Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  And, in truth, Vrinat’s feelings were more complicated than he let on. Contrary to his assistant’s suggestion, he hadn’t been hoping to lose the third star, but now that it was gone, there was a feeling of liberation. He had always said that keeping a third star was harder than winning one (which for him was doubly true; he acknowledged that his father deserved most of the credit for Taillevent’s promotion in 1973). Now he didn’t have to worry about it. From this point on, he could channel all his energy into his guests and customers, not fret about pleasing some “faceless inspector,” as he put it. He was heartened, too, by the support he received; hundreds of e-mails and letters poured in from clients dismayed by Michelin’s decision and vowing continued loyalty to Taillevent.

  But like Sabine, he was also angry. He was angry at the way Michelin had handled the demotion; he thought that thirty-four years at the summit merited a degree of respect and that he should have heard from Michelin after the Simon story had appeared. He vowed that any contact with the Guide would henceforth be on his terms and on his turf; there would be no more trips to the Avenue de Breteuil. “I’m not going to go see them. If they want to talk, they can come here; I don’t go there.” Apart from the issue of poor form, Vrinat was perplexed by Michelin’s actions. His October meeting with Mesplède had been bizarre, and Naret’s efforts to explain the decision after the Guide was released only added to the confusion. Naret told Bloomberg News that “you need to be perfect every day” to keep a three-star rating, implying that Taillevent had fallen short of this goal. Taillevent could be accused of a few things; inconsistent effort was not one of them.

  There was also this. A few days after he broke the news of Taillevent’s impending downgrade, François Simon had written a follow-up article that purported to explain Michelin’s thinking. He said that there was no problem with either Taillevent’s cooking or service but that the restaurant was doing too many covers—one hundred twenty at dinner, he claimed. Although Simon hadn’t cited a source, it seemed clear that his information had come from someone inside Michelin, and it was confounding on several levels. For one thing, the figure Simon gave was grossly inflated: As Vrinat jokingly noted, “If we had one hundred twenty people a night, we would have to seat forty of them on the stairs, and it wouldn’t be very easy for the service.” And why would Michelin, after awarding Taillevent three stars for so many years, suddenly be concerned about how much business it was doing? Moreover, if the restaurant’s turnover was indeed the explanation, not only did this contradict Mesplède, who had criticized the food, it also contradicted Michelin’s oft-repeated insistence that its ratings were based only on the quality of the meal. If that was really true, and if the cooking at Taillevent was still three-star caliber, the number of diners should have been irrelevant.

  Vrinat wasn’t the only one mystified. In the International Herald Tribune, Patricia Wells fumed that the decision to sanction Taillevent had been “born by a desire to provoke rather than [by] a commitment to Michelin’s own customary credibility.” That was one possibility. Another one suggested itself. Of all the claims made by Pascal Remy, the easiest to knock down was his assertion that some three-stars were sacrosanct, and because Vrinat was not a legendary chef but only a restaurateur, his third star was the easiest to take. Naret did nothing to discourage this interpretation; when I asked him about Taillevent, he replied with a smile that third stars were “not engraved in stone. They are in crystal, and crystal can break easily.”

  Although Vrinat recognized that Michelin’s decision was laughable and would very likely harm its reputation more than Taillevent’s, he couldn’t shake a feeling of betrayal. “Michelin represented something,” he said over coffee one afternoon. It had represented something—not only a certain standard of excellence, but also a certain idea of France. While Vrinat’s first concern had always been to satisfy his guests, he had also devoted his life to pleasing those faceless inspectors—to winning their approbation, to affirming that Taillevent itself represented a certain standard of excellence and a certain idea of France. In her anger, Sabine wondered if it had all been a waste—all the hours her husband had worked, all the nights she had sat home alone. “You’ve given your whole life—to what?” she asked. “We could have gone to exhibitions, or dinners, or the theater, and now you’re not any longer three stars. Was it worth it?”

  In August 2007, Vrinat was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died on January 7, 2008.

  Fast-Food Nation

  ON A BRIGHT, MILD Sunday afternoon in March 2007, several hundred people, mostly African and North African émigrés, assembled in Paris’s Place de la République. They were ostensibly there for a protest in defense of squatters’ rights. But with a presidential election just weeks away, the crowd had broader concerns than just affordable housing, and the gathering quickly turned into a raucous demonstration against the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy, a law-and-order conservative reviled by many of France’s minority communities. It also became a rally in support of another presidential aspirant, José Bové, who was on hand to help lead the march. Bové was the charismatic French “farmer” (in truth, he was a longtime left-wing militant who lived on a farm in the Massif Central and liked to pose as a man of the soil) who had come to prominence in 1999 after he and some colleagues, outraged by the punitive tariff that the United States, locked in a trade dispute with the European Union, had imposed on Roquefort cheese, bulldozed a McDonald’s in the city of Millau. His demolition of the golden arches earned Bové a three-month prison sentence; it also turned him, overnight, into a French folk hero and an icon of the antiglobalization movement.

