VI
LET’S DO IT:
A Rocky Start in Saulieu, 1975–1976
Early in February 1975, driving back to Paris after visiting his sister in Bourgouin, Claude Verger decided to stop for lunch at the Côte d’Or in Saulieu. After passing by Beaune and Dijon, he quit the autoroute at Bierre-les-Semur and, following twisty little country roads through the villages of Précy-sous-Thil and Montlay-en-Auxois, arrived at the northern edge of town. It hadn’t changed a bit since the last time he had been there. Saulieu never seemed to change anymore, now that the superhighway had drained the traffic that used to flow down the Route Nationale 6. February was a lousy time to come visiting, too. It was cold, dismal, and rainy, and the fourteen or fifteen hotels that had fed off the R.N. 6 in the glory days—an absurdly large number for a town of less than three thousand souls—loomed empty and somber, several of them shuttered tight, awaiting a hypothetical return of clientele with the spring sun. The life-sized bronze statue of a bull, honoring the cattle-raising tradition of the Morvan Plateau (the soil was good for little else), stood as stolidly as ever at a grassy square near the town hall, but none of the rare passersby, hunched down against the weather, would have granted it even so much as a glance. The statue, the work of a moderately esteemed sculpteur animalier born in Saulieu with the slightly ridiculous name of François Pompon (1855–1933), was about all that the town could claim by way of distinction. That and the hotel-restaurant La Côte d’Or.
More than a decade had passed since Alexandre Dumaine had taken his retirement—coincidentally, both he and Jean-Baptiste Troisgros had died just the year before—and the time since had not been altogether kind to the grand old barn. Dumaine’s successor, an equally traditional if somewhat less illustrious cook named François Minot, had maintained a culinary offering—thick slices of Morvan ham in cream sauce, inevitably served on a bed of spinach, steaks from the white Charolais cattle that grazed on every local hillside, lamb chops with green peppercorns, and his own version of Dumaine’s classic pâté en croûte—of high enough standard for Michelin to award him two stars. That was the plus side. On the minus side, the autoroute bypass had so dramatically diminished clientele that Minot had been able to do little more than simply keep his head above water, putting off repairs and redecoration of the hotel and hanging on to Dumaine’s old kitchen as it was. His single investment of consequence had been to replace Dumaine’s antique coal stove with a more modern one that burned heating fuel. (Dumaine’s stove had shared a hot-water reserve with the hotel’s clients; when too many of them took baths at the same time, the stove began to lose heat.) Even the new installation was showing signs of fatigue, though, and day by passing day, slowly and almost imperceptibly, the whole establishment was taking on that indefinable but clearly recognizable air of genteel shabbiness that marks places and people that had known better days and were reduced to the edge of penury. Minot was ready to throw in the towel.
“You know a lot of people in the business,” he said to Verger in the dining room. “Can you find me a buyer?”
“No problem,” Verger shot back automatically, almost without reflection. It was true: He did know a lot of people, his business was going very well, and he was brimming with confidence. He was sure he would run into someone who was interested. After all, the Côte d’Or was still a very big name. He drove off turning the idea over in his head.
A week or so later he was back in Saulieu. “Have you found me your guy?” Minot asked. “Yeah,” said Verger, “but I forgot to ask you the price you wanted.”
When Minot named the sum, Verger realized he had guessed right: the price was surprisingly low, even cheap. It looked like Minot just wanted to get the hell out of there. “OK, it’s agreed then,” he said.
“You’ve got power of attorney for the guy?”
“No,” said Verger. “I’m taking it for myself.” He drew out his checkbook and wrote out a 10 percent deposit on the spot. Before the month was out he was back in Saulieu again, this time to sign the documents making the sale official and to hand over final payment. It was quite a moment for him. The former Robot-Coupe salesman, former part-time cook in an insignificant Bourgouin bistro, was now owner, master, and commander of one of the consecrated temples of French gastronomy. It was not unlike a tugboat captain taking over the Queen Elizabeth.
