they came to mine to cheer me up and help me with all that surplus food. That was nice of them, but what I needed was paying customers.

“Then one day in December, I saw two pilgrims come through the door asking if they could have lunch—it was Robert Courtine of Le Monde and Jean Didier of Le Guide Kléber. No sooner had they started eating than an inspector from the Michelin showed up! What a day.”

The two pilgrims had been sent by Michel Guérard. Obviously, Michelin had been snooping around his place, too, even if the inspector’s arrival at the same time as the competition was purely fortuitous. In any case, if ever Verger had doubted the importance of the press, his doubts vanished after Courtine published an article describing the rabbit with sautéed turnips that he had enjoyed at La Barrière de Clichy. The pump was primed: Next day at lunch every table was filled, and the restaurant prospered continuously thereafter.

When Bernard arrived in Clichy, the first instruction he received from Verger covered, naturally enough, the kind of cooking he wanted: top-quality ingredients treated quickly, lightly, and at the last minute. In sum, the cooking program he outlined for Bernard on his first day was a simplified, stripped-down version of the Asnières style—Michel Guérard for Dummies, as it were.

But Verger’s Second Commandment, constantly reiterated over the months that followed, was one of basic PR: always, always, court the press. Gastronomic critics were the best clients to get into the restaurant, of course, but any journalist at all was important, because journalists always know other journalists, and word gets around. Journalists are hungry but their pay is lousy, so be nice to them. Bernard never forgot the lesson.

Journalists followed journalists to La Barrière, then, and the crowds followed them, sure as night follows day. Suddenly the place was booming like the Pot au Feu, and the complicity between Verger and Guérard made for the most potent one-two punch on the Parisian gastronomic scene. When Guérard needed an extra hand, Verger sent him Chirent to work out the last few weeks before he left for London; Guérard paid back the debt in person, often coming by Clichy on his day off, or after closing his place for the evening, to assist Bernard in the kitchen during the long late-night hours. As long as the customers kept coming Verger liked to keep serving, and La Barrière catered so thoroughly to the after-theater crowd that it seemed to be almost perpetually open. Cuisine specialists would have viewed the spectacle of Guérard assisting Bernard as approximately equivalent to Vladimir Horowitz coming by to turn the pages for a Juilliard student’s recital, but that was the time, that was the friendship between the two men, and that was the atmosphere. It was groundbreaking, it was fun, it was exciting, everyone was making buckets of money, and Bernard was in the thick of it.

He shared a cheap, remarkably unkempt room in Clichy with Chirent, but neither used it for much more than to collapse on his bed late at night, because they were both going flat-out. “We slept, showered, and then went off to the restaurants,” Chirent said. “We practically lived in them, because we were working like donkeys—fourteen, fifteen hours a day. Bosses would never be allowed to work employees like that today. Even on our days off we worked, because there was always something that needed to be done. We held up by drinking espressos.”

No sweat. Bernard loved every minute of it. He would have been happy to put in twenty-hour days if he had to, because his world had gone topsy-turvy overnight. The laughingstock who had dumped the coal into his frying pan, the incompetent who got knocked headfirst into a tub of potatoes, the guy whose letters didn’t even get answered, was suddenly chef de cuisine in one of the most fashionable restaurants in Paris at age twenty-two. Everything was go, go, go—they were already writing about him in the press! Well, about his work, anyway.

“Barrière de Clichy (Bistrot de Lyon),” wrote the GaultMillau magazine in March, still not entirely comfortable with the restaurant’s change of name, “made known by Michel Guérard, Claude Verger’s friend, who sends the overflow of the Pot au Feu to Clichy. Cuisine very much derived from Guérard. Sublime salads. Délice de foie gras, artichoke hearts, green beans, vinegary frisée lettuce—and (audacious!) a variant with lobster and olive oil. Rabbit with finely sliced turnips. Veal sweetbreads with truffle sauce. Pears poached in Brouilly.”

