Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  The restaurant’s bar was a shrine, but it was a shrine to Point; photos of Bocuse’s mentor filled the room. Bocuse hadn’t entirely cut himself out of the scene: Numerous pictures of him were scattered around the restaurant. One framed image stood out: Entitled “The Last Supper,” it showed Bocuse and a dozen other prominent French chefs, all dressed in tan sackcloth and seated at a long table bearing glasses of wine and loaves of bread. Bocuse, cast in the role of Jesus, was at the center of the shot, surrounded by the twelve “apostles” and gazing benevolently at the camera with his hands resting on the table and open to the sky. For all its cheesiness, the photo perfectly captured Bocuse’s place in the gastronomic firmament. He was France’s most famous chef and was widely regarded as the chief custodian of a culinary tradition stretching back hundreds of years.

  The elderly man with puffy raccoon eyes who shuffled into the lounge that morning bore only a passing resemblance to the dashing figure in the picture. But despite his frail appearance, the eighty-year-old chef maintained a schedule that would have exhausted people half his age; just hours after meeting with me, he would be off on a four-day trip to Japan, where he was considered to be a virtual deity. Dressed in black trousers and a black sweater, Bocuse greeted me warmly and directed me to a table in the middle of the room. I had been told that he liked to put on a show for visiting journalists, and it didn’t take long for the extravaganza to begin. About five minutes into the interview, a reporter and a photographer from the newspaper Le Figaro arrived and were ushered into the kitchen. (Evidently, Bocuse had been double-booked for the morning.) A few minutes later, “Monsieur Paul,” as he was called, was summoned to join them. After another ten minutes, the kitchen doors swung open and I was beckoned inside. There, I found Bocuse standing behind an island counter in his chef’s whites and toque, meticulously arranging a half-dozen or so fully feathered dead birds and rabbits. In this garb, he looked like another major religious figure: The creaseless, full-length white apron and the way that it clung to his body called to mind papal vestments.

  It turned out the Figaro team was there to shoot a holiday spread featuring the great man. For about fifteen minutes, the kitchen came to a halt as Bocuse’s crew gathered around him to pose. The veteran chef needed no coaching: As soon as the camera started clicking, he tilted his head slightly upward and, suddenly, he was no longer the pope but the famous coq gaulois, the rooster whose imperious manner symbolized French pride and hauteur. The kitchen scene finished, Bocuse led me and the Figaro pair back to the bar, where he instructed a waiter to bring a bottle of wine. I assumed we were going to have a mid-morning aperitif, and we did. But the wine was also intended as a prop for the next set of photos, this one of Bocuse à table, raising a glass in celebration. After snapping those pictures, the photographer asked me to sit next to Bocuse and to clink glasses with him. I did as told. “No, look each other in the eyes, like lovers,” he commanded with a laugh. I lifted my glass again and cast a sheepish glance at Bocuse. I was stunned by what greeted me—a facial expression so amorous that for a moment I feared he was going to try to lock lips. The man knew how to play the camera.

  By the time the photo session wrapped up, it was past noon. Bocuse suggested that we head to the dining room and chat over lunch. He ordered for me but decided not to have anything himself, which turned out to be a wise choice (but then, he was trading on inside information): The food was awful. It was no secret that the restaurant, first awarded three stars in 1965, had slipped, and it was generally assumed that Michelin continued to bestow its highest rating on it only out of respect for Bocuse. Even so, I was dumbstruck by how bad my lunch was. Every dish was overwrought and plodding, none more so than Bocuse’s homage to his mentor, the filets de sole aux nouilles Fernand Point, which consisted of a piece of tasteless fish submerged in a cream sauce thicker than plaster of Paris and flanked by a small pile of gummy noodles. Forget Point; this was a parody of Escoffian cuisine. No one served food like this in France anymore, and it was especially strange to find it in the restaurant of the most celebrated figure of the nouvelle cuisine revolution. Wasn’t this the sort of gut-busting, artery-clogging fare that Bocuse and his fellow rebels had sought to extirpate? Indeed it was, and they had succeeded—but their success had had little to do with Bocuse. Although he made himself synonymous with nouvelle cuisine, Bocuse’s creative input had been slight. His real contribution had been to redefine what it meant to be a chef, an innovation that did not necessarily redound to the benefit of French cuisine.

