Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  Toward the end of my conversation with Jacques Maximin, I’d asked what advice he ’d give to a teenager considering a career as a chef. Maximin, a small, pugnacious man, took a drag on his cigarette, stubbed it out in the ashtray, and said, “I’d tell him to think hard about it.” He paused for a moment, and then added, “Or I’d tell him to go to work for Ducasse.” Not long thereafter, Maximin, whose two-star restaurant had run aground financially, took his own advice and became a consultant to the Ducasse organization.

  The New French Revolution

  THE FOOD FIGHT THAT broke out among leading French chefs in 1996, pitting self-styled traditionalists like Alain Ducasse and Joël Robuchon against modernists such as Pierre Gagnaire and Michel Troisgros, was good for a few headlines but quickly receded from view. However, the question that provoked it—which way forward for French cuisine?—never went away, and by 2008, with Spain now widely seen as having supplanted France as the world’s gastronomic pacesetter, the divisions had hardened. One camp believed that the Iberian innovators were best ignored and that classic French cooking would brush aside this challenge and reassert its supremacy. The other was equally convinced that France desperately needed creative upheaval in its kitchens and—echoes of nouvelle cuisine—that this could only be accomplished by breaking free of the past. But even as the two sides pushed very different agendas, their paths were now converging in a most unexpected place: the kitchen. Whether traditionalists or modernists, French chefs were returning to the stove.

  One of the people at the vanguard of this trend was Christian Constant. By rights, the fifty-seven-year-old Constant should have been a three-star chef by now and enjoying all the privileges conferred by this lofty status—above all, the privilege of not having to oversee the day-to-day functions of a kitchen. His talent had announced itself at a precocious age and he had set off in pursuit of Michelin glory, doing stints at two venerable Paris establishments, Ledoyen and L’Espadon, before being hired in 1988 as the chef at Les Ambassadeurs, the ornate restaurant in the Hôtel de Crillon, also in Paris. In 1997, he held a pair of Michelin stars and a third one was considered a virtual certainty. But it was at this moment, on the cusp of achieving the ultimate accolade, that Constant did something astonishing. Tired of having to respond to every new twist in culinary fashion, and wanting to work in a more laid-back setting, he walked away from the Crillon and a probable third star and opened a small place on the rue Saint-Dominique, a serpentine thoroughfare in the chic seventh arrondissement.

  He named it Violon d’Ingres after the French painter Ingres, who was born in Montaubon, Constant’s hometown in southwestern France. In its initial incarnation, Violon was a somewhat formal restaurant serving upscale fare at upscale prices (the set dinner menu was 590FF, or $115). Michelin liked what it found and gave Constant first one star and then a second. That was as high as Violon rose, and by the early 2000s, it seemed that the restaurant, and Constant, had become afterthoughts. It was during this period that Constant became convinced that the French food scene was changing dramatically. Luxury was out; the economy was bad and people didn’t have the money to spend on exorbitant meals, nor did they care for ostentation. Constant knew that he had to adjust to the prevailing mood. “I didn’t want to be some chef standing in the door looking up and down the street to see if anyone would be coming for lunch today.”

  So in 2004, he reinvented Violon. He revamped the décor, giving the restaurant a more relaxed look and feel, and he built an open kitchen (still a rarity in Paris) in order to create even greater intimacy between himself and the guests. More dramatically, he introduced a three-course, €45 ($60) set menu. He wanted to continue serving things such as foie gras and turbot but at a more agreeable price. To make the new formula work, he cut the extravagances—he decided not to hire a sommelier, for instance. (“People know wine as well as the sommelier.”) But that was the beauty of it: He was saving money on things people no longer wished to pay for. “The clientele has changed,” he explained. “People don’t want that kind of formality anymore; they want something more convivial. Also, they want to spend less and return to restaurants more often.”

  The revamped approach proved wildly popular; getting a reservation became almost as challenging as winning a third star. By then, Constant had two other restaurants on the same block, both successful as well: Café Constant, a homey bistro serving homey fare (roast chicken, steak with mashed potatoes, profiteroles, floating island), and Les Fables de la Fontaine, a tiny, elegantly modern fish restaurant. Continuing his colonization of the rue Saint-Dominique, Constant opened a fourth place there in 2007: Les Cocottes de Christian Constant, an airy restaurant evocative of an American diner (counter seating ran the entire length of the restaurant) that specialized in casseroles (cocottes)—the ultimate in inexpensive comfort food. Parisians ate this up, too; Sarkozy even came for lunch one day.

  But there was more to the Christian Constant story than the forsaken third star and the growing empire on the rue Saint-Dominique. During the years he had spent in high-end kitchens, he had earned a reputation not only as a talented cook, but as an exceptional mentor who cultivated a generation of exceptionally capable young chefs—a group that came to be known as Generation Constant. At L’Espadon, he had employed two gifted lieutenants, Yves Camdeborde and Thierry Breton, who had followed him to Les Ambassadeurs, where they had been joined in the kitchen by a bevy of other future stars that included Eric Fréchon, Thierry Faucher, Rodolphe Paquin, and Didier Varnier. It was a rare day at Les Ambassadeurs when the atmosphere around the skillets and salamanders was anything less than electric.