But Claude Verger was a tugboat captain with a mattress—several mattresses—full of money, a fast-expanding business in Paris, and the clear head of a successful entrepreneur who was exploiting a going thing. So if there was emotion at the signing ceremony, there was also some solid reasoning, built around a single overriding idea: Put Bernard in here. With his energy and enthusiasm—or his rashness, or whatever you could call the fire in him—he might just pull this thing off. It was worth a try.
Things were going very nicely for Bernard in Paris just then, thank you very much. The GaultMillau guide for 1975 had already qualified Barrière Poquelin as “one of the best little restaurants in Paris,” citing specialties of chicken with crayfish, and green bean salad with foie gras, and identifying Bernard by name. His glory was abuilding, as was a lasting friendship with Henri Gault, a jovial, discerning gourmet who loved the light, fresh, last-minute style of cuisine that had filtered down to Bernard by way of Troisgros, Guérard, and Verger. Gault and Christian Millau were already gained to Bernard’s cause and proved to be faithful and enthusiastic supporters of the Côte d’Or under his stewardship. But even if they, along with Michel Piot, Robert Courtine, and a few other Parisian restaurant critics, were the most important for professional fallout (that is, on this mortal side of the empyrean where Michelin reigned), Bernard continued to sedulously cultivate journalists of all ilk, exactly as Verger had told him to.
“I used to call Verger ‘Chef Pipeau,’ ” said François Roboth, a photographer and food specialist for Le Figaro who later went on to edit a short-lived restaurant guide. “Then when I met Bernard and saw him doing his number, I named him ‘Chef Super-Pipeau.’ ”
Roughly translated: “Chef Bullshit” and “Chef Super-Bullshit.” Roboth spoke the term affectionately, but, in view of their relentless campaigns of PR and jollying up the press, there was more than a grain of truth in these titles for Verger and Loiseau. “Bernard was a very engaging guy, really an exceptional person,” Roboth remembered. “He had a way of drawing you out—prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai—saying one thing while actually meaning something else, to find out what you really thought. He had a kind of peasant shrewdness to him, and he deliberately played on ambiguity. ‘I’ve got to go now and take care of the pipeau,’ he used to say. He was a lot less naïve than he appeared.”
So who was manipulating whom? The eternal question about Bernard’s psyche was there from the start, and a lot of those clever, nimble-minded Parisians who patronizingly took him for just a charming, ingenuous kid were being assessed much more coolly than they ever realized by those big brown auvergnat eyes.
It was around this time, if Verger is to be believed, that Bernard’s relations with the press moved to an altogether different plane and took a rather more direct form of contact: He lost his virginity. Claude Perraudin and the other Troisgros apprentices had already noted back in the Roanne days that their swaggering friend, the motormouth who could trade repartee at the drop of a wisecrack, was painfully shy with girls. Logically enough, they attributed it to his formative adolescent years at Massillon, living under the thumb of the priests.*
“Bernard was always very introverted where girls were concerned,” Bernard Chirent remembered. “Come to think of it now, in Roanne we never got into ass talk [parler cul] with him the way we did with the other guys. Never. It was a mixture of several things in him, I think—Boy Scout mentality, religion, timidity.”
Whatever the profound psychological foundations for Bernard’s sexual Sahara, it lasted all the way to age twenty-four, according to Verger’s version of events. It was then, according to this same account, that a female journalist from TF1—the biggest and most popular national television chain—radically resolved the matter, with not a little encouragement from Verger and Roboth, by seizing the lad by the ear and dragging him into her boudoir. Whether he went whimpering and protesting or whether he took his punishment like a man is not recorded.
It was not long after his boudoir traumatism that a sadder and wiser Bernard received an exciting piece of news to lift his morale. “I’ve found something for you,” Verger announced. “You want three stars, but you’ll never get them in Paris. The investment’s just too big, and with the prices here, you’ll never make it. But in Saulieu you’ll have a chance.”
Verger’s offer was not pure charity. He knew that in spite of Bernard’s extreme youth and inexperience, he had the drive and charisma of a potential star of the trade. Already a fellow entrepreneur—an author and food critic who moonlighted as an agent—had been circling around him at the Barrière Poquelin with a flattering argument: I can set you up. A guy with your talent could make money cooking in a rabbit hutch in Paris. “The only rabbit hutch I want is three stars,” Bernard shot back memorably.
