by Bill Buford
The downstairs was divided into dining rooms. One had a chandelier. The message was “cozy.” The bar had tables, too, and was brightly lit, with a white tile floor and leaded windows, stylishly 1930s—evocative of a heyday in Lyonnais cooking, when France had discovered the automobile and the meals that you could eat only by driving to the outposts where they were served. The kitchen—with noisy wooden stairs that led to the next floor—was anachronistic and unmodern, cooks standing at attention, the brigade, packed tightly together, staring at us. There was no microwave or vacuum sealer or sous-vide water bath or dehydrator. There were pots.
“Les mères,” Viannay explained, “were the experts at the local dishes.” They were their own subculture, sharing among themselves a literature of tattered mère cookbooks. In 2002, Stéphane Gaborieau, then the chef at the Villa Florentine (originally a seventeenth-century convent, at the top of a hill in Vieux Lyon), bought a handwritten example from the 1850s at a book stall on the quai and produced a facsimile local best seller: ninety-seven pages, written out in an ancient, flourishingly beautiful script describing how to make dishes (quenelles, tripe, kidney, the chickens from Bresse) that you find in Lyon today.
Viannay was fortyish, trim (in the way that many Frenchmen are and Americans are normally not), and wore well-made English brogues, blue jeans, and a chef’s jacket with sleeves that opened capaciously around the wrists, like bell-bottoms for the arms. He had heavy eyebrows, a flop of dark-going-slightly-silver hair (it fell into his face and was long in the back, French rocker style), and a five-day beard. His manner was grace and courtesy. He had nothing but time for us.
He led us upstairs and directed us to “the private dining rooms”—originally small low-ceilinged bedrooms overlooking the street—that were meant for family meals, especially on Sundays, another mère tradition, in which you were fed as though at your home—at least the fantasy high bourgeois version.
“You have children?” he asked us. “This is where you will bring them. You will eat poulet de Bresse.”
I pictured George and Frederick, pushing open the window and throwing drumsticks on pedestrians below, and thought: Nah, not anytime soon.
Our meal included two items that had been served in this very building for nearly a hundred years: an artichoke with foie gras (the artichoke, a famously Italian vegetable, was a local food in Lyon) and the breast of the Bresse chicken. I know they were delicious, I have eaten both many times since, but I wasn’t tasting them. I was anxious. This, clearly, was where I should work.
Afterward, Viannay stood by the door, thanking diners. In manner, he seemed unconventional, anti-form, un-French, but there was a guardedness in his person. The restaurant had been open only three months when it got its stars. The feeling there wasn’t celebratory; it was astonishment that Viannay was getting away with it.
I told him my story, what I wanted to do (to train to be a French chef), and gave him my book.
“I would like to do a stage in your kitchen,” I said.
He looked at me.
“I would like to be a stagiaire,” I said, clarifying the expression.
Viannay looked at the book in his hand. It puzzled him.
“Italian cooking,” he said. It wasn’t a question. It was more like a discovery.
“Yes, Italian cooking.” I mentioned The New Yorker.
He smiled, an odd half-smile, somewhere between amusement and sneer.
“I should sign it,” I said, grabbed and autographed it with the exaggeratedly flamboyant flourish of someone who had nervously drunk too much Côtes du Rhône. I handed it back.
He stared at my dedication.
I waited.
He smiled that smile.
I thanked him. I shook his hand. I thanked him again. I bowed, and shuffled, and said goodbye.
Later, walking home, I asked Jessica, “ ‘Mathieu’ is not spelled with two ‘t’s, is it?”
“No. In French, there is only one ‘t.’ ”
“Of course. I knew that.”
The following night, following Boulud’s advice, we went to Vienne, twenty miles south of Lyon. La Pyramide, once the home of the legendary Fernand Point, was Plan B.
