But some restaurateurs readily acknowledged the problem and were willing to talk about it candidly. Gérard Allemandou owned a well-regarded fish spot, La Cagouille, near the Montparnasse train station. The restaurant was known not just for the quality of its food, but also for the diversity on display in its dining room and kitchen; the staff was largely composed of North Africans and sub-Saharan Africans. For Allemandou, a jovial bear of a man with unkempt hair and an even unrulier beard, the rainbow coalition in his restaurant was a necessity and a point of pride. “In France today, many of the young people don’t want to work,” he told me as we talked over coffee one morning at a corner table in the restaurant. “These people want to work, and without them, nothing is going to function. If you walk around Paris today, there are so many people of color. We need them.”
It was clear that it was also personally important to him to have a restaurant that looked like modern France, and the satisfaction in his voice as he spoke of La Cagouille’s mixité was unmistakable. “Some of the cooks have been here for fifteen years now,” he said. “The number two in my kitchen is from the Ivory Coast. The number three is Malian. There is no relationship between my style of cooking and their native cuisines, but they make my cuisine better than I do.” He conceded that he was still an exception among French restaurateurs. “Gastronomy is the last bastion of the reactionary spirit in France, and it’s too bad,” he said. The most upscale restaurants were the worst offenders. “The grandes tables—they are run by a certain caste that just doesn’t realize the world has changed.” But Allemandou was confident that reality would eventually catch up even with them; it had to. “I think in ten or twenty years we will have a black or Maghrebian two- or three-star chef,” he said. “Look at our soccer team, with its racial mix. We need restaurants that are like that. For our social cohesion, it is obligatory.”
Fatéma Hal made a similar point over a dinner of chicken tagine and couscous at Mansouria, her restaurant in the eleventh arrondissement. Done in an Arabian Nights motif that managed to just skirt the edge of kitsch, Mansouria was Paris’s most popular North African restaurant and its proprietor France’s best-known Maghreb chef. A native of Oujda, Morocco, Hal moved to France in 1970 and opened Mansouria fourteen years later. In the beginning, she had three strikes against her: She was a woman, she was an immigrant, and she was serving ethnic fare. “They described it as ‘Oriental cuisine,’ ” she recalled. “It was very difficult at first, because the French are just not as interested in other cuisines as the Americans and the English. They knew couscous, but that was it.” It was only when Joël Robuchon, a fan of Moroccan cuisine, discovered her and began talking up the restaurant that attitudes began to change. Hal got her first book deal, and the book sold well; others followed, and she was now a beloved figure on the French food scene and abroad.
Even so, old attitudes hadn’t entirely melted away. The French still didn’t consider Maghreb cuisine to be their own; they continued to regard it as something imported and exotic. They also viewed it as inherently inferior to French cuisine. French chefs had embraced a few concepts and flavors from the Maghreb—preserved lemons, for instance—but the melting pot was more like a thimble. This chauvinism, Hal said, was particularly evident among critics and journalists, and she offered a hypothetical example to illustrate her point. “If a top French chef decided to open a Moroccan restaurant, the French journalists would assume that not only would he succeed, he would do it better than a native chef like me,” she said. “They just assume that the French chefs know best. But if I announced that I was going to open a place serving traditional French cuisine—no way. They wouldn’t accept it.”
We talked for a bit about the riots in the banlieues. Hal thought the media had exaggerated the problem; there were certainly disaffected youths in these communities, but most of the residents just went about their business. She agreed, though, that there was a pressing need for jobs and that the restaurant trade was the obvious place to create them. Echoing Allemandou, she felt that food could be not only a source of work but a means of fostering social harmony. “Food promotes ties and encourages cultural understanding,” she said, becoming more emphatic with each word. “It tells a story, and is a way of sharing that story with your neighbors.” I asked Hal if she knew of any Maghreb chefs in the banlieues who were specializing in French fare. She said she had recently met a young cook from one of the suburbs who was interested in doing French cuisine, but she couldn’t recall his name or where he worked.