So Verger’s offer of Saulieu looked tempting. Bernard hitched a ride with François Roboth and drove down with him for lunch at the Côte d’Or. Unsurprisingly, considering his own very Manichean tendencies and the years he had spent at Verger’s side, he decided on the spot that Minot’s Dumaine-derived cooking was de la merde. He must have shown his disdain—Bernard was never able to hide anything—because he and Minot cordially detested each other from the first moment they met. Unfortunately, the animus that developed that afternoon was to weigh heavily against Bernard after Minot signed for the sale, when he liberally spread the word around the profession that the Côte d’Or was headed for disaster under its new leadership.
“What do you think?” Bernard asked Roboth as they looked around after lunch.
“You’re going to need plenty of courage and determination,” he mused. Roboth was right. Dumaine’s little dining room, fairly glowing with the patina imparted by decades of intimate contact with foie gras, truffles, aged cognac, and thousands of deliciously perfumed décolletés, was an elegant piece of history, but the kitchen was antediluvian, the hallways drafty, and the hotel run down and neglected. The imposing Hôtel de la Poste, just across the street, looked much more impressive: bigger, better, cleaner. Roboth remembers his friend falling into uncustomary quiet and contemplation on the drive back to Paris. The prospect of moving down to the middle of nowhere to take over this white elephant was enough to make even Bernard hesitate, but still it was the Côte d’Or, a monument, in its own way, as prestigious and history-charged as, in lesser fields of endeavor, Yankee Stadium, La Scala, or Lords cricket grounds. Dumaine’s place had been revered, Bernard knew, in every corner of the globe when Troisgros was nothing more than a little bistro across the way from the railroad station in Roanne. Now it was being offered to him on a silver platter. It made his head spin. Courage and determination? Hell, yes! When he got back to Paris he told Verger, let’s do it.
It wasn’t a reasonable decision, of course, but reasonable decisions are what create anonymous careers in international banking, hairdressing, and arbitrage negotiating. Young Bernard was rapidly growing into a make-or-break kind of guy.
“He had to have guts,” commented Pierre Troisgros, half in admiration and half in wonder. “Not many would have dared to take that place on. It was really a big chunk to chew on. I always thought Bernard had a dose of inconscience—unthinking recklessness. If he had reasoned it out and analyzed things, he wouldn’t have accepted the challenge, but he had this daredevil quality in him, and he made it, too, didn’t he? It’s amazing to have succeeded the way he did, starting from nothing.”
On February 28, 1875, Minot took his departure with his wife, his dog, and his suitcases. Bernard arrived with one bag to take over the Côte d’Or for good, and the restaurant didn’t miss a single meal with the changeover. The breathless pace of the whole operation—from first informal conversation to sale to installation of a new chef—was typical of Verger’s get-with-it, hubba-hubba style. Now it was up to Bernard to see what he could do with it. From Minot’s administration he inherited a staff of seven in the kitchen, six in the salle, one laundress, an old receptionist, and a porter. The kitchen was organized in the familiar Troisgros pattern: one second, a pâtissier, and five young apprentices who would soon be moving on, as apprentices always do. The dining room staff, though, was something else. They had been there for so long that they constituted something of a monument by themselves—the oldest maître d’hôtel totaled forty-eight years of service, reaching all the way back to the prehistoric days before Alexandre Dumaine.
Truculent old salts, they had all been formed in the grand manner of the oreiller de la belle Aurore, of headwaiters in tails and the ocean-liner style that Dumaine had brought to Saulieu and Minot had hardly altered. They were economical of smiles, but beneath their gruff exterior they proved that their hearts were in the right place when their new chef, only twenty-four years old, arrived from Paris: They hated him.
“Cuisine moderne,” they said to one another as they inspected Bernard’s dishes, drawing out the modeeerne in a long, contemptuous drawl. The old receptionist, Madame Rancin, took a positive pleasure in clucking, shaking her head, and telling clients that everyone was very, very worried. Someone—the culprit never owned up—started a rumor that the new Côte d’Or was intended as the first link of a fast-food style restaurant chain that Verger was contemplating.