  Constant had a rebellious streak, and although it would be several years before he acted on it himself, he imparted that contrarian spirit to his protégés. Fernand Point had prepared his brigade—Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, Outhier, Bise, Peyrot—for the single-minded pursuit of those three Michelin stars; Constant set his men on a radically different course. He had already begun to suspect that the three-star model was in trouble (his suspicion would jell into a conviction after he opened Violon). He also knew that his young charges were truly in love with cooking and that at least some of them had temperaments better suited to small restaurants than to culinary temples.

  So when it came time for Camdeborde and Breton to move on, Constant urged them to think inexpensive and small, which is what they did. “He understood my personality, and he also thought that the system was changing,” Camdeborde would later recall. Camdeborde took his knives to the unfashionable fourteenth arrondissement, where in 1992 he opened a bistro called La Régalade. The setting and service were casual, but the cooking was as skillfully executed as that in most starred restaurants, and the prices were shockingly low for the quality on offer. La Régalade quickly became one of the toughest tables in Paris. In 2004, he would sell La Régalade and take over a charming hotel, the Relais Saint-Germain, off the Boulevard Saint-Germain in the sixth, to which he attached a pint-size restaurant called Le Comptoir du Relais. Le Comptoir followed the Régalade template and proved to be equally popular (and even harder to get into because it was that much smaller). Camdeborde began describing himself as an aubergiste—an innkeeper, right in the heart of Paris.

  Breton followed a similar trail. In 1995, he started a restaurant called Chez Michel, specializing in the food of his native Brittany, in the gritty tenth arrondissement, near the Gare du Nord. He, too, skimped on the ambience so that he would have the money to buy the choicest ingredients but charge only a modest fee. (In 2007, his set menu was thirty euros, or around forty dollars.) Other Constant acolytes did likewise: Eric Fréchon opened an eponymous restaurant in the nineteenth (unable to surrender the three-star dream, he would later become the chef at the Hôtel Bristol). Thierry Faucher started a low-frills place in the fifteenth, and Rodolphe Paquin did likewise in the eleventh. Constant eventually took his own advice and set up on the rue Saint-Dominique, by which time the movement he had inspired had acquired a moniker—bistronomie,
which could be translated as: everything on the plate, relatively little on the bill, and the chef in the house.

  That’s where Breton could be found, twelve years after opening Chez Michel. Although he had a second restaurant next door, Chez Casimir, equally casual and also inexpensive, he was at Chez Michel’s stove for every service. Peering into the kitchen (the door was always open) and seeing the tousle-haired, solidly built thirty-eight-year-old standing over the flame was an arresting sight. A chef who cooks! The excellent salmon marinated herring-style, the rich, velvety lobster bisque, the succulent veal fricassee with root vegetables—it was truly Breton’s food, and if the three-person waitstaff happened to be swamped, he would even deliver it to the table himself.

  The intimacy went beyond the food and service. In the early evening, his wife would stop by with Breton’s children for some pre-bedtime horsing around and hugs. And late-arriving guests who lingered over coffee were often treated to another unusual sight: Breton, dressed in Lycra shorts, carrying his bicycle from the kitchen and setting out on a forty-kilometer nocturnal workout. Breton had solicitations nearly every week to establish other restaurants, but he had no interest in expanding beyond his small corner of Paris. “Someone came to me recently and offered me the chance to open a restaurant in Asia,” he recalled late one afternoon as the staff was setting up for dinner. “I said I’d go there maybe for a vacation, but that’s it. I have a perfect arrangement. It works for me, it works for the clients. I don’t want to conquer the world.”

  But the bistronomie movement was about more than just lifestyle; it also had an ideological dimension. Christian Constant and the chefs he had trained believed that classical French cuisine didn’t need to apologize for itself and that avant-garde cooking was better left to those not fortunate enough to have the strong culinary tradition that France did. “I’m a bit chauvinistic, but France is the best country for food in the world,” Camdeborde said over coffee one morning in the empty dining room of Le Comptoir. “I’m not against evolution, but it’s important to preserve the art of living and eating, and gastronomy. Some of these young chefs are trying to copy the Spanish, and I look at some of what they are making and ask myself, Why are they doing that? Does French cuisine not have a personality? Why would you want to abandon true French cuisine? Does a globalized cuisine really interest you?”

  It was of no interest to Constant. With his slick dark hair, stubbled face, and gravelly voice, Constant looked and sounded more like a mutinous sailor than the leader of a gastronomic revolt. (As it happens, he had met his Scottish-born wife while aboard a ship: He was doing a cooking demonstration on the QE2, for which she was a crew member at the time.) And it was a peculiar sort of insurrection that he was leading: It wasn’t an attempt to tear down an existing order but rather, to validate one. Constant wasn’t a reactionary, but he was worried about the Adrià wannabes in French kitchens and about the proliferation of McDonald’s and pizza. “We’re in danger of losing our identity,” he said. He adored old-school cooking—“I love the traditional, things like béarnaise sauce, gratinées”—and was using his kitchens to keep it alive and to rekindle a passion for it in others. He was convinced the restaurant-going public was coming around to his way of thinking. “The French want to find the classic again,” he said. “People are returning to the old values, reconnecting with the basics.”

