Remembrance of Things Paris

by Gourmet Magazine Editors

  (delivery) when we were there. Another specialty is the ragoût fin Bontoux, made with coquillettes, truffles, foie gras, and sweetbreads. No wonder Guérard’s fellow artists admire his imagination. It is matched by his fastidious standards: He makes the best out of the best available ingredients, which is the only way to practice gastronomy. He uses vinegar in some dishes and likes the contrast of sweet and sour—the Chinese influence—and his canard confit à la maison, cold or hot, is slightly caramelized and has the color of canard laqué.

  It is easy to believe that Guérard was once named his country’s best pastry worker. The feuilleté de poire caramélisé is hot mille-feuilles with caramelized pears and is simply exquisite. So is his salade de pêches et fraises au Bordeaux. Perhaps more interesting even is the granité de chocolat amer et brioche rôtie, a light sherbet made with finely crushed ice and very bitter chocolate. The Italians, who invented granita, mostly make it with syrup, flavored with coffee, lemons, or strawberries. Not M. Guérard, who produces a cold, bitter-chocolate sherbet, which contrasts with a hot, sweetish brioche. No doubt this is an artist going places fast. The Guide Michelin gives Guérard two stars; perhaps they feel the ambience is not quite up to the third star. He will get it eventually. Guérard understands the basic truth that gastronomy demands new-old ideas or old-new ideas, provokingly developed. He is always experimenting. A great cook never stops doing that.

  April 1974

  JACQUES MANIE RE’S HUMAN FACTOR

  Joseph Wechsberg

  Among serious Parisian epicures, a modest Left Bank restaurant—Au Pactole, 44, boulevard Saint-Germain—has for the past few years been an oasis of culinary progress and gastronomic imagination. Its owner, Jacques Manière, is a refreshing specimen, a great French chef more interested in creative cooking than in publicity and money. Manière will never get as rich as some of his avant-garde confreres who spend more time appearing on television or giving guest performances in Japan than working in their kitchens. Manière gets up at four in the morning and drives out to the new Halles at Rungis to select the best fish and shellfish and anything else that strikes his fancy, and only then does he go back to his kitchen and design the menu for the day. Once a week a large truck from Normandy pulls up, delivering cream and butter straight from the farm. Manière buys the best available poulardes from Bresse, “never less than five pounds,” which taste beautiful and melt in the mouth. Manière confounded the pros by admitting that he is an autodidact. He began cooking at an age when other chefs had already opened their restaurants.

  At fifty, Manière looks and walks like the young Jean Gabin playing a chef who is also an artist. Manière comes from the Périgord, which explains his love of truffles and truffled dishes, such as his ragoût de truffes et foie gras. As a young man he wanted to become a professional soldier. Fortunately for French gastronomy he didn’t like the tough régime of Saint-Cyr, the French West Point. Instead, he went home and started a truffle-canning factory. Knowing a great deal about truffles but little about business, Manière canned first-rate truffles and went broke. He had always been an enthusiastic eater, and at that point he decided to become an enthusiastic cook.

  Enthusiast, amateur, autodidact, artist—no wonder Manière is considered an eccentric in some conservative circles. A famous guidebook refused to list his restaurant because he was unwilling to play by the rules of the culinary game. His fierce sense of independence is demonstrated in some of his dishes done à ma façon, “the way I do it,” which isn’t always the way it’s done in the books. But there have been other gifted dilettantes among the great French chefs. Raymond Thuilier of the Oustau de Baumanière was a painter before he began cooking. Amateurs feel less bound by traditions and often embark upon flights of imagination; fine French cooking needs them in order to be revitalized. Manière must have learned fast since he soon got a job in the kitchen of Lapérouse and later at Chez Max, where he acquired the necessary technique. Six years ago he left the suburb of Pantin and opened his small place, just forty seats, named after Pactolus, the river in ancient Lydia in which Midas bathed, leaving gold dust in the sands.

