Jean-Pierre’s cooking became increasingly sophisticated, but it continued to surprise and delight me. On one trip, I’d dine on exquisite, tiny Burgundian crayfish sautéed in pumpkin seed oil and an improbably sweet and tender suprême of capon that had been poached in a rich calf’s muzzle broth, which seemed to me an almost medieval indulgence. On another, I’d sample sea trout with cabbage and goat cheese and ragout of sweetbreads and kidneys in foie gras sauce with vegetable-filled ravioli. The next time, it would be frogs’ legs in a sauce of wine lees with young leeks, followed by caramelized pork cheek with a bouillon of Asian spices and capers in red wine—or, after I’d organized a trip for him to Los Angeles, to cook a banquet at a private club, his version of a cheeseburger, made with ground carp topped with goat cheese and homemade “ketchup.”
The guest rooms at the inn were tiny and drab, but it was always a pleasure, after one of Jean-Pierre’s superb meals, accompanied by great Burgundies chosen by Isabelle and concluded in the parlor with the chef, over good cigars and too many snifters of marc de Bourgogne or vieille prune, to be able to stumble up a flight of stairs and collapse for the night. In 1987, though, the Silvas improved the property by building a freestanding structure across the road, with four large bedrooms and a suite. The following year, they installed an indoor swimming pool on the ground floor of the building. I asked them when the tennis courts and golf course were going in, and started calling the place “the Bouilland Hilton.” I was kidding, of course, but I honestly did imagine that one day the Silvas would be presiding over a luxurious property—a Relais & Châteaux, perhaps—with a three-star restaurant attached. I felt as if I had known a future culinary phenomenon almost since birth.
But then . . . “I woke up one day,” Jean-Pierre later told me, “and realized that I wasn’t a cook anymore. I was a manager and an accountant, which is not what I wanted to be.” The Silvas were also worried that they weren’t spending enough time with their daughters, Dorothée and Laure—especially after Laure had suffered neurological damage in an automobile accident on the narrow byway between Savigny-lès-Beaune and Bouilland. A year after Michelin had given the restaurant its second star—and a number of years before more celebrated chefs like Alain Senderens, Olivier Roellinger, and Marc Veyrat were to voluntarily give up stars and simplify their cuisine—the Silvas decided to take a step backward. Isabelle assumed control of the dining room again and stripped the service down to the basics, and Jean-Pierre recast his food, serving such fare as cannelloni stuffed with shredded coq au vin, pike perch in a vinegar sauce with lentils, and roast lamb from a nearby farm with a whole bouquet of exquisite, simply cooked local vegetables—perfect carrots among them. Michelin, as expected, promptly took away a star—but, Jean-Pierre told me, his business actually increased.
He felt better for a while, but he realized that he wanted something even simpler. He and Isabelle also dreamed about living someplace warmer than this little Burgundian Switzerland. He flirted with the idea of moving his family to St. Barths and opening something there, but also looked back to the south of France. His dream, he said—I’ve heard dozens of chefs, even Wolfgang Puck, say something like this—was to have a tiny place where he could cook food he liked for a handful of customers. Unlike most chefs, he actually made it happen: In 2000, the Silvas bought a beautiful old stone millhouse in the hills above Cannes, in a village called Le Rouret, and began to renovate it into a family home with a small restaurant attached. In January 2003, they sold Le Vieux Moulin—to a Swiss buyer, appropriately enough—and moved south. (The place seems to be doing well under its new owner, the former director of a psychiatric hospital in Fribourg, who hired a Burgundian-trained chef.)
A few months after they’d left Bouilland, the Silvas opened a fourteen-seat dining room in their new millhouse, called La Table de Mon Moulin. This was a two-person operation: Isabelle was the entire dining room staff and Jean-Pierre, by himself, cooked one fixed-price menu daily, five days a week, based on foodstuffs he bought each morning at the market in nearby Cagnes-sur-Mer. When I asked him if Isabelle ever helped with the prep work, he looked at me like I was crazy, as if to say that surely, after all the years we’d known each other, I realized he was the chef. She didn’t even clean up afterward: The plongeur was an automatic dishwasher.
