Why Don't the French Cook Like They Used To?How the Michelin guide crippled France's restaurants.

(Continued from page 1)

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

So chefs were left to draft their own road maps to the Promised Land, and many ultimately concluded that, contrary to Michelin's mantra, the difference between a two-star rating and a three-star rating had little to do with the cooking and a lot to do with the ambience. The chef Paul Bocuse supposedly won his third star after prettifying his bathrooms, and the lesson drawn by other chefs and restaurateurs was that a baronial atmosphere was a prerequisite to earning Michelin's ultimate accolade. In 2007 a trio of European economists—Olivier Gergaud, Linett Montaño Guzmán, and Vincenzo Verardi—published a study showing that Michelin was indeed influenced by the décor and even by the quality of the neighborhoods in which restaurants were located. Their regression analysis led them to conclude that the Guide "overcompensates chefs who invest heavily in their setting (and location) and undercompensates those who strictly focus on cuisine quality." Several generations of French chefs could have told them that, without having to resort to the fancy math.

Then, in 1999, the unthinkable happened: A pair of three-star recipients in London, Marco Pierre White and Nico Ladenis, announced (separately) that they were handing back their étoiles and taking their restaurants in new directions. Explaining his decision, Ladenis suggested that Michelin had fallen out of step with what diners wanted. "I have now reached the age of sixty-five and like an old elephant with its nose in the air, my sense of smell tells me that fashion, people, expectations, and restaurants are undergoing convulsive changes," he said. In his view, traditional three-star dining had become passé. Michelin, clearly stung, responded by insisting that chefs could not actually give back their stars; only the Guide itself had the power to withdraw them. But the legalistic face-saving did nothing to change the story line.

A three-star rating had always been considered tantamount to a winning lottery ticket, but it was now increasingly seen as both a creative and financial burden. In 1996, three years before Ladenis and White told the Guide to go jump in the Thames, Pierre Gagnaire's three-star restaurant in Saint-étienne went bankrupt, a first in the annals of Michelin. For Gagnaire, the problem was location: The restaurant was situated in an industrial city that didn't attract many tourists and where the locals didn't much appreciate his eclectic cooking—or the exorbitant prices. Gagnaire's demise might have been dismissed as a product of uniquely bad circumstances had it not been for the financial woes that struck another three-star chef, Marc Veyrat, that same year. Nine million dollars in debt after extensive renovations (including gold-plated bathroom fixtures), Veyrat was forced to close his restaurant for a month when he couldn't repay the loans. The banks gave him a reprieve that allowed the restaurant, located in the Alps, to reopen, but Veyrat's near-death experience underscored the point: Outside of Paris, at least, a three-star rating had become as much a millstone as a money spinner.

In September 2007 I joined Jean-Luc Naret, Michelin's editorial director and the man charged with reinvigorating the brand, for lunch in Paris. His choice of restaurants was intriguing: Carré des Feuillants, located off the Place Vendôme, was a perennial two-star that many people felt had been unjustly denied a promotion. In picking Carré des Feuillants, was Naret subtly indicating that a third star was at last in chef Alain Dutournier's grasp? I walked into the restaurant at twelve-thirty precisely. The receptionist greeted me and asked for the name of the reservation. I suddenly recalled with some alarm that Naret's assistant hadn't told me the alias he'd be using. I wasn't quite sure of the name, I told her. She asked if I knew the company that had booked the table. I pretended to draw a blank on that, too. Wearing a look of polite bafflement, she invited me to take a seat in the lobby. Then Naret came breezing through the front door. Although it was a sunny, mid-September afternoon with temperatures well into the sixties, he had a bright purple scarf wrapped rather dramatically around his neck—not exactly the look of a man moving about town incognito. In fact, he had booked under his own name. As we were shown to our table, Naret reminded me that he was not an inspector and thus had no need for pseudonyms. It was better if he reserved as Jean-Luc Naret, he said. Michelin took a dim view of restaurants that lavished preferential treatment on certain guests, and what better way of finding that out than having the Guide's editorial director in the dining room? He sometimes had inspectors visit restaurants at the same time he was there so that he could compare notes with them later and determine if favors had been dispensed. "So there might be an inspector here right now?" I asked. "Possibly," he said with a cagey grin.

The Carré des Feuillants staff didn't fawn over Naret. They were obsequious, of course (it came with the territory), but no more so than they were with the other diners. Dutournier also played it cool: Rather than rushing out to greet Naret, he waited perhaps half an hour to come into the dining room, and he stopped to exchange pleasantries with a few other guests before sauntering over to see us. But once at our table, the stocky, gray-haired chef was a picture of timidity: He seemed to bow as he shook Naret's hand, meekly said "Hello," and then stood there wearing a nervous, expectant smile. His demeanor was almost supplicatory, which was jarring to see in this normally cocksure chef, a frequent and animated presence on French television. Michelin's influence might have been waning, but it evidently still had the power to make famous French chefs quake in their clogs. For his part, Naret was curt: He thanked Dutournier for the greeting, said he looked well, and then flashed him a look that seemed to say "dismissed." Dutournier quickly wished us a bon appétit and retreated to the kitchen. I couldn't decide if Naret was being scrupulously professional and avoiding small talk or smelled weakness and was being gratuitously cruel.

Naret ordered oysters in seawater gelée, a specialty of the house, for his first course and roasted turbot for his main. Although he wasn't an inspector, he obviously knew the criteria that Michelin used to assess the quality of meals, and as our desserts were being cleared, I asked Naret to cough up some insights into what we'd eaten. I asked if he thought the quality of the lunch was consistent with the restaurant's two-star rating, to which I received a one-word reply: "Yes." He then told me that he would not be returning to Carré des Feuillants for a while: This had been his fifth visit to the restaurant in 2007, and he was worried that perhaps the long-suffering Dutournier was getting the wrong idea. "You mean he might think you're considering him for a third star?" I asked. "Exactly."

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

SPONSORED CONTENT

• Banish the Bean
  Why green beans have no place on a Thanksgiving menu.
  Juliet Lapidos | Nov. 24, 2009
• Pumpkin Eaters
  It's Thanksgiving. Where should you put your pumpkin?
  Sara Dickerman | Nov. 23, 2009
• Don't Buy Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking
  You will never cook from it.
  Regina Schrambling | Aug. 28, 2009
• Search for more Food articles
• Subscribe to the Food RSS feed
• View our complete Food archive