I made some inquiries but had no luck locating him. But was it really possible that in all of France, there was not a single chef of North African or Middle Eastern descent doing star-worthy French cooking? On a visit to Bordeaux not long after my conversation with Hal, I discovered that there was at least one such person. While eating at Cordeillan-Bages, where Hideya Ishizuka had worked, I was introduced to a chef named Sylvestre Wahid, who was there having dinner with a woman whom I took to be his girlfriend. We talked only briefly, but it was long enough for me to learn that he had been born in Pakistan and raised in France, was a protégé of Alain Ducasse and was now the chef at Oustau de Baumanière, a two-star establishment in Provence and one of France’s most famous restaurants.
A few months later, I went to visit the thirty-two-year-old Wahid at the Oustau. I arrived late on a warm, sun-splashed Sunday afternoon. I’d been to the Oustau several times, and its location—it was set in the middle of a haunting limestone rock formation known as Les Alpilles, in the shadow of Les Baux, a medieval village that had been carved out of the cliffs—was even more beautiful than I remembered it. Ducasse had told me that he thought the Oustau had the most spectacular setting of any restaurant in France, and standing beneath the craggy Alpilles and looking out over the Provençal plain toward the Mediterranean coast, it was hard to disagree.
I had assumed, with Wahid now in charge of the kitchen, that Jean-André Charial, the Oustau’s longtime owner and chef, would not be around. But Wahid had apparently informed Charial of my visit, and shortly after I got to the Oustau, I was told that Charial would be joining me for a drink before dinner and that Wahid and I would talk at the end of the night.
I knew, from conversations with other chefs, that the sixty-two-year-old Charial was viewed within the profession as a somewhat tragic figure. Cooking was apparently not his first love, but duty had obliged him to take over the Oustau after the retirement of his legendary grandfather, Raymond Thuilier, who had founded the restaurant just after the Second World War. When the ninety-three-year-old Thuilier had stepped down, in 1990, Michelin had immediately stripped the restaurant of its third star, which it had held since 1954. Charial had never been able to win it back, a failure that over time had layered frustration on top of frustration.
Charial told me that he had hired Wahid for one reason: to get that third star. Recognizing that his opportunity had likely passed, he decided in 2005 that the best hope of regaining it was to cede the kitchen to a younger, hungrier chef. (More prosaically, Charial was also planning to run for president of the Relais & Châteaux group and knew that he would have to leave the kitchen if elected.) Wahid, then in his tenth year with the Ducasse organization, had heard from some friends that Charial was looking for a chef. He had expressed his interest to Ducasse, who had called Charial, and a match was soon made.
Charial said he was satisfied with the way things had turned out: “Sylvestre is very clever, and I think he’s done a good job of keeping the spirit of the place.” But he also made clear that the arrangement was not necessarily an open-ended one: If the Oustau wasn’t awarded a third star in the next year or two, he might consider taking the restaurant in another direction, one that presumably would not include Wahid. He mentioned Chez Bru, a nearby restaurant that also had two stars but was more casual (and therefore cheaper to operate). “I ask myself sometimes—more than sometimes—if this is the right way, all this effort to get the third star,” he said. “I’ve invested twelve million euro
s in the last ten years, to renovate, to change the kitchen. I’ve got a brilliant chef now, so I don’t know what more I can do. I can make it more profitable without Sylvestre, that’s for sure. Maybe if in two years’ time I still don’t have it, maybe I’ll just have to say that I’ll never get it and change things.”
I asked Charial about Wahid’s background, and what he represented. “I didn’t hire Sylvestre to make him a symbol,” he replied sharply. “I hired him because of his talent and because we had the same idea about cooking. He’s very classical.” Charial allowed, though, that he himself was perhaps more progressive than many of his compatriots. He and his wife had adopted a thirteen-year-old Vietnamese refugee in the 1970s, an unusual thing to do in rural France at that time. (Their son now worked as a pastry chef in Los Angeles.) “I’m very open,” he said. “For me, the color of the skin does not change a thing.” But he acknowledged that Wahid’s complexion was an issue for others. He said that Ducasse had told him that placing Wahid had not been easy—that some restaurants would not hire him because of his ethnicity. Charial said the French press also evinced a curious attitude. “I always have the impression, reading the French papers, that Sylvestre came from Pakistan yesterday,” he said. “But he grew up here; he’s French.” What most disturbed him, he said, was the attitude of some clients. “I’ve had people say, ‘You’re using spice, I think your cooking is spicier because of your chef.’ I’ve always used spices in my cooking. I’ve been to India many times and always came back with new spices and new ideas.” Other guests were more direct. “They’ve said to me, ‘Why did you take this Arab?’ ” I asked if these clients were foreign or French. “French.”
