The reason for the intemperate reaction to my dining plan was that Le Louis XV is no ordinary hotel restaurant. It has three Michelin stars, and no restaurants are more illustrious—or more dedicated to over-indulgence—than those. They epitomize the glories of French dining, the pinnacle of culture in a country obsessed with good taste. While many persons, myself included, are horrified at the cost of three-star dining—to pay less than $150 per person is a boon, to pay more than $300 per person commonplace—the financial price of eating in these gastronomic temples is not as daunting as the physiological one. After one such meal—amuse-bouche, appetizer, fish course, meat course, dessert, and petits fours, unless the diner selects a tasting menu, which entails much more—the process of digestion is inadequate. What is required is decompression. And I was planning on ten meals in five days.
Others have attempted similar feats of gourmandise, generally fool-hardy travelers who make their way across France wolfing down 7 0
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prodigious repasts in as many three-star establishments as they can reach in as short a period of time as possible, lurching from meal to meal in the same béarnaise-flecked tie and Burgundy-stained suit, setting records for the most courses eaten without doing laundry. I wished no part of such buffoonery.
Before I set off for Monte Carlo, the business and tourism center of the principality of Monaco, I announced my intentions to Ducasse. I let him know that something was amiss about three-star dining if a man couldn’t get off the elevator in his hotel lobby and get a little something to eat without a subsequent visit to a gastroenterologist.
He nodded, for that is his tight-lipped way, and I took that for agree-ment. His only stipulation was that I stop at his restaurant, Alain Ducasse, in Paris, on the way home. He wished me to compare the two styles of three-star cuisine. It was not the most odious of provisos, although not many people who eat ten three-star meals in a row are lining up for number eleven.
I set off believing all that was required of me upon arrival in Monte Carlo was a good appetite. Thus I was fortunate to have business before-hand in Milan, for this northern Italian city offers only two significant dishes, one of them veal Milanese, which is bland meat flattened, fried, and served with nothing to detract from its essential bleakness, and the other osso buco, which is the bony part of the veal that remains after most of the meat has been flattened and fried. Having quickly tired of those dishes, I was ravenous when I boarded the Milan-to-Monaco train, a local that proceeded halfway south in a conventional manner, then pulled into a small Alpine village station where it had no choice but to back out. Once the backing up began, it never ceased. We continued in this unsettling manner for hours, until the train finally backed into the station at Monte Carlo. It was a good reason to travel on an empty stomach.
I checked into the Hôtel de Paris, one of those imperial sanctuar-ies that deserves to stand on a square dominated by a statue of some long-forgotten grand marshal of the army of the emperor. Here, in deference to the needs and tastes of guests, the square outside the hotel F O R K I T O V E R
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is given over to Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and Bentleys. The microwheeled vehicle I arrived in, constructed from the same materials as lawn furniture, was snatched from sight so quickly I was nearly dragged away before I could release the handle of the door.
I had requested the kind of room that we Americans call, with some hilarity, a junior suite, as though it were proportioned for undersized executives. I cared only that the room had something other than a bed to rest upon, and such suites always have couches perfect for napping between meals. In the bathroom, I was distressed to note, was a scale, which I vowed never to step on, even though it was thoughtfully accessorized with a doily that averted an untoward situation, bare feet touching cold metal. I knew what would come to pass were I to place my weight upon the scale, the needle jiggling and trembling and finally settling on the wrong number, in much the same way the steel ball of a roulette wheel always comes deliciously close to dropping into my number before leaping away at the last moment. Monte Carlo has a famous casino that I had no intention of patronizing, for casinos and scales are much the same to me. With neither do I have luck.
What I had not told Ducasse, and I don’t believe anybody in his right mind would have made this admission, was that the primary reason I wanted to spend my five days in Monte Carlo and not at his three-star Paris restaurant, is that I wished to evaluate the Mediterranean cuisine served at Le Louis XV. Ducasse is always referring to the food cooked in his Paris place as “northern cuisine,” so much so that I have at times imagined him dishing up a Scandinavian smorgasbord, whereas it is actually the food we commonly associate with France, food lavished with butter and cream, exactly what I love.
Mediterranean food has always displeased me, but that might be because the only place I have eaten it regularly is the United States.
Restaurants that specialize in American-style Mediterranean cuisine tend to feature out-of-season tomatoes, relentless quantities of zucchini and red peppers, and an alarming eagerness to bond tapenade, the anchovy-caper-olive paste, to anything to which it will stick. I also