  These days, the nouvelle cuisine era, which began in the late 1960s and reached its apogee in the mid-1970s, tends to be depicted as an embarrassing chapter for French gastronomy, a period marked by comically small portions and absurd flavor combinations—food that is as cringe-inducing now as bell-bottoms, disco, and other emblems of that regrettable time. But nouvelle cuisine has been unjustly maligned. For one thing, it liberated a generation of French chefs from having to spend their lives replicating the greatest hits of yesteryear; they were Escoffier’s progeny, but they were no longer his prisoners. Escaping Escoffier was the driving motive behind nouvelle cuisine. The American Journal of Sociology is not the most obvious place to look for an exegesis of France’s food revolution, but in 2003 it published an insightful look at the movement’s intellectual foundation. The authors, Hayagreeva Rao, Philippe Monin, and Rodolphe Durand, explained that Escoffier’s towering influence had shackled several generations of French chefs and denied them creative independence. A chef might own his restaurant, but he couldn’t be his own man at the stove; his role was simply to “translate the intentions or prescriptions of Escoffier’s guide into products. Chefs under classical cuisine lacked the freedom to create and invent dishes, and the nouvelle cuisine movement sought to make chefs into innovators rather than mere technicians.” It helped that French diners were also in the mood for something different. The public was becoming increasingly health-conscious, and haute cuisine was now perceived as oppressively heavy (a recurring theme in French culinary history).

  But these developments in themselves would only have produced incremental changes; what turned the mood in France’s kitchens rebellious was the upheaval that swept the country in 1968. The student riots in May of that year, and the nationwide strike that followed, drove President Charles de Gaulle from office and nearly sparked a second French Revolution. The churning political environment triggered an uprising in the cultural realm. Like the student protesters, writers, critics, artists, and filmmakers rebelled against what they saw as a crushing authoritarianism at the heart of French society, and the result was an outpouring of avant-gardism. The guiding impulse was a desire to be unshackled from tradition, to no longer be bound by the Old Way of Doing Things, to have freedom to create.

  To young chefs, stuck making tired dishes handed down by long-dead masters, this talk of liberation was seductive, and they soon began a joyous insurrection of their own. What distinguished nouvelle cuisine from some of the other cultural irruptions of the period, the American Journal of Sociology article went on to point out, was that it was led by insiders—by French cuisine’s most promising talents, men with impeccable pedigrees who were already assuming leadership roles within the fraternity of French chefs. The desire for change among figures like Michel Guérard, Alain Chapel, Jean Delaveyne, Roger Vergé, Alain Senderens, and Jean and Pierre Troisgros gave nouvelle cuisine instant legitimacy.

  What also set nouvelle cuisine apart was the central role that food journalists played in defining and popularizing it. Indeed, it was as much a journalistic movement as a culinary one, and its foremost chroniclers, Henri Gault and Christian Millau, became nearly as famous as the chefs they wrote about. Gault and Millau were Parisian journalists who had worked together from the early 1960s. In 1969, they started a monthly magazine called Le Nouveau Guide Gault-Millau, which in addition to reviewing restaurants and calling attention to the chefs doing the most interesting New Cooking also provided the ideological und
erpinnings to France’s gastronomic revolution. For Gault and Millau, nouvelle cuisine was a revolt against the conservatism that had settled over France’s kitchens—a conservatism that they blamed in large part on the Michelin Guide, which they viewed as a reactionary influence that had turned high-end cooking into a congealed bore. With their distinctive brand of restaurant criticism—punchy, open-minded, iconoclastic—they sought to knock Michelin from its plinth; to wean chefs and diners of their habit of “slouching toward Bibendum,” as they put it.

