I told Naret that I would be in Paris in September and asked if I could join him for a meal so that I could see how the Michelin Man went about appraising a restaurant. To my surprise, he agreed, and two months later, we met up for lunch. 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. Guy Savoy had been made to sweat for seventeen years before finally earning his third star, and now it was Alain Dutournier, the chef and owner of Carré des Feuillants, who seemed to be the un-chosen one. In picking Carré des Feuillants, was Naret subtly indicating that a third star was at last in 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. A few moments later, one of the captains came in from the dining room, exchanged a few whispered comments with the receptionist, and cast a suspicious glance my way.
I figured I was probably just minutes from being asked to leave (or being hauled off by the gendarmes) when 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 wasn’t seeking anonymity at all: 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 I was hoping he would provide a running commentary on the food. But despite my gentle entreaties, Naret didn’t say anything about it: He just ate—and fast. So instead, we talked some more about Michelin’s methodology (as much as he would reveal, anyway); discussed the imminent debut of the Michelin Guide to Tokyo (reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out an inspector’s report for one restaurant in Tokyo and joked about losing it on the street; I got enough of a look to determine that it was a report on Beige, Alain Ducasse’s restaurant on the Ginza); and traded gossip. Apropos of our earlier discussion, I decided to test his familiarity with the New York food scene by asking if he knew which Manhattan restaurant was notorious for serving markedly superior food to regulars and VIPs. Before I could finish the question, Naret gave the chef’s initials, an impressive display of insider knowledge. (He went on to confide that this practice had cost the restaurant a star.) As our desserts were being cleared, I made a last attempt to get 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.”
Several months later, back in Paris, I decided to get another perspective on the Guide from someone else who could speak about it with authority: Pascal Remy. He had suggested a drink at a hotel on the rue de Rivoli, across from the Louvre. I went there expecting to meet a short, bald man (weren’t all inspectors short and bald?) with a hunted look about him. Instead, Remy turned out to be tall, handsome, and quite jocular (with a full head of hair, too). Over a glass of Champagne, Remy told me that while he was officially persona non grata within the French culinary establishment, he was doing consulting work for some restaurants and even heard periodically from former colleagues at Michelin. He was hoping his notoriety might yield a television project: He envisioned a series in which he and various guest stars would travel to top restaurants around the world and critique the meals they were served. The idea didn’t sound very promising, and I had the impression that the people he’d shopped it to hadn’t thought so, either.
When we turned to the book, Remy insisted that everything he had written was true. He said the number of inspectors had declined sharply, and that by 2003 there indeed had been just five for all of France, down from a dozen in the late 1980s. He said that inspectors typically spent three of every four weeks on the road. Each day consisted of a lunch and dinner, with both meals taken anonymously. The rest of the time was spent making non-anonymous inspections of hotels and restaurants to see if any information needed updating. He said restaurants weren’t visited nearly as frequently as Michelin claimed; one-stars, for instance, would be visited perhaps every second year. “There is one uncontestable point,” he said, grinning. “Michelin inspectors always pay their way. After that, everything is contestable.”
He reiterated his claim about certain chefs and restaurants being untouchable. Among these, Bocuse was the one with the worst food but also the most secure rating. “The Michelin Guide made Bocuse, and now he is considered sacred,” said Remy. “He is more powerful than the Guide.” He went on to say that it was silly to even think of the Guide as still being primarily concerned with cuisine; the Guide was now just a vehicle for the Michelin corporation. “Michelin’s goal is to get people talking about Michelin,” he said. The Tokyo Guide had just been released, and to the astonishment of gastronomes everywhere, all one hundred and fifty restaurants listed in the book had been awarded stars, giving the Japanese capital more étoiles than Paris. But Remy said he wasn’t surprised: “The goal was to infiltrate the Japanese market for Michelin tires, so the inspectors were there to give lots of stars.”
I asked him what he thought of Naret. “Berlusconi?” he replied, a twinkle in his eye. It took me a second to figure out what he meant, then I recalled Naret’s dark, receding hair and perma-tan and got the joke. He said Naret was a salesman, selling books in order to sell tires. “He was recruited for publicity, to make people talk about the Michelin brand,” he said. “He is the super ambassador.” Remy said that he’d heard from insiders that Naret w
as not a very popular figure at the Avenue de Breteuil office, in part because he was apparently earning three times the salary that Naegellen—“a real inspector”—had pulled down. I told him that I’d met several times with Naret and that he’d insisted that the power to give or take away stars rested not with him but with the inspectors. Remy shook his head. “The inspectors are marionettes,” he said; if the director wanted the Guide to make a statement by either promoting or demoting a restaurant, the statement would be made.
