by Jay Rayner
In 1996 Joël Robuchon turned fifty and, as he had always said he would, he retired. That year he was named chef of the century by the (then) highly regarded French guide Gault Millau. He is a small, odd-looking man with a squashed face, as if somebody has inadvertently folded away the middle. He favors black, collarless shirts and has a monkish air, as if a part of his personality has also been folded away. Anybody who meets him will not be surprised to discover that, as a boy, he trained for the priesthood until he was forced to leave the seminary by lack of funds, only to take a job in a hotel kitchen.
Those British chefs I know who have worked for him—Gordon Ramsay, Richard Neat—attribute to him the qualities of the mystic, and those who work with him now also often resemble members of a priesthood. A couple of years ago Robuchon was hired to cook a one-off dinner at the Connaught Hotel in London. A small advance team of his cooks was to bring a van of ingredients through the Channel tunnel, because they did not trust any of the ingredients available in Britain. The French cooks insisted that they be met at the British end of the Channel tunnel in Kent by cooks from the Connaught who would then drive the van up to London. None of Robuchon’s team was used to driving on the left-hand side of the road and they believed the effort would destroy their zen state of concentration for the cooking of the meal to come. Naturally, the British cooks thought this was the funniest, and the most precious thing they had ever heard, but complied with their wishes.
Fans of Robuchon refer to his extraordinary palate and his innate ability to know when a flavor combination is absolutely right. Ask them to name a perfect Robuchon dish and they may well mention his cauliflower panna cotta with caviar en gelée. They might talk about his black truffle tart. But there is one creation they will all mention: his mashed potato.
Joël Robuchon revolutionized the making of mashed potatoes. He did this by putting less potato in it. Instead, he made it with half its own weight in butter. The result is a dish so rich, so luxurious, so completely outrageous, it ought to be illegal. I had eaten it just once—at that Connaught dinner—and my arteries are still complaining. The method has been so regularly copied since he introduced it to his menu in the 1980s that it has essentially become the accepted modern method for making pommes purée in top-end restaurants. To change the approach to something so basic and so simple as mashed potato seems to me as good a test of greatness in the chef world as any other.
Tragically, after 1996, the chance to eat it as made by Robuchon himself was reduced almost to nothing. Then, in 2003, came the announcement that had high-end foodies beating their poulet de Bresse with feverish anticipation: The chef was returning to the stove. Former colleagues of Robuchon wanted to open a restaurant of their own, but the banks had refused them money. They asked him if he would join the venture and he agreed, as long as the restaurant that resulted was not the classic three-star, high-end, gastronomic temple that he had left behind. He wanted to do something more casual. He wanted to do the kind of place where diners would sit around an open kitchen at a bar.
There would be simple plates of the best Spanish hams as well as more complex dishes reminiscent of Robuchon in his prime, a tiny langoustine ravioli with black truffle, for example, or the sweetest chops of Pyrenean milk-fed lamb with thyme. It would be the kind of place you could come to for just one or two plates, as well as a full meal. The emphasis was on informality. The first L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon opened that year on rue de Montalembert in Paris. It was followed by another in Tokyo, the beginning of what would turn out to be a chain.
Then came the big surprise. For years Gamal Aziz, now president of the MGM Grand, the biggest hotel in the world, had been trying to lure Robuchon to Las Vegas. Thing is, he didn’t want a branch of L’Atelier. At least not at first. The MGM Grand had launched a new, upscale wing to the hotel, the Mansion, and for that he wanted the full-on Robuchon. The big-ticket Robuchon. He wanted every bell and whistle in the marching band. “I said no,” Robuchon told me, when I met him in London in the spring of 2006. “The problem is Gamal Aziz is a very charming man. He was just too persuasive. Plus he said I could have anything I wanted. He never talked about profitability. He just wanted the best.” In October 2005, Joël Robuchon at the Mansion duly opened inside the MGM Grand. And now I was going to eat there.
