Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  Over the next decade, André groomed his son to succeed him, and it was during this period that Vrinat’s interest in restauration finally blossomed. His personal life also flourished: He was married to Sabine Delame Lelièvre and had two children—a daughter, Valérie, and a son, Charles-Édouard. In 1970, Claude Deligne took over Taillevent’s kitchen. In 1972, André retired; the next year, the restaurant was awarded a third star. “The timing was unfortunate,” said Vrinat. “The third star belonged to my father.” In the years that followed, Taillevent not only cemented its hold on that star; it came to be considered the iconic three-star. It was a favorite canteen of French politicians and business leaders, and lunch service would invariably see tables full of gray eminences huddling over digestifs and Cuban cigars late into the afternoon. But the clubby atmosphere was deceiving; whether you were a president or a rube from Peoria, you were accorded the same exemplary treatment. (Among Vrinat’s most cherished clients: the two factory workers who played hooky from the assembly line once a year to splurge on lunch at Taillevent.)

  Vrinat and his staff went about their work with a serene perfectionism; no detail escaped their notice, but they made flawlessness look easy and fun, and they made it fun for their guests. One left Taillevent feeling not just satiated, but happy. If you couldn’t decide between two dishes, the maître d’ would choose for you and give you a half portion of each (which invariably ended up being more like a full portion of both). If you were eyeing your wife’s turbot, chances were there was already another fork on the table, awaiting your grasping fingers. Names were recalled without fail, and personal predilections, too. A glass of complimentary Champagne was sometimes offered at the start of the meal, and a glass of the house Cognac, also gratis, was frequently offered at the end of it. Vrinat would often pour the Cognac himself and leave the bottle on the table, an implicit invitation to help yourself to more if the mood struck. It was a shrewd way of earning goodwill, but it also bespoke a generosity of spirit.

  A paragon of graciousness—the last gentleman of Europe, you might say—Vrinat also had a knack for defusing even the most challenging situations. There was the day, for instance, that Salvador Dalí, a frequent guest, arrived for lunch accompanied by an ocelot on a leash. Vrinat quietly asked why he had brought the cat; Dalí explained it was his birthday and he wanted to celebrate with someone. The ocelot was permitted to stay, and the meal passed without incident. As Dalí was settling up, Vrinat gently told the artist, “Perhaps next time it would be best if your friend didn’t come; I had the sense he didn’t especially enjoy himself.” Dalí took the hint, and the ocelot never returned to Taillevent.

  Vrinat was a charming and erudite man, as conversant in politics and business as he was in food and wine (with three hundred thousand bottles, Taillevent had one of the finest cellars of any three-star, and Vrinat, who participated in the 1976 Judgment of Paris, was considered among France’s foremost authorities on wine). But he was not a backslapper; he was always “correct” and radiated a quiet but firm authority. There was also something just slightly inscrutable about his expression. If a waiter or busboy made a mistake, it wasn’t hard to read Vrinat’s face—the frown could burn a hole in the tablecloth. However, apart from these (extremely rare) instances, he gave little away. Over time, I came to realize that this was probably just as he wanted it. Perhaps he needed a mask of sorts.

  In 1975, Charles-Édouard, then three, was diagnosed with leukemia; he died two years later. It was not something Vrinat talked about, and I only learned of it while interviewing him in November 2001. I knew that his daughter helped run Les Caves Taillevent, the wine shop he owned around the corner from the restaurant, and I’d assumed she was an only child. Vrinat corrected me, saying he’d also had a son but “we lost him.” As the words left his mouth, his voice cracked and his chest heaved as if he were sucking back tears. “I wanted a son,” he said, gazing out his office window, “to take care of him, to be able to do for him the things that my father, because of the war and what happened to my mother, was unable to do for me.” Aware that I was a new father, he then offered me some advice: Make sure to have three children, he said, because if you have two and lose one, the other child will grow up lonely.