  That’s a good joke, since the Midas touch is one thing Manière doesn’t care about. He considers fine cooking an art and himself an artist, with a right to artistic license. He likes difficult customers provided they are enthusiasts and has no use for people who come to his place “to nourish themselves.” He makes no compromise with quality. He gladly spends extra hours to please a demanding connoisseur; he expects his habitués to be as devoted to eating as he is to cooking. The principle isn’t new. Fernand Point used to say that great cooking was “the finest butter and lots of time.” Unfortunately some modern chefs don’t want to take the time and spend the money. Manière respects the Old Masters but knows that French cuisine must not stand still. Today the trend is toward lighter dishes and subtler flavors. Even Escoffier couldn’t (and wouldn’t) cook today as he did sixty years ago.

  Thus Manière’s only problem is “the human factor.” Just two dedicated young men work with him in his kitchen. They start at nine in the morning and sometimes are still there at eleven at night. The five people working in the dining room are also under pressure. Sixteen hours’ work a day. (To show his appreciation, Manière stays closed on Sundays, throughout February, and for most of August.) It’s always difficult to get a reservation. Someday, when he no longer finds people willing to work such long hours, he will limit the number of guests and work all by himself in the kitchen. That’s the true spirit, and money be damned.

  Manière’s creations have that special quality of having been prepared especially for the diner. If I were a Rothschild I would try to hire him as my personal cook, but of course he wouldn’t accept, and why should he? An artist needs absolute freedom to create. He hates routine and likes to experiment. “You make the same dish every day, and after a while, unless you are very careful, you may wind up in the valley of mediocrity,” he says. “France lost her colonies, but she is still the empire of la grande cuisine.”

  Once a couple of friends asked Manière to create something new in a few minutes. He made a soft-boiled egg, removed some of the liquid white, put in caviar, set the egg over an alcohol burner on a tripod, and reheated the egg with Armagnac. “Amusing but hardly gastronomy,” he says with perfect frankness. But the terrine de poisson with a mousse de cresson is close to gastronomy, and the coquilles Saint-Jacques au beurre blanc are gastronomy, and so are the ris de veau à ma façon and the poularde de Bresse à la vapeur, beurre de cerfeuil. Manière knows the secret of preserving the original flavor and the freshness of the products he uses. Even his desserts, such as his pear sherbet with a light tarte aux pommes, testify to that secret. The wines are unpretentious but honest, as honest as everything else in his restaurant. The prices are moderate by present-day standards, but gastronomy can never be inexpensive. Don’t bother to admire the paintings on the wall. The masterpieces at Au Pactole are on the plates, where they belong. One can’t eat paintings.

  It so happened that the evening before I visited Au Pactole, I had been at Lucas-Carton, once one of the most celebrated restaurants of Paris. Some greatness was still there—the fin de siècle décor, the Limoges china, a number of distinguished older people, and also the cooking. The potage Saint-Germain was a chef d’oeuvre, and so was the salmis de faisan, aptly named after Lucullus. The bécasse flambée remains one of the great creations of French gastronomy. But that night the service was lackadaisical, the waiters were conversing with each other in front of the guests (and possibly about them, judging by their amusement), and the spirit of dedication was completely lacking. Lucas-Carton still has a great chef, a fine wine list, a beautiful décor, but today it seems to rely mainly on the glory of its past, and unless something is done, it may become a museum of la grande cuisine. I thought of it the following night when I sat in Jacques Manière’s unpretentious restaurant, where an enthusiastic artist creates the glory of the future.

  April 1973<
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  YOUNG CHEFS OF PARIS

  Naomi Barry

  The food was beautiful, with tantalizing tastes and thought-provoking textures. Out of the kitchen to take a bow came the chef, baby-faced and boyishly slim. It was disconcerting. He is as young as he looks. And he is not alone. Artists tend to congregate in schools. Right now Paris counts at least a dozen culinary virtuosos in their twenties or just turned thirty. (Not by chance does French kitchen lingo refer to the stove as a piano, an instrument for artists.)

  La nouvelle cuisine, la nouvelle vague. The youth brigades have their hands on some of the most dazzling restaurants of Paris—serious big houses and experimental little bistros requiring three days’ advance booking. At issue is not Young Toque versus Old Hat, or Today supplanting Yesterday. Every currently successful Paris Young Toque worth his salt has in him a little bit of Carême and Escoffier, of Fernand Point and Alexandre Dumaine. If la bande de Bocuse has moved to the position of honorable Older Guard, it still takes a turn at the keyboard. “We owe Bocuse a lot,” said Jean-Jacques Jouteux of Les Semailles, one of the present crop of dazzlers. “Before him, a chef was a laborer. Now he is respected as a professional man.”