Unlike with Bouchon, there is no attempt to hide Joël Robuchon’s restaurant. Or restaurants, for it was eventually decided that there should also be a branch of L’Atelier and the two sit side-by-side, next to the entrance to the Mansion, but still on the gaming floor of the hotel. The entrance to the high-end restaurant—two huge, floor-to-ceiling curving doors—is just twelve paces from the last slot machine. Inside, though, every part of the restaurant has been so heavily engineered that you cannot hear any of the noise from outside.
Inside the dining room, which seats just forty people, there is a $28,000 chandelier by Swarovski. There are vases by Lalique and an outside “garden” that isn’t outside at all, but that takes $8,000’ worth of plants a month to maintain. There is a trolley with twelve different types of bread at the beginning, and another with twenty-five different types of petit fours at the end, plus a wine list as thick as a paperback book. Everything is dressed in “regal” shades of purple and a specially commissioned interlocking pattern is repeated from the handles on the cutlery to the carpet to the curtains.
Although there is a standard menu, Joël Robuchon at the Mansion specializes in multicourse tasting menus. I sat down at the table. I was handed a folder made of a thick glossy card, which I opened. I began reading. The sixteen-course tasting menu, the one I wanted, the one I was determined to try, was listed at $350 a head. Before drinks. Before tax. Before service.
I blinked.
THE MONEY THING
A few years ago I spent £49 ($98) on wine in a restaurant. Not impressed? You should be. It wasn’t for a bottle (let alone for two). Nor was it for some fancy-pants champagne. It was for a single glass, and not a very big glass at that. I know what you’re thinking. If you’re polite you’re thinking “more money than sense”; if you’re not polite you’re swearing at the page. It’s okay. I can deal with it. Because the honeyed amber fluid in that glass, served to me at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London’s Chelsea, came from a bottle of Château d’Yquem, the greatest white wine on the face of the planet, and it was worth every penny. Or, at least, it was to me, which is the same thing.
The fact is I have no problem with the notion of spending large amounts of money on hugely expensive restaurant experiences. I make no apologies for this, even though our puritanical culture so often demands it. £200 ($400)* a head for lunch? Yes, please. £50 ($100) for a starter? Seems fair enough to me. £75 ($150) for a main course? Bring it on. In France I would not need to explain myself. There, spending serious volumes of cash on dinner is a national spectator sport.
Elsewhere, behavior like this puts you in the same grim league as politicians and muggers. It’s regarded as an obscenity; an experiment in excess as filthy and reprehensible as snorting cocaine off the flattened bellies of supermodels or slaughtering white Bengal tigers to provide the fur trim for your panda-skin gloves.
There is one reason for this and one reason only: We need food to survive. Therefore it is a necessity, and to crash the plastic until it smolders on a necessity—one that some people don’t have enough of—is regarded as wrong. That is to completely misunderstand the point of restaurants and high-end gastronomy. For a start, modern famines are not generally caused by a capricious Mother Nature, denying food to some people here while others over there have plenty. As aid organizations have long said—and continue to say—they have man-made, political causes, such as the ill-considered land reclamation policies in Robert Mugabe’s corrupt Zimbabwe, that have pushed its population to the brink of starvation. You foregoing dinner in a restaurant will not resolve that problem
By the same token, nobody goes to restaurants for nutritional reasons. Nobody eats hot smoked foie gras with
caramelized onion purée to stave off rickets. They go for experiences, and what price a really top experience?
Let’s put it another way. How much would you be willing to pay to see your football team play in the Super Bowl? $200 a ticket? $400 a ticket? $1,000 for a really good seat? You wouldn’t think twice about it. A place in the front row for Robert De Niro on the stage? A few hundred dollars, easy. The chance to see Sinatra in his prime? Hell, you name the price.
What does that money buy you? Nothing but memories, and the right to say you were there. Serious gastronomy is no different. An example: A little while ago I was invited to eat at the Auberge de L’Ill in Alsace. Restaurants don’t come much more haute than the Auberge. It has been owned, and the kitchen run, by the same family, the Haeberlins, since 1884. It has had three Michelin stars since 1967 and some of the dishes have been on the menu for more than forty years. Among them is a black truffle the size of a golf ball—not shavings; the whole thing—wrapped in foie gras, bound in a buttery pastry, baked and served on a rich meaty truffle jus. Yours, back then, for 125 euros (about $183; it costs more now).