At his lunch with Roboth, Bernard’s dismissive reaction to Minot’s cooking came back to haunt him almost immediately; the new Michelin guide not only removed both of the Côte d’Or’s stars, but dropped it from the restaurant category altogether, listing it as a hotel only, and not a very distinguished one at that. For all any passing motorist could tell, Bernard’s new command didn’t serve any meals at all. To this day, Verger is convinced that Minot called every guide and gastronomic critic on his list and advised them to blacklist Saulieu. Particularly telling had been his haste in notifying Michelin that he was pulling out and leaving his place to a green youngster from Paris. His warning came just in time for the guide’s editors to remove the two stars and the restaurant symbol before bringing out the 1975 edition at the traditional Easter time release date.
It was a painful blow. “Sometimes I would see big, expensive cars pull up in front of the place,” Verger remembered, “then drive off after the people looked it up in the Michelin.”
Verger had hoped to retain one of Minot’s two stars, and at the very least a respectable restaurant symbol like the crossed red forks and spoons that denoted a classy, pleasant place for a meal. But no. Michelin clobbered him with a gastronomic haymaker. Why? Verger could only assume that, in addition to Minot’s abuse, the grande dame of avenue de Breteuil disapproved of him and his trendy Barrières because they were the darlings of those vulgar interlopers from GaultMillau and the food critics of the Paris daily press. Everyone knew that it was standard Michelin practice to demote a restaurant a notch or two when its chef retired or left for another place, but this total wipeout smacked suspiciously of spite. (Grandes dames can get prissy and vengeful when they feel offended, especially by the competition.)
Now young Bernard found himself up against a double challenge: no listing in the guide and defiance from his staff. It was a distressing new experience. Working almost alone in the Barrières—he had never had more than a single assistant—he had not been faced with the need to command and motivate a staff, and even less, a staff of recalcitrant professionals who were without exception older and more experienced than he was himself. After the warmth and acclaim that had washed over him in Paris, he suddenly found himself the butt of provincial hostility in Saulieu. Disoriented, lonesome, and unsure of himself, he suffered cruelly.
“I used to work my ass off all day long,” he told me several years afterward, as he recalled his debut in Dumaine’s old barn, “then go up to my room and cry for most of the night, I was so miserable and frustrated.”
The problem was that at age twenty-four he was still a boy, only on the verge of becoming a man. Like a dog pack, his theoretical subalterns sensed his insecurity, took advantage of it, mocked him behind his back, and spoke openly of their doubts. How could they fail to when they saw the way he wore his emotions on his sleeve, when his salary was less than that of the head maître d’hôtel, and his entire living quarters consisted of a single room upstairs that looked like a student’s pad, with the toilet and shower down the hall? The boy did not exactly exude an aura of authority.
“He was like Rastignac [the ambitious arriviste of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine],” said Gilles Pudlowski, editor and publisher of the Paris-based restaurant guide bearing his own name. “But he lived like a migrant worker in one miserable little room. He had his clothes hanging all over the place and his precious press clippings in a big pile up on top of the wardrobe. He had already dedicated his life to his work, but I couldn’t understand why, if he was the boss, he lived in that lousy room. ‘Because Monsieur Verger put me here,’ he told me. It took him three years to ask Verger if he could change it to something bigger. He was really like a big kid.”
There it was, the cruel truth: Bernard wasn’t the boss, after all. Everyone knew that it was Verger who wrote the checks, who owned the place, and who paid everyone’s salary, including the chef’s. Certainly he gave Bernard carte blanche to create his own personalized cuisine, but when Verger and his wife came down Friday evenings to spend a long weekend like country squires in Dumaine’s old apartment, there was no doubt about who was in charge. It was only gradually that Bernard’s shoulders broadened and he began asserting his authority as the one giving the orders, whoever the titular owner happened to be.
For the moment, the kid was in Verger’s service—and at his service, too, because he cooked for him and his wife, as well as for the paying customers, over those long weekends. For Claude, the Côte d’Or was like a résidence secondaire where he could take it easy and regain some of the nights of sleep he had missed by his thrice-weekly nocturnal treks out to the Rungis wholesale market buying produce for his burgeoning chain of Barrières and for the rather more grandiose folly he had acquired through his bargain-hunting in Saulieu.