Jean-Pierre’s food was no longer Burgundian, of course; instead, it was full of Provençal flavors. His cold tomato soup with a poached egg and a whole bouquet of herbs from the garden outside was like a field guide to the Côte d’Azur; his sea bass with scallion marmalade sang with freshness; his dorade coryphène, a kind of Mediterranean mahimahi, served on rounds of eggplant with a white bean cream and summer truffles, was an anthology of the Cagnes market; his pork loin with Perugia sausage in red wine sauce with new potatoes and wild chard was earthy and intense; his fig tart with pineapple sage leaves and apricot sorbet evoked a Provençal orchard. Like the food Jean-Pierre had served at Le Vieux Moulin, it was unfailingly good and redolent of its place of origin.
La Table de Mon Moulin was Silva’s fantasy restaurant—but it wasn’t the end of his story. His daughter Dorothée had studied architecture but had a hard time finding work on the Côte d’Azur, which she was disinclined to leave. She had literally grown up in the restaurant business, and one day she came to her father and said, “Can’t we do a restaurant together?” As he puts it, “She got her mother on her side, and then I didn’t stand a chance. There wasn’t room for another person at Mon Moulin, so we looked around, and we found L’Ondine.”
L’Ondine is a beachfront restaurant on La Croisette in Cannes, complete with a private enclosure full of chaises longues and umbrellas, a breezy terrace, and a large interior dining room. When he took it over, Jean-Pierre made the decision not to cook; instead, he supervised the kitchen and did all the buying of meat, fish, and produce, drawing on the network of suppliers he had come to know in the region. The menu was pretty much what you’d expect on the beach in Cannes: oversize salads, gargantuan slabs of beef fillet or breaded veal (the latter dwarfed by heaps of spaghetti on the side), grilled whole fish big enough to give Jonah the jitters. Every time I saw him at the place, sporting not a chef’s apron but a white short-sleeve shirt with the legend “Le Chef C’Est Moi” embroidered on the pocket, Jean-Pierre looked tan and relaxed. He liked to call himself a plagiste—a beach proprietor.
The story still wasn’t over, though. In 2012, after almost a decade at L’Ondine, Jean-Pierre, Isabelle, and Dorothée made another change: They sold the restaurant and opened a wineshop in Cannes, specializing in the wares of about fifty top Burgundy producers. It is, he says, “the best Burgundy cellar in the south of France.” He is considering opening a thirty-seat restaurant next door, to serve “very simple food to a local clientele”—but, he adds, “It’s easier to sell bottles than to cook meals.” The life he and his family will lead, he says, will be “plus tranquille”—more peaceful. It will, he adds, be “almost normal.”
Chapter Thirteen
EL MOTEL,
Figueres, Spain (1961– )
&
ELDORADO PETIT,
Barcelona (1978–2001)
IN ALL MY TRAVELS AROUND EUROPE, I HAD NEVER been to Spain. As a good young leftie, I avoided it—and its neighbor, Portugal—because they were fascist dictatorships. I’d also developed an early affinity for Italy, and Italy and Spain, like their respective languages, seemed so different and yet so similar that I wasn’t sure one could like them both. I crossed the Spanish border for the first time in 1980; by that time, as Chevy Chase used to assure us on Saturday Night Live, Generalísimo Francisco Franco was still dead. Leslie and I were staying in the French Basque port town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and we decided to go to San Sebastián, only about twenty miles away, for lunch one day. We’d done no restaurant research, so when we got there we just wandered around the Parte Vieja, the old quarter, until we found a place that looked okay—casual, big, and crowded. I don’t remember the details, other than th
at I had cigalas a la plancha, grilled scampi, very fresh and good.