It was served to me with a 1994 Cos D’estournel, a big-fisted Bordeaux listed on the menu at 330 euros. A total cost of 450 euros, or around $660 for the ten minutes it took me to eat the dish. That’s $66 a minute ($1 a second; can I stop now?). It was ear-poppingly expensive. It was also sublime: There was the heady, dense aroma of the truffle as I cut in—a smell that I tasted, it was so intense—and the back kick of the sauce, and then the red wine reminding me of the soil. True, I wasn’t paying for this myself. But would I have done so? Happily. And could I justify the price? Of course. This wasn’t simply about sitting down at a well-laid table and being served a set of ingredients cooked in a particular fashion. It was the Auberge de L’Ill truffle dish, cooked by one of the Haeberlins, eaten overlooking the river Ill. It was about the moment, one I’ll never forget.
That’s the thing about expensive restaurant experiences: They have to be worth it. A couple of years ago there was media outrage when a new restaurant opened in London called Sketch where dinner would cost £500 ($1,000) for two. The pundits were right to be outraged, but for the wrong reasons. It wasn’t the price that mattered; the problem was the person setting it. The fact is you have to earn the right to charge top dollar. The overseeing chef at Sketch is a Frenchman called Pierre Gagnaire. In Paris he is a superstar. There, they queue to give him their money. In London (where he isn’t even at the stove), none but the obsessives like me had a clue who he is. You have to be a legend—a Frank Sinatra, a Robert De Niro—before you can start squeezing wallets dry.
France is littered with culinary De Niros and Sinatras: At Alain Ducasse’s restaurant in the Plaza Athénée Hotel in Paris, he serves a caviar and langoustine dish costing just over £100 ($200); the late Bernard Loiseau’s restaurant, Le Côte d’Or, in Burgundy, serves a chicken dish costing £175 ($358); and uber-chef Marc Veyrat will sell you a chocolate pudding for £50 ($100). I’d willingly shell out for them all, if I had the cash to hand.
In Britain the choices are more limited. For example, at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road, the top-rated restaurant in London, the basic menu is still a mere £85 ($175) for three courses: for the tortellini of lobster with herb velouté and the sautéed loin of venison with a bitter chocolate sauce and a gravity-defying coffee soufflé. No worries: There’s always the Château d’Yquem by the glass to help you top up the bill. The thing is, a whole bottle of Yquem will set you back hundreds of pounds at the very least. A big vintage—a 1928, say or an 1880—can cost as much as £30,000 ($61,375) on a restaurant list, and while I may be keen on big-ticket dinners, there are limits to what I can afford. Frankly I’d given up all hope of ever getting to taste the stuff. So that Château d’Yquem by the glass was practically a social service on Gordon Ramsay’s part. Indeed at £49 ($100) a pop it should really have been regarded as a bargain. And I never could resist one of those.
THE CONFESSION
Except that, when I went to Joël Robuchon at the Mansion, just as when I went to the Auberge de L’Ill in Alsace, I wasn’t the one picking up the bill. In fact, I wasn’t expected to pay for anything much in Las Vegas. It was all on the house.
It is not always like this. Whenever I review restaurants for The Observer, the newspaper reimburses me for all the meals I eat. I book tables under a pseudonym and, while I have never gone as far as Ruth Reichl, who used to review for the New York Times disguised as her own dead mother, I try not to draw attention to myself. We never accept freebies for review.
Meals eaten for features have always been a different matter, however. At The Observer we are allowed to accept “hospitality,” where the experience would inform what we are writing about, and that pretty much covers all eventualities, including gluttony. Within hours of contacting the Las Vegas tourist authority, which has offices around the world, I was being pelted with offers of hospitality. I was being hosed down with them, assaulted by them. My e-mail in-box filled up with suggestions for meals I could eat, and places that would love to have me, and ones that would be mortally offended if I didn’t at least drop by for cocktails and canapés. (The most worrying was the offer direct from Freddie Glusman at Piero’s, but only because he is a known associate of convicted killers.) I could have survived in town with an empty wallet for a fortnight on the offers I had received. Instead all I had was a few nights and an appetite, which, while enthusiastic, had its limits. Choices had to be made. Selflessly I had chosen Joël Robuchon at the Mansion to be among those restaurants where I ate for free.