“Verger had a real flair for discovering talent,” Pierre Troisgros said, reminiscing about the old days over a lunch of roast lamb at his house in Roanne. “He gave cooks responsibility very young, and with Loiseau and Savoy he hit the bull’s-eye. Jean and I were of the generation of cooks who had to work their way up, and you could never get to the position of chef before you had a certain maturity. Chef de cuisine at twenty-one or twenty-two struck us as an aberration. But Verger knew exactly the style of restaurant he wanted and the kind of modern cuisine he intended to serve in it. And he came on the scene at a time when gastronomic journalism was evolving, and Gault and Millau were looking for young chefs to make into stars. Just a few years earlier a success like that would have been unthinkable. Bernard and the Barrière would have remained completely anonymous.”

Napoleon, it is said, had a single overriding criterion for choosing the men whom he would name as his generals: They had to be lucky. So it was that Bernard began to savor the sweet taste of fame when he was barely past age twenty-one. He was lucky and he always had been. It was something that followed him almost unfailingly through life. Whenever he was faced with disaster, he somehow managed to squirm away at the last minute; if he did fall into trouble and woe, he always bounced back with that big, ingenuous grin that so aggravated Chef Jean. It was Bernard Chirent who opened the Barrière with Verger, and who did the cooking on the famous December day when Robert Courtine, Jean Didier, and a Michelin inspector arrived at almost the same minute—but since he was going off to London, it was Bernard who inherited a restaurant that was going well and heading higher.*

He was lucky and he was a fast learner. Troisgros is good, very good, Verger told him, but what you’re going to do here is Troisgros cuisine in my style. “I gave him specific illustrations,” he explained. “Spinach, for example. In those days the Troisgros cooked a kilo of spinach in five liters of water. I taught Bernard to just wash it and then sauté it in butter with the water that remained on it from the washing. Same thing with mushrooms—everything done at the last minute in butter or olive oil, and cooked as little as possible. I never stewed veal sweetbreads or kidneys—I sautéed them quick, over high heat, just for a few minutes.† I cooked my fish mostly à l’unilatéral—on one side only, and served them rose à l’arête, still a little pink at the bone.”

The matter of fish rose à l’arête is something of a minisaga of modern French cuisine. Good fish is expensive, and it is rapidly ruined when overcooked, of course, but it is equally inedible when it is not cooked enough. Verger was a leading prophet of the new school of walking the razor edge of almost-not-enough, searing the little critter on one side, tossing in a lump of fresh butter, and covering the pan for the hot steam from the butter to rise and cook the top, just barely enough.

“It was an idea that Henri Gault had at the same time as me,” he told me. “I always tended to undercook things. When people saw me making fish rose à l’arête, they said quel con, you don’t know what you’re doing, but then when they read in the magazine that Gault and Millau liked it that way, everyone started doing it. Of course that’s the way I taught Bernard to do it.

“There were just three of us in the kitchen—me, a helper, and Bernard. At first he was a little bit mystified by the different approach I expected of him, but after three or four days he got the picture. He was a lively guy. He caught on quick.”

Verger was opinionated and often impossible, but he was no dilettante. He knew his stuff, and at the start of his new boy’s incumbency in the kitchen he was at the piano almost as much as Bernard, watching and directing. Gradually, as Bernard assimilated his lessons and grew in confidence, he backed off, spent more time in the salle among the guests, and assumed the classical role of director rather than executor of the cooking—exactly as Bernard would do in later years at Saulieu. By the middle of 1973 the roles were well established: Verger was Chef, Bernard, chef.

Guy Savoy, who came to the Barrière as chef in 1976, and who had the pleasure of mentally pinning the Michelin star on his blouse when it arrived, was by then an experienced cook, but even with all his professional baggage he was impressed with his new boss’s skills. “He spent a lot of time in Rungis [the Paris wholesale market] and brought back only first-rate produce. He was quite knowledgeable about cooking, and he had certain basic principles—‘pas de cuisine de pédé,’ he repeated all the time. ‘Pas de cuisine de puceau’—no cooking for fairies or virgins—cooking that had balls, he said. Best produce, nothing set up beforehand, everything at the last minute, quick cooking, very exact seasoning. No stocks, no classical sauces, just deglazings and little short jus—juices. Food had to be chewy, and above all have taste—real, firm, strong taste. He was a good cook, less of a technician than we were, but his instincts about cuisine in general were excellent. And once he saw that we understood his style, he gave us almost total liberty to make what we wanted.”

