The desire for creative license was expressed most forcefully by a thirty-five-year-old chef named Alexandre Bourdas, who owned a restaurant called Sa.Qua.Na in the seaside town of Honfleur, in Normandy. The name suggested Bourdas’s modernist leanings; he had run three-star chef Michel Bras’s restaurant on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, and Sa.Qua.Na was a play on the Japanese word for fish, sakana. Like Camdeborde, Breton, and the bistronomie cohort, Bourdas had no interest in doing luxury fine dining when he returned from Japan in 2005. He wanted to have a cozy restaurant serving superior food at a decent price; he’d be in the kitchen, his wife would run the dining room, and he would be close to both his suppliers and his customers—“human rapport,” as he put it while we chatted one Sunday morning on a cement wall in the middle of the cobblestone street in front of the restaurant. But where he differed from the Parisians was in his cooking, which, if not quite as outré as Choukroun’s, was daring all the same—poached chicken, for instance, served with hazelnuts, a bouillon of baby turnips and onion tops, and a mix of chopped hard-boiled egg and Roquefort cheese. Bourdas said he personally felt unencumbered by the weight of France’s culinary tradition and that this was true for many of his peers. “My generation wants freedom of expression,” he said. “We find influences everywhere today. For us, there is no code.” Au revoir, Escoffier.
Sa.Qua.Na had a single Michelin star; Boudras said it was a useful thing in a town popular with tourists, but he seemed otherwise blasé about it. Among many younger French chefs now, the hunger for fun was matched by a professed indifference to Michelin; they were happy to receive its benediction but were not seeking it. Even so, the stars were finding them, and the 2007 Guide elevated one of their number, Pascal Barbot of Astrance, a restaurant in Paris, to the highest rung. It was a startling promotion, and not just because Barbot was only thirty-four.
There was the restaurant itself: Tucked into a charmless residential block in the sixteenth arrondissement, within view of the Seine, Astrance’s exterior suggested nothing more than a casual neighborhood bistro. So did its interior: It had a tiny, split-level dining room, with black walls, scuffed in some areas; track lighting; and contiguous mustard-colored banquettes. A small counter to the left of the entrance doubled as a reception desk and bar, and was also home to the coffeemaker. The stemware was arranged on glass shelves that had been built into one of the walls, next to a table, and the kitchen door opened directly to the dining room—a typical setup in most restaurants but unheard of in a three-star.
The dining room staff, overseen by co-owner Christophe Rohat, wore business suits, just about the only visual clue that Astrance was a restaurant with serious aspirations. The service was correct, but in a disarmingly casual way. The waiters, apparently NBA fans, had a habit of passing off plates to one another behind their backs. When guests went to the bathroom, they went unescorted, and their napkins were neither refolded nor reset—again, standard protocol in an ordinary restaurant, but a departure from the three-star norm. The relaxed service was matched by the informality of the clientele. Ties were nonexistent, jackets were optional, and so were jeans and sneakers.
Although Astrance’s promotion was hailed by a number of top chefs and leading French critics, there were skeptics. Partly, it was the ambience: The idea of a three-star with this kind of setting and service simply didn’t compute for some people. But there were also doubts about Barbot’s cooking. No one denied that he had three-star potential, but was he really at the level now of people like Pierre Gagnaire and Franck Cerutti? In truth, he wasn’t—not yet. His food was good—innovative, very personal—and sometimes even great, but the talent was still raw. Barbot’s signature dish was a foie gras and mushroom galette. The fungi were ordinary Paris mushrooms, which made for a clever, very contemporary juxtaposition of the luxurious and the quotidian. But it was also an aggressively unattractive dish; from a distance, it looked like a dried-out slice of grayish-white cake. The plate was brightened a bit by the dollop of lemon marmalade next to the galette, and a small puddle of hazelnut oil paired nicely with the foie gras, but the pleasure was more in the texture than in the taste. The dessert course I had at Astrance was thoroughly pedestrian: some ice cream, a sabayon with a few berries dropped in the glass, and a small dish of very ordinary clafoutis. The most arresting touch was the plate of fresh fruit that accompanied the desserts—a novel conclusion to a three-star meal, but not exactly taxing for the pastry chef.