  But Gault and Millau were not above a little imperiousness of their own, especially as their prominence grew. In 1973, the same year they issued their first restaurant guide for France, they published the Ten Commandments of nouvelle cuisine:

  Thou shall not overcook

  Thou shall use fresh, quality products

  Thou shall lighten thy menu

  Thou shall not be systematically modernistic

  Thou shall seek out what the new techniques can bring you

  Thou shall eliminate brown and white sauces

  Thou shall not ignore dietetics

  Thou shall not cheat on thy presentation

  Thou shall be inventive

  Thou shall not be prejudiced

  It was a manifesto that invited mockery, and mockery gleefully accepted. It was widely noted, for instance, that nouvelle cuisine was hardly an original concept—that many of these same “revolutionary” dicta had also characterized earlier outbreaks of New Cooking in France. As the British food writer Elizabeth David archly put it, “Nouvelle cuisine then, as now, meant lighter food, less of it, costing more.” The skimpy portions (which were made to appear even smaller by the fashion of using oversized plates and bowls) and the hefty checks rankled many critics and customers. Nouvelle cuisine also gave rise to some truly hideous cooking. Lesser talents attempted to mimic the nouvelle stylings of Guérard, Chapel, and company, and the results were often uproariously bad. Meats and fish were found floating in raspberry sauces, with kiwis inevitably garnishing the plate. Atrocities like these were what gave nouvelle cuisine a bad name.

  But every revolution generates excesses; the real test is what they produce of lasting value, and on that score, nouvelle cuisine yielded quite a lot. It was, firstly, a technological revolution. French chefs began using blenders, food processors, microwave and steam ovens, and other devices that allowed for more precise, less labor-intensive cooking. These new tools were complemented by new ideas about what and how to cook. Reflecting the movement’s roots in the kitchen of La Pyramide, freshness and seasonality were the mantras of nouvelle cuisine: This was market-driven cooking in a way that traditional haute cuisine (Fernand Point excepted) had not been. With leading chefs regularly traveling abroad now and eager to demonstrate the inquisitiveness that Gault and Millau had prescribed, exotic spices came back into vogue after being shunned for two centuries, and there was greater receptiveness to foreign ingredients and influences in general. Japanese cuisine was a particular source of inspiration; many chefs were struck by the simplicity of the presentations and the emphasis on freshness and returned to France eager to apply these ideas to their own efforts. At the same time, new uses were found for more familiar ingredients. Nouvelle cuisine popularized duck breasts, for instance, and the now-ubiquitous magret de canard is one of its more obvious (and delicious) legacies. High-end cooking became crunchier and healthier: Chefs eased up on the butter, flour, and cream, made more use of natural juices, stopped cooking fish and vegetables to death, and sought to produce dishes that would send diners home feeling sated but with their belts still buckled tight.

  The most dramatic expression of this new health-consciousness, and the most famous innovation of the nouvelle-cuisine epoch, was Michel Guérard’s cuisine minceur (loosely, “slimming cuisine”). Guérard, a prodigiously talented chef who first achieved renown in Paris in the mid-1960s, had moved to the spa town of Eugénie-les-Bains, in the Pyrenees foothills, in 1974. Inspired by the setting and by the growing demand for lighter fare, Guérard conceived an entirely new idiom: low-cal haute cuisine. It included original creations—mousseline of crayfish with watercress sauce—but also featured classics such as blanquette de veau, which Guérard retooled into what was essentially an upscale Weight Watcher’s entrée. The genius of cuisine minceur was in finding ways to strip the calories out but keep the flavors in: Instead of flour, butter, and cream, sauces were assembled from vegetables, herbs, and olive oil, yet they were made to taste as rich and substantial as the real stuff.

  Word of Guérard’s alchemy traveled widely, and his cookbook La Grande Cuisine Minceur, was an international sensation. In 1977, a French chef named Michel Richard opened a pastry shop in Los Angeles and was besieged by foodies who mistakenly thought he was Michel Guérard. They would show up with copies of La Grande Cuisine Minceur and ask Richard to sign it; he told them that they had the wrong guy, but many of them wouldn’t be deterred, and he ended up autographing a number of books. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Alexander Cockburn boiled the dietetic message of cuisine minceur, and by extension nouvelle cuisine, down to its crude but joyous essence: “Eat like a hog and stay healthy.”