  The following June, I went to Taillevent for lunch with my wife and ten-month-old son. Halfway through the meal, I took James out into the front foyer to give him a change of scenery while my wife finished her main course. To my surprise, Vrinat joined us and spent five minutes crouching down and playing with James. As he gently clutched James’s hand and quietly talked to him, his manner wasn’t so much grandfatherly as it was paternal. During subsequent visits to Taillevent, I would show Vrinat photos of James, and I noticed he would linger over the pictures longer than politeness required. It wasn’t hard to imagine what he was thinking. What was difficult to fathom was how this man who had known so much turmoil and grief became so single-mindedly determined to give tranquility and pleasure to others.

  That attitude didn’t necessarily extend to the people he employed. He was a difficult boss—liberal with criticism, niggardly with his praise, and punctilious to an extreme (he was even known to personally scrub the toilets if he felt his staff needed a refresher course). He typically descended from his apartment above the restaurant at eight each morning, and apart from an early dinner with Sabine, he was on duty straight through until midnight. It was a job that demanded great sacrifice on his part but even more on hers. (Although, as she cheerfully observed one day over lunch, “In France, all the men have mistresses. His mistress is the restaurant. He comes home late every night, but at least I know where he has been.”)

  Taillevent was closed on Saturdays and Sundays. Weekends were given over to family—to Sabine, and also to Valérie and her three children—but Vrinat also spent much of his downtime brooding about the restaurant and pinpointing needed improvements. The start of a new week was seldom pleasant for his staff. “Sometimes, I am in a very bad mood.” Vrinat admitted. “Monday morning is the worst part of the week for them.” He wasn’t one to shout his displeasure, though he would if he felt it was needed; rather, he expressed his dissatisfaction through subtle but unmistakable gestures. Working at Taillevent required, among other things, becoming fluent in the boss’s body language. One Saturday morning at Les Caves Taillevent, Vrinat found a splintered piece of wood in a display case. He picked it up and began gently tapping it against his leg while chatting with a customer. Within seconds, one of the shop’s employees, contrition etched on his face, swooped in to discard the offending spear. Even after nearly three decades at Taillevent, Jean-Marie Ancher, the restaurant’s head captain, said that he still feared Vrinat’s wrath. “We have a nervousness in our stomachs twice a day, every day,” he told me.

  Vrinat’s imperiousness extended to the kitchen. At Taillevent, the chef’s role was to cook, not to be seen or heard. This had been the modus vivendi of his father and Lucien Leheu, and their partnership had prospered for twenty years. But, of course, that was before nouvelle cuisine, and while Claude Deligne, who replaced Leheu and served until his retirement in 1991, was also content to defer to the boss, Vrinat recognized that the culinary profession had changed and that chefs wanted the authority and the attention for themselves now. He knew that his attitude was rooted in a bygone era and he made light of it. “I came along before Paul Bocuse led the chefs out of the kitchens,” he jokingly told Frank Prial of the New York Times.

  But Vrinat had no interest in recalibrating the balance of power at Taillevent, and this had led to a rupture with Deligne’s successor, Philippe Legendre. A shy man, Legendre was happy to cede the public relations to Vrinat, but after several years as chef, he began to chafe at the limitations imposed on him in the kitchen. It wasn’t that he was prevented from exercising his imagination; he retooled a number of longstanding dishes and also created some new ones, including a stunningly good cream of watercress soup that was fortified with generous dollops of Sevruga caviar and which became an
instant classic. But Vrinat’s insistence on having the last word about what went on the plate became harder for Legendre to accept, and in 1999 he took his knives and bolted for the Hotel George V.

  Vrinat wanted innovation—it just had to be on his terms. While Taillevent served classical cuisine, Vrinat knew that its food had to keep pace with the changing whims of the dining public, and over the years it had: Sauces became progressively lighter, vegetables crunchier. But this wasn’t just a matter of submitting to culinary fashion; Vrinat believed it was essential that Taillevent evolve. When Legendre quit, the restaurant was in its sixth decade and had held three stars for more than a quarter-century. Vrinat knew that it now risked being seen as a gastronomic museum, and he was determined not to let this happen.