It is possible that Michelin had promoted Barbot to make a statement—to demonstrate that the Guide, contrary to the accusations of people like Dubanchet and Pascal Remy, was not stuck in the past. It is conceivable that the third star taken from Taillevent was, symbolically and maybe even literally, the third star awarded to Astrance. In fact, Barbot and Astrance did have symbolic resonance, if not quite in the way that Michelin had perhaps intended. In terms of his background and the attitude he brought to his work, Barbot was a mold-breaker among top French chefs. In contrast to most three-star recipients, Barbot’s interest in cooking had not been nurtured by his family: He had grown up in a household in which food was treated as mere sustenance. “I don’t have the grandmother story,” he told me with a laugh.
Instead, he got his early training at a cooking school. After doing his mandatory military service, which had him stationed in New Caledonia, he went to Paris and got a job with Alain Passard at his three-star restaurant, Arpège. He spent five years there, rising to number two in the kitchen. From Passard, Barbot came to understand the importance of “the product” and also acquired an egalitarian attitude toward ingredients. “Passard’s philosophy was that a carrot mattered just as much as a lobster or a truffle, and that it is just as important to make wonderful carrots as it is to make wonderful lobsters.” (True to his philosophy, Passard went to a predominantly vegetable menu in 2001.) It was also at Arpège that Barbot made the acquaintance of Christophe Rohat, who in time became the restaurant’s maître d’.
In 1998, Barbot left Arpège and Paris and moved to Sydney, Australia. He worked there for two years, running the kitchen of a popular French restaurant. His time in New Caledonia had given him a love of the South Pacific, and he adored Australia. What he found most appealing was the sense of freedom. It was a young, dynamic country, where people were completely receptive to new ideas, not least at the table. This was particularly true of Sydney, which offered a dizzying array of cuisines and where an exuberant inventiveness held sway. The chefs wanted to surprise, diners wanted to be surprised. Barbot had never encountered such a spirited, progressive food culture, and he found it enthralling. Australia introduced him to new flavors and techniques, but what it mostly did was unshackle his mind. “Back in France, when I would try to create different kinds of dishes, I would question myself and worry about how people would react,” he said. “But after Australia, I didn’t ask myself those questions anymore. ‘Is it okay to use scallops for something? What will people think?’ I didn’t care anymore. I was décomplexe”—free. In the past, French chefs had gone abroad to convert others; Barbot went abroad and returned home having been converted instead.
Barbot left Australia in 2000, lured back to Paris by an offer to take over the kitchen of Lapérouse, a Paris landmark, and to be reunited with Rohat, who would oversee the dining room. The pair lasted just three months there: Creative differences with the restaurant’s owners led to a quickie divorce. Barbot decided to open his own place, one that would allow him to do more spontaneous cooking and to express the same freedom that he had experienced in Australia. “I wanted something very simple and very small,” he said. He also wanted Rohat in the front of the house, and the two spent the next several months scouting locations. They finally settled on a small space on the rue Beethoven in the sixteenth, and because they both had good pedigrees in the business, the bank was willing to finance them almost completely.
Astrance opened in October 2000. Although the restaurant could have comfortably accommodated fifteen tables, Barbo
t and Rohat limited it to nine widely spaced ones, which meant no more than twenty-five diners per service. At the start, there were just five employees: Barbot and an assistant in the kitchen, Rohat and a waiter in the dining room, and a dishwasher. There was no à la carte menu, only a tasting menu that changed daily. In keeping with the prevailing fashion, Barbot sent a steady procession of smaller dishes to each table; a typical meal would consist of six courses.
Just days after receiving its first guests Astrance was the subject of a glowing review in Figaroscope, and the reservation book filled up immediately. The demand for tables accelerated when Michelin awarded the restaurant a star in February 2001. Barbot was happy to receive it, but it was not something he had sought or especially cared about. “It is nothing against Michelin,” he explained, “but I never worked to please the Guide. I worked to please the customers. I didn’t want a three-star restaurant; it just wasn’t my goal.” He couldn’t even recall the year Astrance had garnered its second star (it was 2005). His memory wasn’t quite so sketchy regarding the third, though: The day before the 2007 promotions and demotions were to be announced, a colleague had walked into the kitchen and told him Jean-Luc Naret was on the phone. “I did something wrong?” he thought. It was a characteristically self-effacing reaction. As young as Barbot was, he looked even younger. He had a slight frame and pale, delicate features, and with his warm, guileless smile, he exuded a kind of boyish frailty and sweetness. Sweet was a word often used to describe him—and it’s not a word often applied to three-star chefs.