For the next few years, on our European vacations, we stuck mostly to France and Italy, with side trips to London, Brussels, and Amsterdam. In early 1985, though, as we started planning our next trip to Europe, Leslie said, “Why don’t we go to Spain this year?” I agreed, and we plotted out a trip: We’d start in Paris, then drive down through western Provence and across the Pyrénées on the Mediterranean side. We’d stop in Barcelona for a few days, then move down to Valencia, Seville, and Jerez de la Frontera before swinging back up and finishing in Madrid. This time I did my homework, and one of the books I read was The Simon and Schuster Pocket Guide to Spanish Wines by Jan Read, which included brief restaurant recommendations for each region. In Catalonia, Read singled out, among other places, the dining room at the curiously named Motel Ampurdán in Figueres, describing it as a “highly sophisticated restaurant started by Josep Mercader, founder of the new Catalan cuisine.” I hadn’t even known there was an old Catalan cuisine, but I was intrigued, and the Motel Ampurdán was the first place we stopped, for lunch, when we entered Spain.
Walking into the dining room, I was engulfed by an attractive but exotic aroma that I couldn’t quite place, earthy, sweet, and a little dark, but not in a heavy or ominous sense. I later learned that this scent, unique to Catalan cooking, comes from a combination of long-cooked onions, garlic, and tomato and a mortar-and-pestle-ground paste of nuts, garlic, chocolate, and other ingredients—the so-called sofregit and picada, respectively, with which many traditional Catalan sauced dishes are made.
We sat down at a table set with thick white napery and ate plump, mild, oily anchovy filets with little rounds of bread rubbed with tomato and drizzled with olive oil (my introduction to the quintessentially Catalan dish called pa amb tomàquet, bread with tomato), then salt cod croquettes, grilled squid, and baby eggplants stuffed with anchovies and fresh herbs. The raw materials were familiar to me, mostly from my meals in Italy, but the flavors were somehow different, and I was definitely intrigued.
Over the next few days, in Barcelona, we ate at two contemporary Catalan places, both now long gone, Farín and Montse Guillén; the good but very French Neichel; a traditionally Catalan hole-in-the-wall in the Gothic Quarter called Quatre Barres; and the elegant Via Veneto, where we sampled both international haute cuisine (sautéed goose liver with sherry cream sauce, wild mushroom gâteau) and real Catalan fare (red peppers stuffed with salt cod mousse, botifarra sausage with white beans). This was, I now realize, a curious assortment of restaurants, only intermittently representative of what the region had to offer gastronomically. Nonetheless, from this brief, imperfect sampling, I realized that Catalan cuisine could make a great story.
Back in America, I quickly sold an article on the subject to Met Home; it is a measure of the obscurity of the region to Americans in those days that the illustrated map the magazine used to accompany my piece labeled Catalonia as “Catalan.” Before the piece was published, my literary agent took me to breakfast in Los Angeles and asked, “What’s new in food?” I told her that it was probably too obscure for a whole book, but there was this little corner of Spain. . . . “You should write a proposal,” she said. I did, and in June 1985, I signed a contract with Atheneum for my first cookbook, to be titled Catalan Cuisine. I was thrilled by the imprint—Atheneum published all my favorite poets, like James Merrill, Mark Strand, and Norman Dubie—and even the advance didn’t seem so bad: $12,500, payable in two installments, one upon signing, one upon delivery and acceptance of the “complete and final manuscript.” What I didn’t realize, of course, was what the book would ultimately cost me.
IT WAS APPROPRIATE that the Motel Ampurdán, which introduced me to Catalan cuisine, would become the most important restaurant in my Catalan culinary education. In the 1960s, the Motel had been almost as revolutionary a restaurant as the legendary elBulli, fifteen miles or so to the east, was to become thirty years or so later, even though its innovations never had the international reach that elBulli’s did. To understand its significance, you have to realize that until the latter half of the twentieth century, the food served in white-tablecloth restaurants in Spain was primarily French, either literally or in inspiration. Menus were often written in the language of Carême and Escoffier, and while they may have included a handful of traditional Spanish dishes, even those were often Gallicized (“les tripes à la madrilène”).
The dominant Spanish culinary text for much of the past hundred years or so—the Escoffier of Spain, if you will, written for professional chefs—had been El práctico, a compendium of about 6,500 recipes published in 1895. It certainly included Spanish specialties—empanadas, pucheros, various rice dishes, and the like—but it was mostly full of instructions for the correct production of vol-au-vents, quiche, frogs’ legs, bouillabaisse, andouillettes, chateaubriand, and the other French classics that any serious chef in Spain was expected to be able to prepare.