  The new boys, bubbling with creative ambition, are busily inventing, innovating, improving, refining, and reviving with new twists classic French cuisine, which for the past few hundred years has been passed down from stirring spoon to saucepan. The process is not dissimilar to that of the Comédie-Française, where Molière’s gestures and directions have been transmitted by one generation of actors to another, each of whom has added touches and variations.

  Among today’s bright young chefs there is both competition and camaraderie. It is not unusual to spot one of them on his closing day enjoying a meal in a colleague’s establishment, testing his own performance by comparison and gaining a bit of inspiration for a culinary takeoff when he gets back to his own kitchens.

  The track is flashy with talents: Jouteux, Denys Gentes of Clodenis, Gilbert Le Coze of Le Bernardin, Alain Dutournier of Le Trou Gascon, Daniel Metery of Le Lord Gourmand. From the field we have selected a yeasty quartet who reflect the tone of contemporary gastronomic Paris: Patrick Lenôtre of Le Pré Catelan; Dominique Bouchet of Jamin, Robert Vifian of Tan Dinh, and Jean-Michel Bedier of Chiberta.

  Le Pré Catelan is a gorgeous folly in the Bois de Boulogne. Despite the pretty building in a stage setting of gardens and trees, it was a consistent flop. A few years ago it was taken over by Gaston Lenôtre, who saw in it an ideal ambience for the parties and receptions he caters.

  Gaston is a clever Norman, and he was determined to float the derelict Pré Catelan to success. A comparatively small luxury restaurant was developed within the complex so Parisians would get in the habit of taking the road through the Bois. Wife Colette was detached from directing the Lenôtre pastry shops in Auteuil and Boulogne and entrusted with the refashioned dining room of Le Pré Catelan. For the important post of lord of the kitchen, Gaston chose his nephew Patrick Lenôtre, whom he had been grooming since the latter was eighteen years old, in 1968. For three years Patrick was thoroughly trained as a pastry chef and then graduated into catering. He left the family fold to work in big-time houses such as Paul Bocuse’s, Roger Vergé’s, Michel Guérard’s, and the Haeberlin brothers’ before returning to Uncle Gaston’s catering headquarters at Plaisir, thirty-seven kilometers west of Paris. In 1976, when he was twenty-six, Patrick was given responsibility for Le Pré Catelan. This year the former white elephant was awarded its first star from the Guide Michelin.

  Le Pré Catelan is about a fifteen-minute taxi run from the Étoile, but that scant quarter of an hour is equivalent to a trip far, far out of town. The route through the Bois is well marked, for Le Pré Catelan benefits from the same sort of official signposts as Bagatelle, the Polo, and the racecourses of Auteuil and Longchamp. The last stretch of road is a spur, leading only to the restaurant. Peace and Privilege might be the passwords.

  The first impression is that of an estate: neoclassic main hall and rustic outbuildings, gardeners busy on the fringes, and polite welcomes from “family retainers.” A house-proud quality is immediately apparent. Birds amid the bucolic setting and a sparkling glass of Champagne bring instant serenity to those in jangle (the usual state of escapees from the Champs-Élysées area). And the businessman hitched to his second-hour-day-month wristwatch suddenly decides that a two-hour lunch there is just the felicity he owes himself. In good weather tables are set up on the terrace with a backdrop of forest and the blissful quiet of no cars.

  There is no skimping on details. The table bouquets are thoughtful, and all the arrangements are stylish. Typical of Le Pré Catelan’s small touches are the Limoges ashtrays painted with a pastel of the restaurant. (I wonder how many of these are pocketed each year.) The amuse-gueule that accompany apéritifs are deluxe ministarters. Last time the assortment consisted of a poached quail’s egg in a croustade, a smidgen of toast topped with red caviar, and a canapé of fresh duck liver.