Listening to Remy, I was struck by how completely at ease he looked and sounded. He was either an astonishingly persuasive fabulist or he was telling the truth (at least as he saw it). I asked him about the Loiseau affair and what role, if any, he thought that Michelin had played. He claimed that, contrary to its denials, Michelin had indicated to Loiseau that his third star was in jeopardy. There was a written report about the visit that Loiseau had paid to the Guide’s offices in November 2002, in which it was stated that he had been told there were concerns about the quality of his food and that he needed to improve things. Not only that: After the meeting, Dominique Loiseau had written a letter to Michelin saying that its warning had been heard and that her husband would henceforth be tethered to his kitchen; according to Remy, she even underlined the word warning. The fact that Michelin had not removed La Côte d’Or’s third star after Loiseau’s death, Remy said, suggested that the Guide may have felt that it bore some responsibility for what had happened. He also told me that the day after Loiseau’s suicide, the chef’s file, containing the account of his visit and the follow-up letter from his wife, had mysteriously vanished. So the written evidence was gone? Not entirely, said Remy. “Copies exist.”
A few days later, I had lunch with Gilles Pudlowski at Benoit, a venerable Paris bistro now owned by Alain Ducasse. Pudlowksi was a French phenomenon. Trained as a literary critic, he had turned to restaurant writing in the 1970s as one of the provocateurs at Gault Millau. He was now the food critic for the newsweekly Le Point and also published two annual restaurant guides, Pudlo Paris and Pudlo France. Pudlowski had spent most of his career challenging Michelin’s hegemony in one way or another. Yet when I brought up Michelin’s travails over lunch, he seemed genuinely pained by the Guide’s diminished stature. “For us, Michelin was the grand old lady,” he said. “It was a defender of France’s cultural patrimony. Now, it makes scandal and provocation. It’s unfortunate.”
The Last Gentleman of Europe
TAILLEVENT IS LOCATED ON a small, strangely nondescript street a few blocks in from the Champs-Élysées. Its name is on the awning, but the restaurant’s entrance is so understated that you almost expect to be asked for a password before you step inside. After checking your coat, you are led down a hallway toward the dining room, and as you approach its threshold, you feel hungry, but you may also feel a twinge of nerves. There are thousands of restaurants in France, but only around two dozen of them hold three Michelin stars. These select few are supposed to represent French cuisine in all its refinement and splendor; they are considered the standard-bearers, and none more so than Taillevent. As you are shown to your table, the normal calculus is inverted. At other restaurants, you wonder if they’ll prove to be worthy of you; sliding into your seat at Taillevent, you wonder if you’ll prove to be worthy of it.
A waiter appears—discreet and courteous, of course, but with a friendliness to his smile that you didn’t expect. He suggests a glass of Champagne and returns a few minutes later with the aperitif and a small plate of gougères. Served warm, they are the airiest, most delectable cheese puffs imaginable, and their golden-brown color, set against the deep yellow of the Champagne, the wood paneling of the walls, and the soft lighting of the room, has an oddly sedative effect; it seems like a cue to relax, and so you do. The head captain approaches the table, and although he is dressed in a tuxedo, he exudes geniality. Whether or not you are a familiar face, he greets you like one, tells you how delighted he and his colleagues are to see you, and makes small talk for a few minutes—about Paris, or his recent visit to New York, or the French soccer team. He has a playful demeanor and cracks a joke or two; you notice later that gentle waves of laughter ripple across the room from wherever he happens to be standing.
As you continue chatting with him, a man holding a menu hovers into view a few feet from the table. He is in his sixties, with a trim frame and a heavily receded gray hairline. Dressed in an elegant business suit, he looks like a bank executive, an impression reinforced by his large tortoiseshell glasses. Although the maître d’s eyes never leave yours, he seems instantly aware that his boss is nearby and gracefully brings the conversation to a close. As he steps away, you sit up in your seat and cast a quick glance down to make sure your tie is where it should be. Taillevent’s formidable reputation rests largely on the shoulders of Jean-Claude Vrinat, and now that this legendary restaurateur is standing before you, that edgy feeling returns. Surely, this is the moment you are going to be sized up, deemed unworthy, and condemned to an evening of quiet misery.