Josep Mercader knew the classics as well as anyone, but he also saw the value in simple Spanish—and especially Catalan—home cooking, and knew how to refine it just enough to earn it a place on his tables alongside all those French specialties. He went a step further, though, and dared to tamper with tradition: Instead of just applying the techniques he knew to indigenous fare, he began rethinking the fare itself, making it lighter, rearranging its elements, and presenting them in different form—something it apparently had never occurred to other good chefs of the era to do. This recasting of familiar dishes into forms that recalled the original but changed their texture and composition very much anticipated the basic notion of the “deconstructions” that Ferran Adrià, who had not yet appeared on the planet when Mercader opened his establishment, was to develop some decades later.
Born into a family of fishermen in the seaside village of Cadaqués, a town beloved by Picasso, Miró, Duchamp, and most of all Dalí, who built a house there, Mercader started cooking young, apprenticing at local restaurants, often under French-trained chefs. His most important mentor was Pere Granollers, who, for twenty years, had run the kitchen at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo (where Alain Ducasse now holds sway), before returning to Catalonia to take over the railway station restaurant in the Spanish-French border town of Portbou. This was a grander establishment than it might sound. In France, there was a tradition of fine restaurants in railway stations, and because French and Spanish trains ran on different gauge rails, all passengers between the two countries had to stop in Portbou to change carriages. As a result, there was a constant stream of customers, many of them used to the high standards of French cooking.
As Mercader worked under Granollers, he grew increasingly confident in his own skills, and began to think about creating a different kind of cuisine. With investments from local friends, he constructed a three-story hotel in a streamlined, quasi-deco style on the edge of Figueres, on the old pre-autoroute road between Barcelona and the French border. He called the place the Motel Ampurdán—“motel” because he saw the place primarily as a rest stop for automobile-borne travelers, Ampurdán because that was the Castilian Spanish form of Empordà, the name of the region in Catalan, a language whose use was forbidden by law until after the death of Franco.
Mercader never identified himself with the nouvelle cuisine movement that began redefining French cooking a few years after he opened his restaurant, but he pursued many of the same goals that chefs like Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, the Troisgros brothers, and Alain Chapel did. Like them, he modernized and lightened traditional dishes, simplified preparations, and brought regional fare into the formal dining room, anticipating changing tastes. He was encouraged in this pursuit by a group of cosmopolitan friends, chief among them the prominent local writer Josep Pla, and by Pla’s friend Dalí, who became a faithful customer of Mercader’s.
An example of Mercader’s approach is his faves a la menta, literally fava beans with mint. There is a traditional Catalan dish called faves a la catalana, typi
cally made with large, starchy favas, cooked for a long time, with blood sausage and bacon added. Mercader reconceived the dish as a salad of small, fresh favas—he only made it in the spring, when they were in season—flavored with lots of fresh mint, and, in place of rich blood sausage, he used only a few shreds of ham and bits of translucent, fat-streaked meat sliced paper-thin from a pig’s foot.
Among his other innovations, Mercader turned samfaina, the Catalan ratatouille, into a rosy-hued, complexly flavored sauce for roast loin of veal; made a surprisingly delicate mousse out of escalivada—eggplant, red peppers, and onions charred in the embers of a live fire; recast straightforward roasted salt cod with allioli (the basic Catalan garlic-and-olive-oil emulsion) by topping the fish with a souffléed garlic mousseline; played off the “mar i muntanya” (sea and mountain, or “surf-and-turf”) dishes of traditional Catalan cooking by stuffing roast lamb leg with the superb anchovies of his hometown of Cadaqués; and had the inspiration of processing crema catalana (crème brûlée), caramelized sugar topping and all, in an ice cream machine (this became probably his most copied dish). Long before other Catalan chefs started experimenting with centrifuges and vaporizers, liquid nitrogen and calcium chloride, Mercader was thinking about ways to transform the dishes with which he’d grown up, retaining—and in some cases clarifying and/or intensifying—their flavors while deftly altering their forms. There’s no telling what greater influence he might have had on the cuisine of his region, and of Spain in general, if he hadn’t died of a heart attack in 1979.
My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants Page 21