Juggling the management of his little empire, Verger established a routine that varied little in the first few years: he bought the foodstuffs for the Côte d’Or; Alfred, the porter, drove up to Rungis two or three times a week to pick them up; Bernard stayed in Saulieu to cook the purchases; and the profits from the Barrières kept the big old place afloat until the customers started to come back.
And Verger was sure they would come back, because Bernard could make things happen. Verger had been around the restaurant business long enough to sense that Bernard’s combination of charm, charisma, and vision would bring the journalists scampering down to Saulieu to see what was going on with their buddy Bernard, and that after them the regular customers would be sure to follow. He encouraged Bernard to be Bernard, then, to develop his cuisine and his personality as fast and as strongly as he could.
Nor was his approach purely mercantile. Although Verger was undeniably a hard-nosed businessman with profits to make from the people he hired, he was not immune to personal feelings, and he had a genuine liking for this surprising, cheerfully overwrought kid from Clermont. For Savoy, Perraudin, Chirent, and Bernard’s other companions from the Troisgros days, the relationship between the older and younger man was clearly that of father to surrogate son, even if it was marked for years by a curious kind of formalism: as long as he was Verger’s employee, Bernard addressed him in the respectful vous form, while Verger responded with the tu generally reserved for children or social and professional subordinates. (Like so much else that he learned from Verger, Bernard continued this practice with his own staff in later years.)
“You can say tu to me when you become owner of the place,” Verger told him. Meanwhile, as the ambiguous situation of one boss and one not-quite-boss continued, the air in the Côte d’Or grew less and less breathable until finally, after long, anguished hesitation, Bernard lanced the boil.
“One morning,” he told me some years later, “I came down from my room and called them all together. ‘Take a good look at my face,’ I told them, ‘because I’m here to stay, so you’d better get used to it. Now either do that or get out.’ And you know what? They got out. None of them is here anymore.”
He must have spent days, if not weeks, rehearsing his speech and pumping up his courage to face down the mutinous crew, because if ever there was a constant in Bernard’s life, it was this: He was big and strong, but he hated violence and he fled from confrontation. There would be several other critical moments in the following years when he pulled himself together, only at the very last moment, to avert disaster that was looming in his face. But the showdown in the dining room was the best move he could have made, because with the departure of the Côte d’Or’s graybeards he began building a youthful new staff, in both kitchen and salle, whose competence and easy, unfeigned amiability was to become the envy of the profession.
Nevertheless, the first few years in Saulieu were dreadful. If Minot left town a discouraged man, he at least had enjoyed the steady drawing power of two Michelin stars. With zero stars in 1975, the Côte d’Or clientele dropped off sharply, especially after the predictable summer migration of hungry motorists and foreign tourists had run its course. In those early days, Bernard could not suspect how dramatic the difference would be in Saulieu between the summer and the winter seasons. In Paris and other important cities, restaurants always boom in the winter, because they are havens of warmth and conviviality. Everyone is working hard, everyone is making money, everyone has to go to lunch, and everyone is hungry—a perfect situation for restaurateurs. Making money with a classy restaurant in Paris is like shooting fish in a barrel. In the provinces, winter is like being suddenly shoved behind the Iron Curtain.
As the last vacationers of September sped north, and as October gave way to November, Bernard discovered that he was living and working in Moldavia. Like Verger in the first two months of his tenancy at the Barrière de Clichy, he would see a handful of clients now and then during the week, and a few more on weekends, but some days would pass with only two or three, and some with none at all. The town was barren and there was nothing to do. No movie house, no girls, no action, nothing. In those days, people used to say, the crows flew backward over Saulieu, so they wouldn’t see the misery.
It was after another typically depressing day—on a Saturday evening, as it happened—that Bernard abruptly decided to arrange a little morale-boosting outing for himself and four of his kitchen staff. He piled them all into his little Renault and drove to the White Horse, a rustic nightclub 30 kilometers away in Semuren-Auxois. Rushing back to Saulieu after midnight he missed a corner, totaled his car, and smashed his head so severely against the windshield that he remained unconscious for several hours.