By the time the third star was awarded, getting into Astrance had become even more challenging. In 2006, Barbot and Rohat had made the unusual decision to close the restaurant three days a week (two was standard for top restaurants in Paris). Despite the low number of covers, the quantity of plates coming out of the kitchen was brutal on the entire team—all the more so because the restaurant had been open six days a week. Also, Rohat had two children and desired more family time, and the unmarried Barbot wanted longer weekends to be able to go looking for new ideas. He also needed to more fully replenish his energy and enthusiasm. “I realized that I had to have a break,” he said. “Cuisine is a pleasure for me, but I didn’t want to be a slave. It was important to have a life, to have something that exists on the side.” It was another way of saying that he wasn’t going to let haute cuisine do to him what it had done to Alain Chapel and Bernard Loiseau.
In all these ways, Barbot was redefining what it meant to be a three-star chef. But in one important respect, he was a throwback. Like all big-time chefs, he had an extensive network of purveyors, but he was not content merely to receive daily deliveries at the restaurant; he wanted a closer relationship with the ingredients and the people who furnished them. For this reason, he made a weekly run to Rungis, the famous (and famously sprawling) wholesale food market on the outskirts of Paris. (It had once been located in Les Halles, in the center of the city; in 1969, it was moved to a site just off the A6 highway near Orly Airport.) Barbot usually went on Tuesdays; driving a rented delivery van, he would leave Paris at 5:30 A.M., hoping to make it back by ten; heavy traffic coming into the city often made the return trip a two-hour odyssey. Barbot didn’t need to go to Rungis; he sourced only around 10 percent of his supplies there. His visits were reconnaissance missions: He went to see what was in the market and to hear what the farmers were talking about—how crops were faring, how the growing season was shaping up. Barbot was not just the only three-star chef putting in a regular appearance at Rungis; insofar as he was aware, he was one of the few chefs who went there, period. In fact, he knew of just one other chef—a friend of his with a restaurant in Paris—who routinely made the trip.
Most of the people he did business with had no idea he was a chef of distinction, let alone one with three stars. This sometimes led to amusing exchanges. On the morning I joined Barbot, a beefy delivery man, upon being told that he was a chef, shrugged and said, “I work in a restaurant, too.” Some of the merchants knew Barbot’s identity and were flattered by his visits. “He doesn’t delegate,” Pascal, a fruit seller, told me. “He comes out, to see for himself. He’s a great, great chef, but he’s humble.” Pascal was eager to have Barbot taste some lychees, just arrived from Thailand. With his pocket knife, he peeled and sliced several of them. He and I thought they were great; Barbot wasn’t convinced, and as he continued to peruse the inventory, Pascal tried a few more, testing his impressions against the chef’s. After careful evaluation, he reversed himself: “I think he’s right.” The lychees had good flavor, but they weren’t as firm as they needed to be.
Barbot ended up spending nearly four hours at Rungis. He visited a half-dozen halls, picking up cherries, strawberries, white nectarines, apricots, melons, lemons, peas, champignons de Paris (the mushrooms for the galette), almonds, milk and yogurt (for staff meals), tarragon, coriander, basil, parsley, fennel, and several bunches of flowers. He paused only for cigarette breaks and to take a phone call from a fisherman on the Ile d’Yeu, off the coast of Brittany. The fisherman had just reached the dock and had John Dory and red tuna; Barbot told him to send it (the fish would arrive the next morning). Although the Rungis run was mostly just symbolic, Barbot applied forensic scrutiny to every product he inspected. He tasted enough fruits during the course of the morning to fill a small grove, and he agonized over nearly every purchase he made. Cost was no concern (“I never look at the prices”); quality was his only criterion. The apricots, just in from the south of France, were the primary source of indecision. Barbot went through perhaps twenty apricots, spread over three stands, before finally choosing several small baskets. At one point, as he wavered over one carton, he laughed at his own compulsiveness. “Can you imagine taking an hour to buy a box of apricots?”
“Better Than the Original”
IN 1862, A DELEGATION of Japanese diplomats visited France.