By then Claude had perfected a winning formula for his minichain of Barrières: eager young cooks hired after formation by respected masters; careful preliminary instruction in the style of cooking he demanded, followed by independence of execution, once they got it right; only top-quality ingredients—all the money for food, nothing for the décor. Verger himself chose the produce for his burgeoning little empire. Three times a week he rose at 2 A.M. to hustle out to Rungis an hour later to snap up the best fish in from Brittany and the finest and freshest fruits and vegetables. He was a careful buyer and a sharp bargainer. He knew what he was about, and he commanded respect among the wholesalers.

The theoretical underpinnings of the cuisine that Bernard would be developing in Saulieu were already established at Poquelin: a straight line from his mother’s home cooking—those simple deglazings for sauces—to Troisgros to Verger, with homeopathic doses of Guérard thrown in. Not too much of this last, though—attempting to copy Guérard has always been a perilous enterprise. Bernard knew it, too.

“Bernard was a good cook,” Guérard told me, “and he was clever enough not to try to make dishes that were over his head. He mastered certain things and he did them well. They were quite a couple, he and Claude. The restaurant made a hit because Claude was an exceptional composer and Bernard executed his recipes well. Verger did his lobsters à la minute, and served them out of the shell on a puree of watercress. It was very good that way, too. With his rabbit, he sautéed his turnips raw. That was something you would never have seen in classic cuisine, where the routine was always to cook the turnips first in boiling water.”

Among all the new dishes and combinations that Verger threw out to his Parisian fans, it is his rabbit—the lapin sauté aux navets crus—that became identified as his signature dish, the one that sticks in everyone’s memory thirty-plus years later. As luck had it, it was this same creation that broke Bernard’s anonymity and brought him his first bit of personal fame. It came via the pen of Michel Piot, then gastronomic critic of the daily Le Figaro.

“The first time I went to the Barrière it was Jean Didier who brought me,” Piot recalled. “Everyone was talking about this guy Verger who had come up from the provinces and opened a bistro where the food was as good as a starred place. We went without declaring ourselves, and ate incognito. It was very good—rabbit with turnips. After we had finished we told the waitress who we were and asked if we could see Monsieur Verger. She kind of blushed. He was away, she said. It was his cuisine, but he wasn’t the one who had made it. Oh, really? Well, we’d like to see the person who did it, because we really liked it a lot. The waitress said, I’ll go see.

“Five minutes later this boy arrived from the kitchen, covered with sweat and trembling like a leaf. So that was how I met Bernard Loiseau. It was obvious to us that this was an immense cook, and I wrote him up that way in the paper, saying we had eaten admirably well in a bistro style that was profoundly in the French tradition, but with food that was classical and modern at the same time. ‘We did not have the chance to meet Claude Verger,’ I wrote, ‘but we had the great good luck to meet the one who does his cooking for him—Bernard Loiseau. Remember this name. You’ll be hearing it again.’ ”

Although Piot said nothing about his dessert in the article, the chances are good that he and Didier enjoyed another Barrière specialty that was headed straight for the same kind of international celebrity as the now-ubiquitous tiramisù and crème brûlée: the tarte fine aux pommes. Like so much else, this brilliant little inspiration had originated in the well-made noggin of Michel Guérard. Abandoning the pâte brisée and almond cream of the classical French apple tart, Michel set thinly sliced apple sections onto a disk of puff pastry, brushed them with butter and sugar, and slid the finished product into a gentle oven for an hour, just long enough for it to cook to a beautiful uniform gold. Verger adopted the tarte fine outright with Guérard’s blessing, and it conquered the world. Bernard didn’t forget that, either.