He wasn’t even drunk (Bernard was always extremely abstemious with alcohol), just a bad driver and a sleepy one, going too fast as he always did. No one else was hurt in the accident, but his injury was severe enough to knock him out of action for a couple of days. This was bad news for everyone, but especially Claude Verger, because the regional association of druggists had scheduled their annual lunch for Sunday in the Côte d’Or, and he had no choice but to stand in for Bernard at the piano.
Roast beef was on the menu that Sunday, and Verger decided to cook it in presliced portions, but he was unfamiliar with the caprices and the irregular heat distribution of the Minot’s goofy oil-burning oven. The result was a disaster: Hungry Frenchies are as picky as Goldilocks about the exact cooking of beef—well done, just right, bloody or blue—but at that lunch, half of the pharmaciens complained that their meat was burnt to a crisp and the other half grumped that theirs was raw. An uncustomarily contrite Verger came into the dining room to apologize and explain that the chef had been injured in a car crash. The pouty faces immediately softened. Car crashes were one thing that everyone in France could understand and sympathize with, because in those days before traffic radar and speed limits that were actually enforced, they all drove like fiends. The druggists showed appropriate sympathy for Bernard, then, but also let it be known that ill-cooked beef had better not happen again.
It didn’t. For all intents and purposes, Bernard tied himself to Saulieu for the rest of his life, surrounding his absences with such a wealth of precautions that no client, unless he barged into the kitchen and looked, could tell that the chef was not there. Besides, even when he was there, he would rarely be doing the cooking himself. In the first few heroic years, when Bernard was indeed involved with the hands-on work, he had transferred Verger’s cuisine of the Barrières more or less intact to Saulieu, and did much of the actual cooking himself. As he began developing his own personal style, though, he gradually shifted the cooking duties over to his new kitchen staff, promoting one of his apprentices to commis and, when he saw that he could handle the challenge of greater responsibility, elevating him all the way to second: in practice, the one who actually did the cooking.
Bernard’s move exemplified an old debate and a common misunderstanding: Who is a cook and who is a chef? The situation that he had known in Roanne, where the Troisgros brothers were actually at the stove wielding pots and pans themselves every day, twice a day, was in fact unusual in the world of haute cuisine. It happened because the genius of Jean, Pierre, and their father had unexpectedly rocketed their family restaurant into three-star orbit while it was still an artisanal operation in the hands of two remarkable professionals seconded by teenage apprentices. Far more common at the three-star level are the larger, military-style brigades of seasoned specialists, each working a specific task under the absolute authority of a chef who stands at the passe, taking orders from the waiters, inspecting and adjusting the finished products before passing them back out to the waiters, and generally coordinating the complex clockwork of men, machines, and foodstuffs lying behind a successful dish.
It is a full-time, crucial, and devilishly tricky job, because the chef has to be intimately familiar with all the details of every post in the brigade, and only his eye and his perfectionism stand between a flop and a dazzle. Jean and Pierre Troisgros had a staff of eight behind them in 1968, but today young Michel Troisgros, at the passe of the same restaurant, watches over the work of twenty-two seasoned professionals. In short, the chef directs and the cooks cook. Three-star luminaries of the trade like Pierre Gagnaire and Bernard Pacaud in Paris and Michel Bras in Laguiole, who both direct and cook, are admirable beyond words, but they are relatively rare.
“I must be the world’s dumbest chef, because after all these years I’m still cooking,” says Gagnaire ruefully, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. Anyone who has ever seen him scanning an entire kitchen with his bright blue eye to discover precisely the one dish where the wrong amount of parsley lies on a tiny portion in a tiny ramekin, then shortstopping it and making the readjustment before allowing it to go can get a small idea of the mad perfectionism that drives these characters, and sense the decades of experience that brought them to the almost spooky level of mastery that they demonstrate twice a day.
“Pacaud est un chien!” Bernard Naegellen, retired director of the Guide Michelin, cried the other day with unconcealed admiration. Chef and presiding genius of the classically elegant Ambroisie on the place des Vosges in Paris, Bernard Pacaud could not dream of a greater compliment than to have Michelin compare him to a dog—sous-entendu, a mad dog, of course.