* * *
———
The Financial Operations of the House of Point always mystified his friends, since he uses only the finest ingredients, yet charges prices lower than those of most high-class restaurants in Paris. His friends agree that Point might have gone bankrupt long ago but for his wife. “Mado” Point acts as a maître d’hôtel, purchasing agent, wine taster, cashier, house physician, confidential secretary, and chronicler. Someday, she hopes, she will collect her husband’s recipes and put them in a book for posterity’s sake. This won’t be easy. M. Point takes a dim view of the printed word.
JOSEPH WECHSBERG, “THE FINEST BUTTER AND LOTS OF TIME,” THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 3, 1949
VIENNE. I knew enough to know that, to any student of the French kitchen, La Pyramide was not Plan B material. For chefs, it has a house-of-worship status. It is the “Temple.” The name, la pyramide, came from a Roman statue at the end of the street—it marks the place where chariot races were held (Vienne is said to have more Roman ruins per square meter than any town in France)—and the ancient, vaguely pagan iconography seems to have enhanced the restaurant’s metaphysical pull. You would be hard-pressed to find a serious French chef who hasn’t been there.
Its fame was the achievement of Fernand Point, and his restaurant was, in Curnonsky’s day, the greatest restaurant in the whole Rhône Valley (“which every Lyonnais knows”) and in all of France and among the very best in the world. Curnonsky, whose actual name was Maurice Edmond Sailland (he arrived at “Curnonsky” by combining a school nickname, Cur Non?—Latin slang for “Why not?”—with an aristocratic-sounding Slavic suffix), was a critic and historian. Until the 1950s, no one, in matters of French food, had more authority. It was Curnonsky who described Lyon as the “gastronomic capital of the world.”
In 1949, the Czech-American journalist Joseph Wechsberg—who had been told by Parisian friends, “If I wanted to have the epicurean experience of my life…I would have to go to Vienne”—spent a day with the great chef. Point, in Wechsberg’s description, was massive—six foot three, and three hundred pounds (others say he was closer to four hundred)—impressively at ease with his size, appearing in a capacious black suit and big silk bow tie with a flowery design, began each day with a magnum of champagne, and regarded butter, lots of butter, as an essential ingredient in a well-prepared dish (“Butter! Give me butter! Always butter!”). He also harbored a lifelong prejudice against skinny chefs, and was, in both bearing and sway, a fleshy illustration of the expression “larger than life.” He was not, alas, stronger than it, and, six years after Wechsberg’s visit, Point was felled, like many other chefs of his generation, in his fifties (at fifty-eight in Point’s case).
His “art”—Curnonsky’s word—continued in the hands of others, principally those of “Mado,” the nickname of Point’s widow, Marie-Louise Point. Indirectly, his art was continued by the cooks in his kitchen. Many came to be associated with nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s. Point is credited with being the movement’s “godfather.”
Patrick Henriroux is now the Pyramide chef. His name had also been on Boulud’s contact list, just below Mathieu Viannay’s. He joined us at the beginning of our dinner. Fernand and Mado had a daughter, Marie-José, he said, who had been prepared to sell the restaurant to a chef who understood her parents’ legacy and had the wherewithal to continue it.
She asked Paul Bocuse. (Bocuse had worked for Point.) He said no.
She asked Alain Chapel, another former member of La Pyramide’s brigade. He said no.
She asked Michel Guérard, the unequivocal genius of nouvelle cuisine. He said no.
She asked Alain Ducasse: N
o. Marc Veyrat: No. She asked every three-star chef in France.
“It was Point’s reputation,” Henriroux said. “No one wanted to be measured against it.”
She approached the two-star chefs. Finally she asked Henriroux, then running the one-star kitchen of La Ferme de Mougins, in the south of France. Henriroux accepted the challenge, because, well, “Cur non?”
He began in 1989. He got his first star seven months later. He tried to buy the restaurant but was turned down. Two years later, he got his second star. By then he had the support of the locals (supporting Boulud’s belief that two-star restaurants belong to the town), and, when the restaurant was in financial trouble, they supported him in his purchase. Now, fifteen years later, he has paid off the loan.
He asked us what we would like for dinner.