Now that the press had another identity to chew on in addition to Claude Verger’s already arresting personality, Bernard’s name began appearing in articles next to his mentor’s, and sometimes even separately, on his own merits. His love story with notoriety was off to a good start. But just then, toward the end of 1973, Bernard made a disastrously ill-advised decision: He impulsively bolted from Clichy to take a job as cook in the Hôtel de la Poste, a very classical restaurant with two Michelin stars in Avallon, a sleepy old fortified town 150 miles south of Paris, at the gateway to Burgundy. Exactly why he did it is a matter of some disagreement. Bill Echikson, whose book Burgundy Stars recounts a year spent in the presence of Loiseau in the early nineties, psychoanalyzed this departure as a fit of adolescent rebellion against an overbearing father figure. Dominique, Bernard’s future wife, wrote in Bernard Loiseau, Mon Mari—Bernard Loiseau, My Husband—a memoir that she published in France seven months after his death, that the young cook felt he wasn’t progressing at Clichy anymore.

“He wanted to redefine the menu according to his own ideas,” Dominique wrote, “but Verger refused. The proprietor was wary of his protégé’s immoderate taste for the most expensive produce. He wanted to continue controlling the buying himself, and the best way to do it was to keep the upper hand on the menu.”

Balls, Verger replied, in essence. He, Claude Verger, was the boss, the one who paid the bills and the salaries; he was the one who did the buying and he always bought only the best and most expensive ingredients, in any case—he didn’t need Bernard to tell him to do it. And there could never have been even the hint of a debate about handing over his prerogatives to his employee. “Bernard left because he saw those stars,” he said with a shrug. “There were two in Avallon and none in Clichy. It was as simple as that.”

Given the avowed, lifelong, and undeviating goal that Bernard was chasing, coupled with his excessive hurry-up nature, it is Verger’s explanation that rings truest. But all parties agree on one thing: Bernard’s bailout was a vast connerie. “They had him gutting chickens by the ass-hole,” Verger snorted.

That was a typical Verger kind of imagery, but it was also accurate. The job Bernard had landed in Avallon was to run the garde-manger, and preparing poultry would be one of his main responsibilities. He didn’t like it. What he had been expecting was the big-league stuff. He wanted to be at the piano, like Chef Jean. The hotel’s boss looked at his meager CV, looked again at his twenty-two-year-old face, and decided that the boy was trying to peter plus haut que son cul, as the sanctified French expression has it—to fart higher than his ass. He fired him three weeks later.

Oh, dear. Now it was back to Clermont and back in with his parents again. Bernard swallowed his pride and lowered his sights. There was always the Frantel. He heard they were looking for a cook. Frantel was a modern operation, one of those cookie-cutter chain hotels that by the seventies was rapidly supplanting the mom-and-pop Hôtels Moderne throughout France. Although totally lacking in charm, beauty, and character—they were typical products of modern engineering and the business school mentality that could just as well be set up in Indianapolis, Lagos, or Stuttgart—they were at least efficient and not too expensive.

Bernard got the job and lasted exactly a week before getting fired from there, too. His Troisgros–Verger cooking style and his extravagant personality were exactly right for scandalizing the B-school–trained, rule-following administrator in charge of what passed for gastronomy at Frantel.

“He found himself up to his neck in what they call le ratio,” Verger said. “Everything was calculated, every slice of meat had to be exactly 150 grams—and in Clichy he had gotten in the habit of cutting generously.”

It was one more flop for him to digest, but it also offered another lesson: everything in its time. Bernard had to learn at least a few preliminary atoms of patience. He gulped, picked up the phone, and called Verger.