At the other end of the spectrum from these Stakhanovites of the casserole are the CEOs of cooking enterprises, big-picture overseers like Paul Bocuse in Lyon or Alain Ducasse, just about everywhere in the world. These chefs create the style and dictate the cuisine of their restaurants, but may not spend much time at all in the heat of the kitchen, because they have trained people to do that for them. They’d better do it right, too, because these chefs expect very precise, flawless results, and they know everything there is to know about every last detail of their kitchens and the dishes on their menus: That’s how they became chefs. I once asked Bocuse if he was capable, himself, of doing every task that he asked his kitchen staff to do.
“And twice as fast,” he barked back without hesitation. (That was some years back. He now allows that age might have slowed him down to a mere mortal level of speed.) The same Bocuse is not in the least ashamed to admit that long ago he delegated the execution of his cooking, just as Fernand Point did in Vienne. “Who does the cooking in my restaurant when I’m away?” he asks rhetorically, before delivering the prepackaged punch line: “The same one who does it when I’m here.”
That’s fine with Michelin, and in fact Derek Brown, who succeeded Naegellen at the guide’s directorship, frequently repeated Bocuse’s bon mot when he described the different styles and approaches to the restaurant business that he and his inspectors encountered every day. It takes all kinds to make a great restaurant, and as long as the style, the personality, and the quality—the niac, as they say in the trade (probably stolen from the English “knack”)—are present, he wouldn’t care if the cuisine he is judging had been executed by martians.
And, indeed, there is a martian in the trade—an intense, articulate, and perspicacious international businessman named Alain Ducasse, who also happens to be a first-rate cook. (He began the other way around, a three-star cook who turned to the world of business, but his success has been so tremendous that he cannot be viewed now as anything other than a captain of industry who also knows how to cook.) Ducasse has transcended the stereotypical model of the chef so thoroughly that he doesn’t even have a kitchen anymore—or, rather, he has dozens of them around the planet, each one another link in the chain of Groupe Alain Ducasse. Apart from a small Provençal inn that sits prettily in the wilds north of Cannes, he does not actually own the dizzying and apparently ever-expanding list of luxury establishments that comprise the group, but rather lends his name and expertise to a gaggle of financiers eager to reap profits from his fertile brain and the unbeatably strong public image of the first man in history to have won six simultaneous Michelin stars—three in Paris and three in Monte Carlo. Formulating the style and décor of each new restaurant, developing the menu, laying down precise procedures for making each dish to be served there, exercising strict quality control, and training the personnel according to his own exacting standards, he resembles nothing so much as the Ray Kroc of haute cuisine, the pendant at the exclusive, expensive upper end of eating to the prophet of the cheap, mass-produced burger at the lower end. He is the McDonald’s of gastronomy.
“McDu,” he said, with a quick little smile. “I like that.”
There are plenty of different routes, then, that lead to great cooking, but common to them all is this: The end result bears the unmistakable mark of the chef’s personality, whether or not he is the one who actually executes the dishes. Bernard’s route in Saulieu was halfway between the obsessive hands-on approach of Gagnaire and Pacaud, and the virtual kitchens where Ducasse cooks with his brains. As his second grew in skill and confidence, Bernard progressively withdrew from the piano himself to adopt the role that fitted him best: the idea man, the inventor, the tester, the taster, and the motivator. He was smart enough to realize that with the limited technical skills he had gained in two and a half years of apprenticeship in Roanne, he could never hope to rival monsters of technique like Bocuse, Guérard, Ducloux, or the Troisgros brothers—men who had been everywhere and learned everything. On the other hand, he had ambition, energy, and vision to spare, along with a finely discerning palate that with the years was to develop into one of the best in the business.
This proved to be one of the great surprises within the rarified atmosphere of the highest echelons of French haute cuisine. Neither Chef Jean nor Chef Pierre, as they lorded it over their terrified band of bungling apprentis, could suspect that Bernard, their bungler-in-chief, was something of a natural-born genius of taste, a young man whose talent was only awaiting the right moment and the right environment to grow and blossom. As he slogged through his first years in Saulieu, he began discovering that talent himself, then expanding it and perfecting it until it became the leitmotif around which he built his entire career, from zero to three stars. Taste: straight, pure, unadulterated, undisguised taste.