At first I was a little uncomfortable about this, not least because I wasn’t entirely sure what category my efforts at the table would be falling under. No, I wasn’t reviewing for the paper. Some of my experiences would end up in its pages, but not all of them. I just wanted to pursue my perfect meal, and that meant eating in a whole bunch of really good and improbably expensive places, as cheaply as possible. As ambitions go, it’s hardly up there with “cure the world of all known diseases” and “usher in an era of global peace.” When I ate the £300 ($600) truffle-wine combo at the Auberge de L’Ill my wife had told me that the only thing that mitigated what would otherwise have been morally reprehensible behavior was the fact that I hadn’t paid for it. There was, she said, a smear of virtue in freeloading. I wasn’t convinced.
But within a day or so of arriving in Vegas it became clear to me that freeloading really was the only way to go here. So much money washes through the city, courtesy of the casinos, that not adding to the cash pile seemed to me to be a genuinely responsible thing to do. After all, it wasn’t like I was hurting the chefs. They were on such sweetheart deals that one meal to a journalist on the take was neither here nor there.
Anyway, everybody was doing it. The night I ate at Joël Robuchon at the Mansion, one table was occupied by a group of journalists from San Francisco who were hardly fighting to protect their anonymity—they kept posing for photographs—and another was being hosted by Gamal Aziz, who certainly wasn’t expecting a bill. The next day a group of seventeen other freeloading hacks was due in, and none of them would be paying, either. And it’s not just the media that gets the treatment. A few weeks before my visit, a Chinese businessman had lost $7 million in the casino at the MGM Grand. As a courtesy, the sort of courtesy offered to all high rollers in Vegas, the hotel had then invited him to eat for “free” at Joël Robuchon. It struck me that I was actually being smarter than that guy because I was getting a free $600-a-head dinner without, up to that point, having lost a single cent. I concluded that I really didn’t have anything to feel guilty about. I had beaten the house, and in Las Vegas, that is something worth boasting about.
And so, accompanied by the public relations executive for the MGM Grand (a committed, valiant, and remarkably slender woman called Jennifer who would do all sixteen courses again the following night with that party of seventeen), I ate.
At the start there were cr
unchy pearls of green apple, with a vodka granita to cleanse the palate. There was the famed caviar en gelée beneath a musky cauliflower panna cotta, the surface of which was decorated with tiny dots of a deep green herb purée (applied from a pipette, we were told proudly; there were exactly the same number on every dish). We had a mille-feuille of unagi—glazed savory eel, Japanese style—and foie gras, the flavors of these two ultrarich ingredients playing tag with each other in the mouth. There was, as there was at almost every restaurant I visited in Las Vegas, a tuna tartar followed, as there wasn’t anywhere else, by a coin-sized langoustine ravioli, with a little sautéed cabbage. We were served a bowl of a soft, luscious sweet-onion custard onto which was ladled an intense lettuce soup. And then a sausage fashioned from a scallop mousseline, encased beneath tiny slivers of raw scallop, which tasted tantalizingly of the sea.
While we were awaiting the arrival of course eight, the halfway mark, a waiter brought another chair to our table. We looked quizzically at him, and he nodded to the back corner of the restaurant, to where a small, gray-haired man in a black collarless shirt was standing talking to Gamal Aziz. Jöel Robuchon was in town and he wanted to join our table.
I had eaten food in front of the chefs who had cooked it for me before, but none had been of Robuchon’s caliber. I regarded the man as a legend and, even having interviewed him once already, I remained in awe of him. This was the chef of the century, the guy who revolutionized mashed potatoes! Plus there was the language barrier. My French is atrocious, his English not much better. In London we had communicated through a translator. Here, there was none. Now, as he sat down at our table, his face fixed in a crooked grin, I couldn’t think of anything to say other than “mmmm” and “lovely . . .” and “How do you do it!”