I wanted to try the poularde en vessie. I’d read about it in Point’s Ma Gastronomie, which includes letters, details of the guests (Colette, Charles de Gaulle, Pablo Picasso, Édith Piaf), aphorisms (e.g., “In the orchestra of a grand kitchen, the saucier is the soloist”), and what is sometimes referred to as a “kitchen bible,” a collection of all its recipes. Point’s is understated in the extreme. Any instruction so specific as to mention, say, a measurement or a cooking temperature seems so arbitrary as to read like a mistake (“Take five liters of blood from Menon’s animals, after they have spent the last month eating his pears”).
I gave Henriroux my order. A vessie is a bladder. I had never eaten food cooked in a bladder.
Henriroux grimaced. “You have to be very hungry.”
I assured him of my appetite.
“It is the whole chicken. It’s a poularde.”
“I love poularde,” I said. I had no idea what a poularde might be.
(A poularde is a bird more than a year old; a poussin, less than six months; a poulet, more than six months. It’s the Eskimo rule: In Lyon, there are many words for birds, including the generic one, volailles, which means “flying things.”)
Henriroux persisted—“It takes a long time to cook”—and, as I was about to play along (“We’re in no hurry”), he interrupted me and confessed: “Frankly, it needs to be ordered in advance.”
I settled on a squab.
And to begin?
Perhaps a sandre.
I knew nothing about sandre except that it was a local freshwater fish. Lyon was said to be famous for its freshwater fish, all of it caught in the nearby rivers or the big lakes that surround the Alps.
The meal was well executed, and though it never reached the higher expressions of epicurean hyperbole, it illustrated why so many chefs had refused to step into Point’s kitchen. Henriroux was born in 1958. Why should he be judged by a man who had died three years before his birth?
I wondered: Could this be my place? The history, the intimacy with what comes from here and nowhere else (the flying things, the swimming things), the Roman ghosts. Plus Boulud’s rule: It had two stars!
Henriroux rejoined our table. He was comfortable with journalists, accustomed to their making the trek from Paris, a health checkup on the legend. His message wasn’t complicated: “I am not Fernand Point. If you come here to eat, I will give you my food, not his. But I live in what had been his house, and am happy to share my impressions of what he did.” In his person, Henriroux conveyed more stamina than flair. He had started in adversity and overcome it. He had muscular shoulders, a wispily receding hairline, soft blue eyes, furry brows, and a square face creased by deep lines that betrayed decades of slog. But he also had an easy smile, and wore the slog lightly. Now the restaurant was fully his. He had begun making changes, his changes. Outside: Henriroux had just landscaped the property (now more Versailles than Point’s country house), built a patio, and considerably enlarged the number of tables in the garden. (Point abhorred outside dining.)
I told Henriroux about my project. “I would like to be a stagiaire at La Pyramide.”
His smile vanished so quickly that it could have been wiped off by a sponge. He looked confused. “A stage? No, no, no. A stage is complicated. There is a protocol. You? No, it is out of the question.”
He sounded so definitive.
“Really?” I asked, weakly. (I felt myself physically deflating.)
“No, I can’t do that.” His manner seemed to say: “An American? A journalist? In my kitchen?” I appeared to have offended him.
He thanked us for coming. He stood up.
“The poularde en vessie!”
He stopped.
“What if I came here one day, only a day, to learn how you cook a chicken in a bladder.”
His diner was negotiating with him.
I pressed on. “No one in America eats food out of a pig’s bladder.”
He seemed to consider the possibility.
“One day. One dish,” I said.
He sighed. “Okay.”
We took a taxi back to Lyon, a long ride in wintry weather, freezing rain, the road slippery. We didn’t talk much. I didn’t have a backup plan for my backup plan.
* * *
—
What I did have was a home in the quartier that, for all its in-your-face grittiness, had energy, integrity, and an abundance of small eateries: twenty-two by my last count, nothing more than five minutes away. The food wasn’t grand, but always good, and characterized by what is referred to as a rapport qualité-prix—an essential feature of the Lyonnais meal (i.e., good quality for the price).