  Nor was he about to allow himself to be labeled a dinosaur. His view of chefs may have been prehistoric, and he certainly understood that he was among the last of a breed of restaurateur, but he bristled at the notion that he was tethered to the past. In 2001, eager to show that he could appeal to a younger, thriftier crowd, he opened a second Paris restaurant, L’Angle du Faubourg, a contemporary bistro one block over from Taillevent. It was done in a chic, minimalist décor and offered updated bistro fare—lamb shoulder with black olives was a typical entrée—punctuated by flights of fancy, such as a dessert of pineapple ravioli. “L’Angle is a pied à nez”—thumbing the nose—“at all those who say I am conservative,” he said at the time.

  This same desire to confound expectations led him to hire Michel del Burgo as Legendre’s replacement. Del Burgo, then the chef at the Hôtel Bristol in Paris, had been recommended to Vrinat by his friend and business partner Joël Robuchon, with whom he co-owned a restaurant in Tokyo called Taillevent-Robuchon. Still, del Burgo seemed a strange choice. He was known to be a bit of a culinary daredevil, and the Carcassonne native’s food bore a distinctly southern accent. Taillevent’s fare, even as it was made lighter, had always been solidly northern French—cream and butter. However, Vrinat not only gave del Burgo the job; he let him apply a few southern touches to Taillevent’s cooking (a risotto of cèpes, for instance—so creamy and deliciously earthy it would have made even the most chauvinistic Italian groan with pleasure). But then history repeated itself in cruel fashion: del Burgo lost his infant son to crib death, and not long thereafter, the devastated chef quit.

  Alain Solivérès, who had been working at the two-star Les Élysées du Vernet in Paris, took over the kitchen in 2002. He was also from the south, and with him at the stove, Taillevent’s food became lighter and sunnier still, with artichokes, tomatoes, and olives turning up in more dishes. However, the additions to the menu were less significant than the subtractions. Two of Taillevent’s most celebrated dishes—the boudin de homard à la nage, a feathery lobster mousse shaped like a sausage and served in a light fish stock, and the marquise au chocolat et à la pistache, a mousse-like chocolate cake served in a glorious puddle of pistachio sauce—were now off the menu. Old-timers and creatures of habit like me were crestfallen, but Vrinat was determined to show that he and Taillevent could evolve.

  And it wasn’t just the food. Vrinat gave the restaurant a makeover in 2004, putting in new carpeting, upholstery, and lighting. He also redecorated it in a contemporary motif, hanging several abstract paintings and adding some modern ornamental art. The renovations did not suit everyone’s taste; head captain Ancher jokingly offered to treat me to dinner if I would use my cutlery to slash a painting he particularly disliked. In truth, though, the new look did make the restaurant seem younger.

  Taillevent’s appearance was changing in another important way. In the past, men who showed up without jackets and ties were lent them, and if they balked, they ate elsewhere. But the same sartorial rebellion that tore through the workplace in the 1990s—beginning with casual Fridays and eventually resulting in casual Mondays-through-Fridays—quickly spread to restaurants, and Taillevent didn’t resist it. The staff stayed tuxedoed, but guests could now leave the jackets and ties at home. Vrinat and his lieutenants didn’t necessarily welcome the new look; one night, as I watched an elderly man shuffle through the dining room in jeans, Ancher just shrugged and said, “It’s a different world, my friend.” But the culture had changed, and Taillevent needed to change with it.

  In 2006, as the restaurant turned sixty and he turned seventy, Vrinat continued to look for new ways to project vitality. He now had a blog on Taillevent’s Web site, where he posted daily ruminations on food, wine, and other matters. Although the kitchen was functioning well—the reviews for Solivérès were uniformly enthusiastic, and Taillevent was still in possession of its third star—Vrinat felt he needed to pour even more of himself into the restaurant. In 2006, he ended his collaboration with Robuchon in Japan because the two weeks that he was obliged to spend at their Tokyo restaurant each year were two extra weeks that he now preferred to devote to his flagship establishment.

  Contentment was an elusive state. “Maybe I can’t enjoy today; I’m always worried about tomorrow,” he had told me when I interviewed him in 2001. “When I was young, life was not easy. Not knowing if your father will return from war, then seeing him lose everything; it shapes the way you think. It gives you a feeling of insecurity, of anxiety. And then to be in the restaurant business, which is so fickle—this is why I take nothing for granted and am always cautious.” But now, though, his anxiety wasn’t limited to Taillevent. He was distressed about France, fearful that the country was in terminal decline. “Where is my grandchildren’s future?” he said. “Is it in France? I just don’t know.”