  That same year, Bové took part in angry protests at a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and he had since traveled the planet as a self-appointed tribune of the downtrodden and the disenfranchised. He had also kept up his activism in France, championing the cause of small farmers and leading the fight against genetically modified crops and other forms of industrialized agriculture. In February 2007, he had decided to launch a presidential bid, and while no one expected him to win, his exploits—not least the destruction of the McDonald’s—had brought him widespread name recognition and support, and it was thought that he might do well enough in a crowded field to at least influence the outcome.

  As it happened, the demonstration kicked off directly in front of a McDonald’s, which was flanked by a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a restaurant belonging to the Belgian hamburger chain Quick—a murderer’s row of malbouffe (the French pejorative for fast food). Dressed in corduroys and work boots, with his customary pipe in hand and trademark handlebar mustache, Bové was positioned near the front of the protest and wore a look of serene confidence as it made its way up the Boulevard Saint-Martin. His presence electrified the crowd, which serenaded him with shouts of “Bové! Président!” and “Moustache à l’Élysée.” The cries of support continued even as Bové was interviewed by a BBC reporter doing a story on rising anti-American sentiment around the world. Presumably, he had sought out Bové, who had spent part of his childhood in Berkeley, California, in the hope of scoring an incendiary quote. But Bové, perhaps intent on recasting himself as a statesman, offered only boilerplate; from a few feet away, I heard him tell the BBC man that he had no beef with the American people but simply disagreed with the policies of the Bush administration. The interview over, Bové continued marching into the wan late-winter sun, plainly delighted to see how far his celebrated act of vandalism had carried him.

  That same afternoon, at a convention center on the other side of Paris, the annual Salon International de l’Agriculture was winding down. Filling several stadium-size exhibition halls, the Salon was a week-long trade show that literally brought the farm to the city. Hundreds of farmers and truckloads of farm animals came to Paris to give urbanites a taste of la France Profonde. It was an opportunity for city kids to pet horses, chase chickens, and be flabbergasted by the amount of waste matter that poured out of cows. It was also an occasion to showcas
e the meats, cheeses, and wines that made the French countryside such a cherished source of sustenance. No less than that, the event was a way for Parisians to express their support of French agriculture—in a sense, to reaffirm their own Frenchness. The patriotic overtones were catnip for politicians: President Jacques Chirac had kicked off the Salon the previous Sunday, and the floor traffic throughout the week included a steady flow of ministers and members of parliament.

  Encouraged by the nice weather, an enormous crowd had turned out for the Salon’s closing day. Most of the visitors were families with young children. They formed a striking portrait of the new, multicultural France: Many of them were white, but many others were of African, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern descent. Hijabs were nearly as ubiquitous as baseball caps and sneakers. By now, a full week into this jamboree, animal droppings and strands of hay were everywhere and the place reeked of the barnyard; judging by your nose and the bottom of your shoes, you really might have thought you were down on the farm—that is, until the big, splashy McDonald’s exhibit, located toward the back of the livestock hall, came into view. What the hell was that doing here, and why was it crawling with people?

  As I moved closer, I discovered that no food was being sold; instead, McDonald’s was feeding its guests corporate propaganda. Large, colorful placards ringed the display, documenting the amount of French beef, poultry, and vegetables that McDonald’s used, detailing the nutritional value of the food it served, and describing the company’s eco-friendly practices. The words were accompanied by lots of pastoral imagery—cows, potatoes, sheaves of wheat. Children weren’t spared the charm offensive. At an activity table, a sign reading D’où vient ton McDo? (Where does your McDonald’s come from?) was adorned with more pictures of chickens and cows. Judging by the display, you would never have guessed that it belonged to an American fast-food chain. That, apparently, was the idea. Cooked down to its essence, the message from McDonald’s was that its food was French, it was good for you, and it was good for the environment. I wasn’t buying it, but the intended audience clearly was. Didn’t these kids realize that McDonald’s was the Trojan horse of mondialisation and that they were committing cultural treason? Why weren’t their parents stopping them? Another question occurred to me: What would José do? The answer was obvious: He would have borrowed the nearest bulldozer and leveled the exhibit.

  But it wouldn’t have done him much good. In the battle for France, Bové proved to be no match for Le Big Mac. The first round of the presidential election was held on April 22, and Bové finished an embarrassing tenth, garnering barely 1 percent of the total vote. By then, McDonald’s had eleven hundred restaurants in France, three hundred more than it had had when Bové gave new meaning to the term “drive-through,” which included a rebuilt and very popular franchise in Millau. The company was pulling in over a million people per day in France, and annual turnover was growing at twice the rate it was in the United States. Arresting as those numbers were, there was an even more astonishing data point: By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald’s, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food. Against McDonald’s, Bové had lost in a landslide.

  As reprehensible as Bové’s tactics were, it was difficult for a food-loving Francophile not to feel a little solidarity with him. If you believed that McDonald’s was a blight on the American landscape, seeing it on French soil was like finding a peep show at the Vatican, and in a contest between Roquefort and Chicken McNuggets, I knew which side I was on. But implicit in this attitude was a belief that McDonald’s had somehow been foisted on the French; that slick American marketing had lured them away from the bistro and into the arms of Ronald McDonald. However, that just wasn’t true. The French came to McDonald’s and la malbouffe willingly, and in vast and steadily rising numbers. Indeed, the quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin’ it—the architects of McDonald’s strategy in France were French.