It was a good thing he did, because, justement, Claude was about to open his second Barrière, on the little rue Molière, smack in the middle of Paris next to the Palais Royal and a brisk five-minute walk from the Opéra. Barrière Poquelin, this one would be called. Here, too, the name was a bright idea bearing the shadow of Christine’s influence. It would have been perfectly logical to call the place Barrière Molière, but that was obvious and boring. Jogging clients to think twice by reminding them that the playwright was born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière was his professional pseudonym) was like a little wink that lent it a smart, theatrical cachet.

The name clicked, and everything else with it. Poquelin was so close to the center of everything that journalists, jet setters, actors, actresses, and the world’s most skillful collection of ancillary showbiz freeloaders were no longer obliged to get their feet muddy by trekking all the way out to Clichy. Verger held what amounted to a permanent open house in his new Barrière, and nothing pleased him more than to lead his clients down the steep stairs into the little kitchen in the cellar to watch his eager young star in action. When, late at night, the last kidney had been sautéed and the last crayfish shucked, Verger exactly replicated the modus operandi of Jean-Baptiste Troisgros in Roanne with his two sons, and brought Bernard up into the dining room to mingle with the beautiful people. Instantly and unanimously, Bernard charmed them. When that signature smile of his, a huge, face-splitting jack-o’-lantern grin, combined with the effusive chatter that came as easily to him as meow to a cat, Bernard exuded a warmth and humanity that effortlessly melted the stoniest Cartesian reserve.

Poquelin was a theater, and every night was a different play within a play. Host and impresario, Verger chivvied and wisecracked, insolently flattered the showbiz types, and yelled at the journalists for not giving his boy Bernard more and better press, while everyone was giving everyone else two* Gallic kisses on the cheeks, one for each side, saying darling and cher ami, and sometimes even paying the bill. That was fine with Verger—among the role players there were plenty of normally paying customers to keep the place going nicely, and he and Bernard were fast becoming an integral part of le tout Paris.

Early in 1974, Gault and Millau reflected the generalized infatuation with the latest Barrière by awarding it the very respectable grade of 15 in its merit scale of 1 to 20. “A remarkable chef, Bernard Loiseau, who flew the coop† from Troisgros, [offers] a menu full of invention, a cuisine that is simply admirable, including marvelous salads and sublime braised sweetbreads with spinach.” (It was in February of the same year that I first met Bernard, down in his kitchen in Verger’s catacombs, as he hyperactively cooked for a full dining room while grinning the huge, irresistible grin that was his eternal trademark. The lunch menu he fired up for me was fast, intelligent, and as close to perfection as I could have imagined any solo cook managing when he had thirty or forty other clients to take care of at the same time: frisée salad with truffles; chicken sautéed with crayfish; tarte fine aux pommes.)

According to Dominique Loiseau, Verger’s insistent promotion of Bernard as a personality among the personalities who haunted Poquelin enabled her future husband to gain ten years of professional life by establishing his credentials once and for all as not just a legitimate chef de cuisine in spite of his young age, but by making him a famous one, too. At age twenty-three he was kissing starlets’ cheeks, backslapping big-name TV producers and presenters, and saying “tu” to every journalist who came along. Bernard took to the celebrity game as if he had been born to it. Boisterous, vociferous, and optimistic, he let fly with the same skills that had made him Massillon’s king of gab. And the Parisians liked it. They always look for someone to erect into stardom, someone to talk about in the endless talking that characterizes the Parisian scene, and for talking about cuisine, Bernard was perfect: He was young, handsome, overpoweringly energetic, and unfailingly friendly. For his part, he was discovering something about himself, an unshakeable character trait every successful chef seems to be born with: He loved to receive people and he loved to please them. For the moment his cooking was mostly Verger’s, but his personality was his own, and it was so strong and so persuasive that suddenly he was leapfrogging all the other kids of the Troisgros kitchen.

Chef Jean’s bête noire was going places. Little could Bernard suspect, as he rattled his pots and pans or later, after the service, as he swam in the cigarette smoke, the noise, the japes, and the jabberings of his Parisian clientele, that his next stop was to be a silent, godforsaken little town in the middle of the windswept Morvan plateau. And even less, of course, that it was to be for the rest of his life.