  He was worried, too, about the state of French cuisine. Younger chefs, rattled by Spain’s emergence, seemed to be forsaking France’s culinary heritage in an effort to prove that they could be just as daring and imaginative. Vrinat admired Ferran Adrià and had enjoyed his meals at El Bulli, but he believed that the Spanish chef was sui generis and that his style of cooking was simply not replicable. More importantly, he saw no reason why the French should want to mimic it. “We need to change,” said Vrinat, “but is the point of creativity to just be creative?” He thought there was a way of reconciling innovation and tradition and that he and Taillevent could, in some small fashion, help point the way forward. This was now the task he had set himself. “It is my main challenge, and it is a big challenge, and it is the reason why I want to go on as long as I can.”

  But as 2006 drew to a close, he suddenly found himself with a more urgent concern. In October, he went for his annual appointment with the Michelin Guide. He had expected to see Jean-Luc Naret, but when he arrived at Michelin’s headquarters, he was informed that he would instead be meeting with Jean-François Mesplède, the editorial director of the French Guide. Mesplède wasted no time getting to his point: He told Vrinat that he had been to Taillevent recently and thought the quality of the food had slipped. “What did you eat?” Vrinat asked. Mesplède, a former journalist, told him that he had a vegetable starter and a côte de veau. And had he liked the côte de veau? Mesplède said it had been good but not as good as it needed to be. Vrinat pressed for more details, but Mesplède was vague and just kept returning to the same theme: The cooking had declined. Vrinat left the meeting confused and worried. For reasons that were unclear, he and Taillevent had officially been put on notice.

  Three months later, Vrinat learned that Mesplède hadn’t been warning him of a demotion; he had been announcing one. On January 18, 2007, Le Figaro’s François Simon reported that the 2007 Michelin Guide, due out in February, would bear several surprises, “the most spectacular” of which would be the demotion of “the Parisian institution” Taillevent. Vrinat didn’t publicly acknowledge Simon’s scoop. He assumed it was true but thought it wiser to wait until the Guide was released before commenting. He also harbored the slender hope that if Michelin heard from enough indignant readers, it might reconsider (though, presumably, the 2007 Guide was already printed). In anticipation of a possible downgrade, Vrinat wrote two messages, one of which
would be posted on his blog: a sigh-of-relief statement if Taillevent kept its third star, a concessionary statement if it didn’t. Oddly, Vrinat seemed to find more enjoyment in preparing the latter. He decided that it would be accompanied by a photo of a deflated tire, which he thought was a hilarious touch (Michelin being a tire company). As he roared with laughter, his assistant commented, “I think you’re secretly praying to lose the third star.”

  Early on the night of February 20, as Vrinat was greeting some guests, Naret telephoned. It was the first Vrinat had heard from Michelin since the Figaro story, and the mere fact of the call was all the confirmation he needed; he had no interest in speaking with Naret. “Tell Monsieur Naret it’s seven twenty P.M. and it’s time to take care of customers, not to take care of Michelin,” he icily instructed the receptionist. The next morning, Michelin announced its 2007 ratings, and for the first time in thirty-five years, Taillevent was not among the three-star recipients. Vrinat wasted no time posting his response, along with the picture of the flat tire. He said he was surprised by Michelin’s decision but assured readers that he and the restaurant would “get back in the saddle,” and carry on as before. “I’ve known more painful challenges than this,” he wrote.

  Shortly after the demotion was made official, Solivérès walked into Vrinat’s office and burst into tears, apologizing for having let him down; Vrinat assured him it was not his fault and that there was no need to apologize. The rest of the staff was shaken, too, but as the morning went on, an illusion of normalcy fell over the restaurant. On this of all days, the need for flawless execution and smiling faces was acute; it was imperative that the atmosphere in the dining room be festive, not funereal. As for those closest to Vrinat, Valérie was sad but displayed her father’s stoicism. Not so Sabine, who was devastated by the news and furious at what she saw as a gross injustice against Taillevent and her husband.