A few minutes later, we said good-bye and I went into the dining room to eat. The food was impressive. I’d enjoyed my previous meals at the Oustau, and this one was certainly their equal. A Bloody Mary sorbet, comprised of tomato, vodka, and spices, was an unusual and refreshing palate teaser. It was also visually striking: It came to the table in a cloud of smoke produced by liquid nitrogen, an Adrià-esque flourish that signaled the generational shift in the kitchen. But the first course was as traditionally French as they come: oeuf en meurette—poached egg served with cèpes and a red wine sauce, a deliciously earthy ode to autumn. Next came rouget with basil and thyme blossom, a Provençal (and Oustau) classic that was easily as sublime as Charial’s rendition; line-caught sole with more cèpes and some of the sweetest prawns I’d ever tasted; a delicious roast pigeon with turnip, beetroot, and lavender essence; and a warm green-apple tart paired with roasted figs and vanilla ice cream. The food didn’t quite have the polish and profundity of a three-star meal (or that a three-star meal was supposed to have, anyway), but Wahid was definitely headed in the right direction.
Make that Wahid and his brother: It turned out that his kid brother, Jonathan, was the pastry chef. Jonathan, thirty, had been hired by Charial at Sylvestre’s request; he had previously worked at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris and had been crowned France’s Champion of Desserts in 2005. Both Wahids, still in their chef’s whites, joined me for coffee after dinner. By now, it was past eleven P.M., and the restaurant was empty except for a few waiters tidying up. Sylvestre was sinewy and tall, with a thin beard and mustache. Jonathan was clean-shaven and a little beefier. On this night, at least, Sylvestre was the more animated of the two, which probably owed something to the fact that the hour was late and Jonathan, in addition to his kitchen duties, had a wife and four-year-old child. (Sylvestre was single; “I’m married to my job,” he said.) Sylvestre did most of the talking, and he told a remarkable story.
The Wahids were originally from Kohat, Pakistan, a city near Islamabad. Their father visited France in 1979 and decided, apparently on a lark, to join the French Foreign Legion. The family—Sylvestre and Jonathan, their mother, and two sisters—didn’t see the senior Wahid for five years; according to Sylvestre, new recruits were required to be incommunicado for that length of time. Finally, in 1984, he brought the family to France, settling them in Nîmes. He immediately enrolled the children in Catholic school, which he believed was a way of hastening their integration into French society. “He didn’t want us to forget our past, but he wanted us to feel part of the French community, to absorb the French spirit,” Sylvestre explained.
By then, the father had taken a job overseeing food and beverage services for the Foreign Legion, and he had also acquired a taste for French cuisine and the bourgeois lifestyle. “My father liked the good things,” Sylvestre said. “He cooked a lot of French food, and he liked to eat and drink well, and he shared that with us. We had Dom Pérignon, we had foie gras.” I must have raised an eyebrow at the mention of drinking, because Sylvestre quickly brought up the family’s Muslim faith. “My parents practiced, but not all things,” he said. “They didn’t think these things were prohibited in the Islamic religion; to them, the important thing was moderation. I drink wine, my brother drinks wine, my father drinks. My sisters do, too.”
In 1990, when Sylvestre was fifteen, his father arranged for him to spend the summer working for a local pâtissier. (Jonathan would later get his start with the same man.) It was then that he discovered that he didn’t just like eating good food; he enjoyed making it. Through the pâtissier, he landed a stage at a one-star restaurant in Nîmes called Cheval Blanc, whose chef at the time was Thierry Marx, now the chef at the Cordeillan-Bages. “Thierry showed me all about French food—the best meat, the best fish, the best everything,” says Sylvestre. When he decided to pursue a culinary career, it came as unwelcome news to his mother: “She cried when I told her I wanted to be a chef. She said she [hadn’t brought] her children to France to be cookers. In Pakistan, being a cooker is not a big job. I said to her that I would be somebody in this job.”