Our favorites were already known to us by the people running them—such as Laura Vildi and Isabelle Comerro, two former waitresses who, the year before we arrived, opened the Bouchon des Filles, not with a woman at the stove but with a man, whom they robustly (and ironically?) treated like shit. It had checkered tablecloths, a wood ceiling, cheeky service, great Beaujolais, and established Lyonnais dishes lightly tweaked: like their boudin noir, the sausage made from fresh pig’s blood (a staple in the city—you bought it by the meter), but served, in their version, inside a crunchy pastry and topped with an herb salad. From the Filles’ door, you could see both the boys’ school and a window of our apartment.
Or Mai and Franck Delhoum’s Bistrot du Potager des Halles.
“Halles” refers to a nearby small historic food market. A potager is a kitchen garden. The eatery had also opened just before we arrived and became, in practice, the neighborhood bistro, open from breakfast to a late-night drink.
Or Roberto Bonomo’s surprisingly authentic Sapori e Colori, which, despite our commitment to Lyonnais cuisine, we found ourselves routinely craving. Jessica, during her early IKEA forays, had found Roberto’s in a state of desperation and declared that she had been in Lyon only three days and was already desperate for a plate of proper Italian pasta. (“Oh, Jessica,” he said, very sympathetic, “this is not a good sign.”) Later, I gave him an Italian translation of the book I wrote about the Italian kitchen. He read it and asked me to come cook with him. I briefly considered the possibility. “No, Roberto, thank you. I can’t do that. I didn’t come to Lyon to cook Italian.”
And then there was the famous local baker, “Bob.” His boulangerie was obviously where we bought our bread. I didn’t know if it was actually the best in the city because we hadn’t eaten anyone else’s, but I did know that we were lucky when we got a loaf hot from the oven (a line began forming just outside the door—we could see it from our living-room window), carried it home jugglingly, and ate it with salty butter.
The boulangerie was where the boys discovered the word goûter (from goût, meaning “taste” or “flavor,” and probably the single most important word in the entire language). A goûter was an afternoon snack—eaten universally at 4:00 p.m., when children got out of school—and an exception to two of the established rules about French food: that you do not eat while walking or standing and never between meal
s. A goûter was devoured instantly. Most parents brought it from home; we extravagantly bought ours at Bob’s. The boys had discovered Bob’s pain au chocolat—they had eaten nothing like it before—and didn’t understand why they should eat anything else.
After being turned down by La Pyramide, I wondered if I should do a stage at Bob’s—bread is a fundamental of the French plate, why not? I asked one of Bob’s English friends, Martin Porter, a Liverpudlian in Lyon: Could he make inquiries on my behalf?
“I don’t know,” Martin reported Bob’s saying. “Tell him to come see me one night.”
* * *
—
We met our next-door neighbors, Christophe and Marie-Laure Reymond, and their four children—all boys, in robust, gorgeous health—over a welcome-to-the-building glass of wine and a plate of wintry bugnes. Bugnes are a Lyonnais fried-batter treat, coated in powdered sugar, made just before Lent to use up all the fat before fasting. (I have an image of young George, dressed up warmly for the market on the Saône that I insisted on taking him and his brother to every Sunday, eating a bugne that has just exploded in his hands, covering his face and dark-blue coat with sticky, powdery whiteness.)
During our getting-to-know-you chat, I described my project, including my suspicion that the Italians played a part in forming French cuisine. I may have spoken more bluntly than I’d intended. What I’d probably said was that Italians “invented” it. Marie-Laure and Christophe are not in the restaurant business. They are not historians. But they were born in Lyon, their families are Lyonnais, and they see themselves as of the city. What happened next was a veritable matrimonial dispute.
Marie-Laure: “Yes, I can see that. The Italian influence.”
Christophe: “What are you talking about?”
Marie-Laure: “Oh, you know. Ravioli. Or rosette” (a Lyonnais dried sausage made from pork meat and studded with white pork fat, said to be a local interpretation of mortadella).
Christophe: “I don’t understand.”