However, Vrinat turns out to be just as hospitable as everyone else. Indeed, after several minutes of his undivided attention, a bizarre thought occurs: Although there is nothing the least bit obsequious about his demeanor, Vrinat seems almost flattered by your presence. Sometime later, perhaps as you’re sipping a perfectly aged Bordeaux and savoring the last bite of the gloriously turned out venison or sweetbreads, another, even more disorientating realization sets in: Taillevent is the most exalted of all France’s three-star restaurants, yet you’re not just being made to feel welcome—you are being made to feel as if you belong here. Patricia Wells summed up the experience perfectly. “If Taillevent did not exist,” she wrote, “someone would have to invent it: the pillar of French cuisine, the ideal of what can and should be done in running a restaurant, in treating each guest with honor and dignity.”
Wells wrote those words in 1984. Two decades later, she still held to that view, as did many other people. In 2006, Taillevent celebrated its sixtieth anniversary and Jean-Claude Vrinat turned seventy.Neither showed its age. At the time, the restaurant had been recently renovated and the food, though still traditional, exuded the panache of the restaurant’s talented, self-effacing young chef, Alain Solivérès. As for Vrinat, he was as driven and indefatigable as ever, presiding over the dining room every lunch and dinner and constantly seeking new ways of keeping Taillevent vibrant without sacrificing its essential classicism. The fact that it was always full seemed to indicate that he was succeeding. But on February 21, 2007, after thirty-four years at the top, Taillevent was stripped of its third star by Michelin. It was a decision that left Vrinat perplexed and angry, and he wasn’t alone.
In demoting Taillevent, Michelin wasn’t just punishing a revered institution; it was closing the book on a particular style of three-star restaurant. Vrinat was the ringmaster at Taillevent, but he wasn’t its chef; he presided in the dining room and left the cooking to someone else (always a supremely capable someone else, of course). Postwar Paris had a trio of legendary three-star restaurants with this allocation of labor and limelight: La Tour d’Argent, Lasserre, and Taillevent. Lasserre, its dining room under the direction of René Lasserre, was awarded its third star in 1962 and lost it in 1984. La Tour d’Argent’s non-cooking owner, Claude Terrail, captured three stars in 1951 and was downgraded by Michelin in 1996. In an age of celebrity chefs, Vrinat’s approach to the running of his restaurant was nothing short of antediluvian, and now, in February 2007, with his third star gone, it was officially passé.
It was a form of hospitality that Vrinat had learned at the side of his father, André, but only after an unsettled childhood. Born in 1936, Vrinat was just a year old when his mother died. At the time, the family was residing in the town of Saint-Quentin, in northern France, where André, a sybaritic engineer who had long aspired to a life of food and wine, had opened a hotel and restaurant. Success came quickly; the restaurant earned a Michelin star after just a year in busines
s. But hopes for a second star were dashed by the onset of the Second World War. Fiercely anti-Nazi, André put his son in the care of his grandmother in 1939 and took up arms, first for the French Army, later for the Resistance. Over the ensuing seven years, Jean-Claude saw his father only sporadically.
At war’s end, André returned to Saint-Quentin to find the auberge in ruins. He sold what remained of the property, moved to Paris, and in late 1946 opened Taillevent—named for the fourteenth-century chef believed to have penned France’s first cookbook. Two years later, he recaptured his Michelin star. In 1950, Taillevent took up residence in its present location, a townhouse on the rue Lamennais. With chef Lucien Leheu in the kitchen, Taillevent earned a second Michelin star in 1954.
Despite having grown up around food and wine, Jean-Claude had little interest in the restaurant trade. After graduating from lycée in 1954, he studied law and business in Paris. In 1959, he interned with several multinationals in Brazil. He returned home to perform his military service, which threw him into the last spasms of France’s withdrawal from Algeria, and then decided to take a job in Brazil with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. One of his father’s friends talked him out of it. “He said Brazil had a bright future, but that it was unclear when exactly that bright future would arrive,” Vrinat recounted with a laugh. “He suggested that I instead go to work at Taillevent. I thought about it, realized he was right, and so that’s what I did.”
Au Revoir to All That Page 10