During the trip, one of the emissaries, Shibata Teitaro, sent a letter home in which he described his difficulties with the cuisine. “We are troubled by the food, which is different,” Teitaro wrote. “No matter where you go, you are served all the most prized dishes, most of which are based upon meat. If this meat is replaced with fish, it is cooked in oil. There is no variation in the vegetables and if, by chance, we are served some, they too taste like fat. As this cooking with butter does not suit us, we fixed ourselves a kind of sashimi during our stay in France, by cutting up raw fish and sprinkling it with the sauce we brought along. Since the beginning of our mission, that was the first time we found any food that satisfied us.”
One can only wonder what Teitaro would make of Château de l’Éclair, set in the hills above Villefranche-sur-Saône, just north of Lyon. With its high, vaulted roof, latticed balconies, and weathered façade, the château looks like a typical French manor house—that is, until you notice the Japanese flag fluttering in the courtyard. Walking in the direction of the flag takes you past a building catty-corner to the château that contains a large, gleaming professional kitchen. A look inside will invariably prompt a double-take: All the young cooks are Japanese. If it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Martians in Times Square, a kitchen full of Japanese cooks in the middle of the Beaujolais region is an arresting sight all the same, and one that probably would have given Teitaro a jolt.
The château is an overseas campus of L’École Hôtelière Tsuji, Japan’s most prestigious professional cooking school. The Osaka-based academy was founded in 1960 by Shizuo Tsuji, a former journalist who held a degree in French literature and had a longstanding interest in French cuisine. Other cuisines, including Japanese, are also taught there, but with the encouragement of some leading French chefs, notably Paul Bocuse, Tsuji’s school has become possibly the finest foreign-run French cooking program in the world. In 1980, with the help of Bocuse, Tsuji acquired Château de l’Éclair; nine years later, he added Château Escoffier, in the village of Reyrieux, several miles to the east. Around two hundred second-year students are sent to th
e châteaux annually, where they work at mastering classic French recipes and techniques. On the day I ate there, lunch consisted of cold marinated salmon, roasted lamb, a selection of cheeses, and tarte Tatin, all cooked and served by the students and all impressively done. The curriculum is supplemented by frequent visits from well-known chefs, bakers, winemakers, and pâtissiers. After graduating, many of the students do stages in top restaurants throughout France and then return home to cook or teach, lending their talents to what has become one of the great food stories of our time: the Japanification of French cuisine.
Nearly one hundred and fifty years after Teitaro starved his way through France, his compatriots have embraced French food with quasi-religious fervor. French restaurants, wine bars, bakeries, and cheese shops are ubiquitous in Japanese cities. Many are locally owned, but a number of leading French chefs also operate restaurants in Japan. Bocuse currently has six restaurants in Tokyo, Joël Robuchon has three, and Alain Ducasse and Pierre Gagnaire have two apiece. Michel Bras, Michel Troisgros, Marc Haeberlin, the Pourcel brothers, and Guy Martin all have outposts in Japan as well. Some of the most acclaimed names in French foodstuffs—cheese specialist Marie-Anne Cantin, baker Eric Kayser, pâtissiers Pierre Hermé and Gérard Mulot—have shops there, too. Japan has quite literally become a second home to French cuisine, a point that was underscored when Michelin published its first-ever Guide to Tokyo in 2007 and awarded three stars to three French restaurants and two stars to a half-dozen others. Robuchon was among the three-star recipients (his other Tokyo restaurants also received stars) and Gagnaire and Troisgros were both awarded two.
All this is an unintended consequence of four decades of French culinary imperialism. Starting in the 1960s, prominent chefs such as Raymond Oliver, Paul Bocuse, and Pierre and Jean Troisgros began making regular trips to Japan, other chefs moved there to work, and French cuisine soon found a large and devoted following in the island nation. It was a development made possible by Japan’s postwar economic boom; this new prosperity not only gave many Japanese the means to dine out luxuriously, but also the ability to travel abroad, and France proved to be an especially popular destination. In time, the Japanese became the savviest culinary tourists to France. They knew all the top tables, and thanks in part to a cluster of Japanese food writers living in France and reporting back home, they also seemed to know about up-and-coming restaurants even before many French did.
Au Revoir to All That Page 22