  But this period also produced some landmark dishes. Probably the most famous was the Troisgros brothers’ l’escalope de saumon à l’oseille, or salmon in sorrel cream sauce, which departed from custom in several important ways: The fish was cut scaloppine-style, it was flash-cooked and left rare on the inside, and the sauce contained not a drop of flour or butter (there was, however, a little cream—nouvelle cuisine didn’t entirely dispense with the good stuff). The quick dip in the pan left the salmon tasting as if it had just been plucked from the stream, and the light sauce had a garden-fresh tanginess to match. In keeping with the spirit of the times, nouvelle cuisine also yielded some truly subversive twists. Guérard and Alain Chapel both put salads on their menus, which was unheard of then for Michelin-starred restaurants. More provocative still, Guérard dared to mix his humble greens with foie gras, while Chapel studded his with lobster. Thus was the revolution sliced, diced, tossed, and served.

  Conspicuously absent from discussions of nouvelle cuisine’s culinary legacy is Paul Bocuse. This is no accident: As cooking goes, he was not a central figure. Christian Millau, interviewed three decades after the nouvelle cuisine starburst, insisted that Bocuse was “never included” in the movement and was just a reasonably good classical chef. This might seem uncharitable of Millau (and a bit of revisionist history, too; after all, the Gault Millau guide named Bocuse to its Chef of the Century list in 1989), had not Bocuse himself provided a wealth of evidence to support this claim. On a visit to New York at the peak of the nouvelle cuisine craze, Bocuse confided to the expatriated French chef Jacques Pépin that he didn’t understand what the whole thing was about, and in the years since the revolution fizzled, he has missed few opportunities to disparage it. When I asked Bocuse, over my distinctly un-nouvelle lunch, what he thought had been the big, animating idea behind nouvelle cuisine, he immediately quipped, “Nothing on the plate, everything on the check,” and burst out laughing. Something told me I wasn’t the first journalist to hear that line. So how did Bocuse become the most acclaimed chef of the nouvelle cuisine era—the one who graced the cover of Time and was personally awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the president of France?

  It was mainly a triumph of showmanship. Bocuse was an accomplished chef, but he was an even better entertainer and self-promoter. Millau, who years later would write a satirical novel featuring a chef named Paul Baratin (baratin translates roughly as “carnival barker”), once traveled to Florida with Bocuse and spent an evening at a garish themed restaurant near Disney World. Bocuse was so smitten with the scene—the big steaks, the cowboys, the dancing girls—that Millau finally piped up, “Paul, I’m afraid you missed your calling in life.” Bocuse nodded in agreement and seemed to really mean it. According to Millau, Bocuse made himself the face of nouvelle cuisine because he was the most m�
�diatique of his contemporaries and wherever the spotlight went, he followed and made sure that it shined brightest on him. “He always wanted to be number one,” says Millau.

  Bocuse used the hype surrounding nouvelle cuisine to turn himself into a global brand. Over the years he would establish frozen food lines in France and Japan, a chain of brasseries in the Lyon area, and restaurants in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Melbourne, and, yes, Disney World. To be sure, his empire-building didn’t only benefit him; French cuisine also profited from it. The hospitality school that he founded, L’Institut Paul Bocuse, became an important incubator of culinary aptitude. In 1987, he started the Bocuse d’Or competition, in which teams of chefs representing countries from around the world battle each other in a multiple-day cook-off, and this event is now considered the Olympics of food and haute cuisine’s biggest international stage. Above all, his bonhomie and bravado made Bocuse an outstanding ambassador for France and French cooking, a point vividly illustrated in the photos that line the walls at Collonges au Mont d’Or.

  However, in pursuing these far-flung interests, he ceased to have a direct hand in the food that went out under his name and thereby helped create a new template for the culinary profession: the chef manqué, discharging the financial affairs of his restaurant and providing “editorial” guidance but leaving the cooking entirely to underlings. This took the idea of liberation far beyond what the nouvelle cuisine revolution had set out to achieve. Nouvelle cuisine was about creative freedom, but with Bocuse, it became freedom to not create—to abandon the kitchen. His absenteeism was a source of controversy and, on at least one occasion, hilarity. In a joint appearance on French television, Mimi Sheraton of the New York Times facetiously suggested that, like the flag that flies over Buckingham Palace when the Queen is at home, a flag should fly above Bocuse’s restaurant when he was in residence. Bocuse was so incensed that as soon as the show ended, he lurched at Sheraton and tried to tear off her wig and mask (this was back in the day when major food critics made an effort to conceal their identities). He missed, and she ended up pushing him to the ground.