My week at the school, I must say, has been as rich and filling as the lunchroom’s croquettes de pommes de terre—potatoes mashed with egg yolks and butter, then breaded and deep-fried. While I have not learned as much as I had hoped, Chef Antoine has taught me lessons about French cooking and culture that I will never forget: 1. Never lose control of your shallots. I have no idea what this means, but Chef Antoine warned us about this during classes and I pass it F O R K I T O V E R
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on. Losing control of your shallots is not to be confused with sweating your carrots, which is a good thing.
2. Washing your mushrooms is perfectly fine. I can’t tell you how happy I am about this. I never serve mushrooms when friends come over, because one of them will invariably launch into a diatribe when I wash my mushrooms instead of brushing each one with a dry cloth. Chef Antoine says wiping mushrooms is ridiculous. “You have time in the United States for things like that,” he says.
3. My final lesson comes from the cultural side of the curriculum. Chef Antoine says that a French chef never lies. When I ask him if he ever put frozen fish on his menu and sold it as fresh, he explains, “Yes, but that is business.”
GQ, june 1995
B O C U S E M U S T G O
Paul Bocuse has done more to glorify French cuisine than any other living restaurateur, and for this he has been suitably honored. He was named “chef of the century” by the Gault Millau restaurant guide and has been immortalized in statuary at the Musée Grevin in Paris. He created a prize, the Bocuse d’Or, that is coveted by cooks simply because his name is on it, and he is so cherished throughout his homeland that he has been known to drag massive cuts of well-marbled American beef through French customs while inspectors shrug and look the other way.
Now, as he approaches eighty years of age, he need perform only one more gracious act to preserve his reputation. He must close his restaurant.
The restaurant Paul Bocuse, which he named for himself before such a vain (if logical) act was commonplace, can be found just outside Lyons, a city long considered (except by me) to be the gastronomic capital of the nation. Paul Bocuse retains a score of three stars, the highest awarded by the Michelin guide. Such a rating denotes exceptional cuisine “worth a special journey.” The experience of dining at Bocuse cannot be duplicated at any other Michelin three-star establishment. It is uniquely disturbing. At a visit this past January, I spent most of the dinner shaking my head in disappointment, although at moments I was bent over with laughter (during the cheese course) or sitting bolt upright in outrage (throughout a musical performance by a black employee dressed as an organ-grinder’s 5 4
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monkey). This is not how I would choose to remember the greatest cuisinier since the fabled Auguste Escoffier, but I have no choice, because I will never enter that establishment again.
While ostentatious and somewhat dated, the building that houses the restaurant does not detract from the pleasure of a meal. Inside, the restaurant is too bright and too warm and the tables are too close together, but the copper pots gleam, the shelves appear to be dusted regularly, and the napery is luxurious. The place isn’t Versailles, but it’s more than respectable.
I’ve been there twice. During the first visit, in the mid-nineties, the room was almost empty and the meal was acceptable, if forgettable. A day later, I couldn’t remember much of what I’d eaten except for the famous black-truffle soup with its puff-pastry dome, as good as its reputation. This past January, I returned with four friends. We each ate a fixed-price meal that cost approximately $190, tax and tip (but not wine) included. On the set menu was the same signature soup, pan-fried scallops with sauce Perigueux, a granité prepared with Beaujolais wine, chicken with black truffles cooked in a pig’s bladder, cheeses, and a selection of desserts.
The truffle-scented soup, which exhales an ambrosial cloud of pungent vapor when its crust is pierced, was again the only noteworthy dish.
The flavor of the Gamay grape was captured by the granité, so I suppose that was also to be admired. Wine service was nonchalant, wineglasses too small, cheeses a joke, and many of the desserts inedible. Even the bread—two kinds of rolls relentlessly offered with every course—was the stuff of a neighborhood boulangerie.
Most depressing were the disastrous main courses, because they supposedly epitomize the cuisine of Bocuse. The pan-fried scallops came in an overly sweet, shockingly rustic, dull brown interpretation of sauce Perigueux, which is made with Madeira wine, foie gras, and chopped black truffles. Only if I had been dining in a farmhouse would I have sent my compliments to the cook.
Chicken cooked en vessie, which means in a swollen pig’s bladder, is intended to be an exercise in culinary showmanship. The dish dates F O R K I T O V E R
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from the days when French furniture and French food had much in common—they were both about ornamentation, not pleasure.
The presentation was delightful, but then we were obliged to eat.
Steaming a chicken in a bladder might seal in flavor, but it turns nearly everything inside either tough and rubbery (the skin) or mushy and overcooked (the vegetables). By scraping aside most