  The principal architect (or culprit, depending on your point of view) was Denis Hennequin, a forty-nine-year-old Parisian. He had joined McDonald’s in 1984, straight out of law school. At the time, McDonald’s was relaunching itself in France; an effort in the 1970s to establish a presence there had failed because of the company’s dissatisfaction with its French franchisee. After stints as an assistant store manager, a training and recruiting consultant, and the Paris regional director, Hennequin was named president and managing director of McDonald’s France in 1996. In the eight years that followed, he steered the company through the Bové controversy and into a period of robust growth and expansion. It was a job so well done that in 2004, Hennequin was promoted to executive vice president of McDonald’s Europe, and just a year later he was put in charge of European operations, overseeing more than six thousand restaurants in forty countries and a quarter-million employees. Having done the seemingly impossible and made McDonald’s safe for France, he was now thought to be in line to take over the entire Chicago-based company. A Frenchman running McDonald’s—it would be a hard thought to swallow on either side of the Atlantic.

  Within the organization, it was widely agreed that Hennequin had exhibited audacious leadership in France, notably in his handling of the Bové crisis. Rather than doing the prudent, corporate-minded thing and seeking some form of conciliation with Bové, Hennequin had decided to meet provocation with provocation. In 2001, McDonald’s France had launched a promotional campaign using Astérix, the beloved French cartoon character whose thick handlebar mustache was the inspiration for Bové’s facial broom. That same year, Hennequin rolled another, bigger grenade under Bové’s tractor by opening the McDonald’s booth at the Salon de l’Agriculture. There was deep anxiety among Hennequin’s colleagues about the reception that awaited them there. “Everyone said, ‘They are going to kill us,’ ” recalled Eric Gravier, a vice president of McDonald’s France and a longtime employee. The fears were so great, he said, that they had all their posters made in triplicate because they expected the booth to be pelted with dung. But Hennequin wouldn’t be deterred: McDonald’s France was sourcing 75 percent of its ingredients domestically, and he felt it was imperative from a PR standpoint to force French farmers, hypocritically applauding Bové, to publicly acknowledge the large volume of business that they were doing with McDo. While the gambit was undeniably bold, Hennequin clearly understood that he was operating from a position of strength, and not only in regard to the farmers. The French public applauded Bové, too, but in the places that mattered most, the stomach and the wallet, it applauded McDonald’s more.

  The wallet was no minor consideration. McDonald’s appealed to budget-conscious students, of course, but with France’s high unemployment and sluggish economy, it attracted people of all ages. Pensioners, for instance, were among the chain’s most loyal clients. The food at McDonald’s was cheap, and it was made cheaper still because its restaurants were officially designated as takeout joints. The value-added tax on meals at such establishments was just 5.5 percent, versus the 19.6 percent levied at “gastronomic” restaurants. This gave McDonald’s an even greater competitive advantage over brasseries, bistros, and cafés. It was odd that French politicians, supposedly committed to keeping globalization at bay and defending France’s culinary patrimony, would extend such favorable tax treatment to an American hamburger chain, and the different rates were a source of endless consternation to chefs, restaurant owners, and other purveyors of French cuisine. As André Daguin, a retired two-star chef and now the head of the French Hotel and Restaurant Association, put it, “Either our government wants us to be the country with the best restaurants, or it doesn’t.”

  What especially cheesed off Daguin and other chefs was that McDonald’s was being taxed as a carryout establishment even though the overwhelming majority of its customers actually chose to dine chez McDo. French diners tend
ed to treat McDonald’s as if it were no different than the bistro around the corner: They came, they ate, and they lingered. As Gravier artfully put it, “The French population uses McDonald’s in a very French way; it is fast food, but not that fast.” The data the company collected bore this out. Americans visited McDonald’s more often than the French, at all hours of the day, frequently alone, and opted for takeout 70 percent of the time. The French spent more money per visit, came in groups more often than Americans, and did 70 percent of their eating during regular lunch and dinner hours. “We have a food culture in France; eating is not a feeding moment, it is a social moment,” Gravier said.

  And the company was very adept at catering to French proclivities, a point brought home to me on a visit to a McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées in June 2007. I was part of a group of journalists being given a guided tour by Jean-Pierre Petit, who had succeeded Hennequin as the chief executive of McDonald’s France. We had come to this particular McDonald’s because Petit wanted to show us the newest addition to the company’s product line in France: McCafé, a stand-alone espresso bar offering lattes, macchiatos, and the like, along with fruit tarts, macarons, and other classic French sweets. The company was planning to open McCafés all over France, and the Champs-Élysées location was home to one of the first. Some of the other journalists eagerly ordered espresso drinks and pastries, but I wouldn’t be so easily gulled—this was still McDonald’s. Petit began making the rounds with a plate of macarons and insisted I try one. I took a pistachio. Not bad, I thought, but no Ladurée. As if reading my mind, Petit immediately chimed in, “We get the macarons from Holder, the company that owns Ladurée.” Touché.