After Cheval Blanc, Sylvestre went to Paris, where he worked at a two-star restaurant called Les Élysées du Vernet, whose chef, Alain Solivérès, would later move to Taillevent. In 1996, Sylvestre was back in the south of France when he heard that Alain Ducasse was taking over Joël Robuchon’s restaurant in Paris; Sylvestre sent over his résumé. “Ducasse is the best,” he explained, “and I said I [would] only go back to Paris to work for him.” He spent a decade with Ducasse. He worked first at the old Robuchon restaurant, then at the Plaza Athénée, after which Ducasse sent him to the Essex House in New York, where he was posted for nearly five years and fell in love with the city (“It’s so cosmopolitan; Paris is cosmopolitan, but not like that”).
In 2005, he was back in France, working at Ducasse’s cooking school in Argenteuil, when he heard about the opening at the Oustau. Ducasse was completely supportive, he said, but also wanted to make sure that Sylvestre understood the pressure he would be facing. “With Mr. Ducasse,” he said, “you can’t hesitate, so when he asked me if I was ready, it had to be yes or no right away; I said yes, of course I’m ready.” When he was formally offered the job, it was a pinch-me moment. “This was the most famous restaurant in the south of France,” he said. “I’d never seen Oustau de Baumanière, but I knew the history of the house. I said to myself, ‘Imagine—I’m going to be the new chef of Oustau de Baumanière at thirty years old. Are you crazy or what?’ It was a dream come true.”
Sylvestre said that while he had not encountered any overt racism in the restaurants in which he’d worked, he knew that some people could not see past the color of his skin. “Of course they looked at us differently,” he said. “We feel French, we like this country, we appreciate what it has given us. But something we can never change is our face.” At this point, Jonathan chimed in: “From the time we got to France, we knew that some people looked at us differently.” Both agreed that this attitude had motivated them. “You have to work two or three times harder than someone else,” Sylvestre said. “You don’t want to give them the opportunity to say, ‘You can’t do this.’ ”
He was quick to add that he was not pursuing his career to make a point or to be a symbol. But he said he was happy if he and Jonathan were
seen by other immigrants as role models, and he acknowledged that were they to win a third star, the story would be a compelling one. “Winning a third star makes you very French,” he joked. “I can’t wait to see how people will react.” Mostly, though, Sylvestre wanted the third star for Charial. “Mr. Charial has given me such an opportunity,” he said. “He doesn’t judge anybody by how they look; I can tell just from the way he looks at me. He has taught me so much, and I feel I need to give him something back, and the only thing I can give him is the third star.” A third star would also be a gift to his parents. They had both recently visited the Oustau; it was the first time they’d ever been in one of his restaurants. “They cried, they were so happy,” Sylvestre said.
Conclusion
ON A WEEKDAY AFTERNOON in the spring of 2007, I found myself back in the Mâcon region, seven years after I’d made that regrettable return visit to Au Chapon Fin. Driving north on the highway, I passed a sign for Thoissey, where the restaurant was located. Surrendering once more to curiosity, I decided to go have a look. Maybe it was under new management and flourishing again; that was my hope, anyway. But the first indication was not an encouraging one: From a distance I could see that the parking lot was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and as I drew nearer I noticed that it was overrun with weeds. The building was still upright but was now abandoned, with much of its paint peeled off. By the looks of things, it had been a while since Chapon Fin had served its last meal, and I could only assume that a wrecking ball would soon be turning it into rubble. (There was already some collateral damage: I later discovered that with Chapon Fin gone, Thoissey had been removed from the Michelin Guide—literally taken off the map.) Chapon Fin had enjoyed a longer and vastly more successful run than most restaurants, and for all I knew, the circumstances that forced its closure may have had nothing to do with the weak economy or the state of French gastronomy. But as I stood there eyeing the skeletal remains of a place that had helped kindle my love of France and French food, I couldn’t help but see its downfall as emblematic of theirs.
Au Revoir to All That Page 24