  Appetite aroused, one was eager for the first course, a stylish mélange of zucchini, carrots, artichokes, and asparagus bound with puréed fresh herbs to form a delightful mosaïque de légumes.

  Patrick prefers cooking to pastry, finding the latter too inflexible in its rules, allowing little room for improvisation. “I am severe and critical,” he said. “My basic structure is classical and traditional, but now I am seeking subtle expressions so that the dishes that come from my kitchen are really les plats à moi.”

  Jamin has been a gratin restaurant of the Sixteenth Arrondissement since 1960. Over the years, Raymond Jamin, who had been maître d’hôtel at Le Grand Véfour, became known around town for his shrewd but expansive personality, his well-flavored Bordeaux accent, his prize trotting horses, and the consistently good food served in his plush but conventionally decorated establishment. The Michelin awarded the house two stars, the well-heeled clientele was constant, and everything seemed fine in the best of all possible worlds.

  Then Gérard Besson, the chef who had brought on the stars, left to strike out on his own. The goings-on were well chronicled by the local gastronomic press. Jamin felt the thunder of impending doom, but the clouds kindly showered him with good fortune. To replace Besson, someone sent a stripling assistant chef from the Concorde Lafayette, a giant modern hotel near the Porte Maillot. Dominique Bouchet was twenty-five, good-looking, modest, conscientious. In near-panic, Jamin tossed him the responsibility of his kitchen.

  Eighteen months later, Jamin is in a state of near-euphoria. “I’m having a second youth,” he says, his wily face creased with smiles. The correct banality of the vermilion velvet interior remains, but the atmosphere has the fizz of gaiety. Dominique grasped the helm with such authority that Jamin retained its two-star status, despite the fact that Michelin customarily marks a major change by ripping off a star to make restaurateurs earn it back.

  Dominique, a native of the Charente, is as happy about his position as the boss. “My dream was to work like this, with my hands, paying attention to every detail. I love to start with everyday things from everyday life—a little watercress, a potato, an olive—and transform them into beautiful things. I wouldn’t change my profession for anything in the world.

  “When I was seven or eight making mud pies, I already wanted to be a chef. I became an apprentice at fourteen. They gave me a dark blue apron to wear, and I was heartbroken. For me the white uniform represented the nobility of the profession. In three months I was handed a white apron. It was my recompense, and I was proud.”

  Raymond Jamin has always been punctilious about service, and he himself is a master of affable customer relations. Currently the Jamin service is hitting a high, a cunning blend of unobtrusive traditional care and informal enthusiasm about the dishes to be selected and served. The good humor is infectious. Your mood is lifted before the actual performance starts by the charm of the overture as the waiter helps you compose your menu. The dining room’s staff, as young
as the kitchen’s, has the good sense to know that adopting the supercilious air of the old-fashioned maître d’hôtel would be plain silly.

  Jamin’s menu operates on merit without resort to headline-grabbing tricks. A second meal within a week confirmed the level of excellence. Scallops are a current darling with the top Paris chefs. Dominique features them in two guises. Cold, they are a first course enhanced with a dressing of walnut oil. Hot, they are a main course teamed with cooked endive.

  A Jamin signature hors d’oeuvre since the restaurant’s inception has been a plate of creamy scrambled eggs incorporating some edible luxury. For years the eggs were coupled with a fortune in black truffles. This season’s note has been a generous dose of minced crayfish.

  Time-consuming touches give the house its finesse. The noodles that accompany the fillets of sole are freshly prepared. The nut-bread rolls presented with the cheese platter are baked on the premises. The sherbets, the caramel and coconut ice creams, the petits fours—all are made out back.

  When it is suggested at the beginning of your meal that you order a tarte fine chaude aux pommes for dessert, heed the suggestion. This open-faced honey-glazed apple tart constructed on a wisp of buttery crust is served warm, and it is the best of its genre I’ve yet encountered.

  Robert Vifian, thirty-one, of Tan Dinh was born in Saigon. Just as the Spaniard Picasso, the Italian Modigliani, and the Japanese Foujita were all luminaries of the École de Paris, the Vietnamese Vifian is an integral member of today’s Cooking School of Paris.