  In an interview with Food & Wine, François Simon plaintively asked, “What happened to the notion of chefs as beloved community figures prowling the neighborhood shaking hands with suppliers?” Constant had become just such a chef, and as he made his morning rounds, dressed in a thick sweater and faded black jeans, he radiated contentment. He spent several minutes taking reservations at Les Cocottes, then darted into the Violon kitchen to check on the progress of the cassoulet. Although he was operating four establishments and employed a chef de cuisine for each, he kept a hand in every pot—if not quite literally, certainly figuratively. From Violon he stopped in at the neighboring vegetable stand. The owner had planned to retire, but Constant had persuaded him to keep going by promising to regularly purchase provisions from him. “I said to him, ‘Eh, no, stop—stay in business. We’re reinvigorating this street.’ ” He next dipped into Les Fables de la Fontaine to make sure everything was set for lunch service, helping himself (and me) to a quick white-wine aperitif. From there, it was off to Café Constant; a few regulars were at the bar, and Constant greeted them like the ward boss he had become.

  Naturally, another round of white wine was in order. Constant told me he had no regrets about not having received a third star. “You spend all your time scared, your whole existence is simply about winning that third star,” he said quietly. He wasn’t against Michelin or the system of stars; Violon still had a star, and Les Fables had one, too. But he thought that Michelin needed to shower more praise on the chefs who stayed in their restaurants and cooked. “That’s the one thing I criticize Michelin for—they need to defend the artisans more. I’m in my place every day, these other chefs are too. Michelin should give five stars to chefs who are in the kitchen.”

  Gilles Choukroun looked down at my coffee cup, paused momentarily, and picked up the small spoon that lay on the side of the saucer. He gently placed the spoon in my cup, its thin silver handle rising up out of the jet-black espresso. “Why does the spoon come on the plate; why can’t it come to the table already in the cup?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, Choukroun’s way of illustrating the point that French cuisine was now in a period of revolutionary ferment, in which everything—from the composition of sauces to the division of labor in the kitchen to the placement of demitasse spoons—was open to reinterpretation. We were sitting in the stylish bar of Choukroun’s restaurant, Angl’Opéra, located on the Avenue de l’Opéra, halfway between the Paris opera house and the Louvre. In contrast to its gray, tired neighborhood, the restaurant was arrestingly contemporary, with aluminum tabletops and a riot of brightly colored accoutrements: blue water glasses, orange and pink shades, zebra-striped banquettes. As we talked, dance music pulsated gently in the background—proof in itself, Choukroun explained, that the French dining scene was in a state of delicious upheaval. He said that when he had opened his previous restaurant, Le Café des Délices, in 2000, guests had been shocked to find music being piped into the dining room. “Clients and the press were completely surprised,” he recalled. “ ‘What’s happening?’ It just wasn’t done here.” Seven years later, he said, restaurants all over Paris were making music part of the ambience, and younger diners, at least, were delighted. “There is a revolution going on. The chefs and the clients want a cuisine that is très actuel, très fun.”

  Fun. If there was one idea that united younger French chefs, it was that French cuisine needed to loosen up. In their view, fun was not inimical to French cuisine; there was no requirement that French cuisine had to be served by morose waiters in somber dining rooms; and having good food and a good time were not incompatible desires. The stocky, handsome Choukroun, at age forty, was one of the chefs at the head of this movement. A few years earlier, he had founded a group called Générations C, a confederacy of young chefs committed to putting more fun into French food. The “C” stood for “cuisines” and “cultures,” a dual meaning that spoke to the worldliness these chefs supposedly brought to the kitchen, in contrast to the insularity of their culinary forebearers. “The goal was to get the word out about all the great things that are happening with young chefs in France,” said Choukroun. In his view, French cuisine had been wrongly depicted as hidebound and incapable of change. Choukroun cited Arthur Lubow’s New York Times Magazine article about Spain’s gastronomic ferment as the most damaging source of this misconception. “No question, Adrià is a great chef,” he said. “But it would be very difficult to name ten truly great Spanish chefs. By contrast, I can name dozens of top French chefs, working in Paris and the provinces.”

  Even so, Choukroun and his peers were determined to show that they could
be as eclectic and playful as the Spanish and just as open to ideas and flavors from other countries (if not necessarily open to the idea that other nations could produce food and chefs that were the equal of France’s). Choukroun, for instance, offered rococo creations like crème brûlée of foie gras with peanuts, and salmon with lemon risotto accompanied by a shot glass of hot coconut milk. Some critics found his concoctions, and those of like-minded chefs, to be more incoherent than inventive. But to people like Omnivore’s Luc Dubanchet, this freewheeling style was reinvigorating French cuisine.