Au Revoir to All That

by Michael Steinberger

  The Japanese also became ardent students of French cuisine and proved to be very adept at it. A few months before his death, Jean-Claude Vrinat told me that he found better baguettes in Tokyo than he did in Paris, and that the young Japanese cooks who came to work at Taillevent had a stronger grasp of French recipes and techniques than did most of the French chefs he hired. But there wasn’t just mastery; there was also devotion. The Japanese had a reverence for France’s gastronomic heritage that stood in dramatic contrast to the indifference of many French. In the late 1990s, when the Food Network aired the popular Japanese cooking show Iron Chef, a number of the Japanese chefs cited Alain Chapel as their inspiration. This was astonishing. By then, Chapel was largely a forgotten figure in France—chefs, of course, celebrated his memory, but the French public wouldn’t have known him from Alain Châpeau. When I told Suzanne Chapel about the show and how often her husband’s name was invoked, she nodded and told me that his enduring influence in Japan was one of the things that kept her going. “The respect the Japanese have for him and for French cuisine is very motivating,” she told me. “They defend an ideal.”

  And not just in Japan. In a remarkable twist, some of the most acclaimed French cooking in France was now being done by Japanese chefs, three of whom even held Michelin stars: Hiroyuki Hiramatsu and Tateru Yoshino, both of whom had restaurants in Paris, and Keisuke Matsushima, who owned an eponymous restaurant in Nice. Hiramatsu was the most prominent of the three. With nineteen restaurants employing more than six hundred people, he was Japan’s answer to Bocuse and Ducasse, and his restaurant group had served a turnkey function for some of the French chefs starting establishments in Japan. In 2001, he opened a nine-table eponymous restaurant on the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris, which quickly earned a Michelin star. Three years later, the restaurant relocated to a slightly larger space on the rue de Longchamp in the sixteenth arrondissement, where it retained its star.

  It was there that I went to see Hiramatsu in April 2007. As our appointment wasn’t scheduled until two P.M., I decided to have lunch beforehand. The dining room, decorated in a contemporary, vaguely Japanese style, was empty except for me and a dowdy British couple that was either a husband and his much older wife or a son and his mother. The waitstaff was entirely French, and the wine list was one of the best I’d encountered in France, studded with marquee names like Coche-Dury, Lafon, Roumier, and Guigal. The food—classic French, and fairly conservative at that—was good, if not quite as delicious as I’d hoped. An appetizer of sliced scallops and marinated salmon with celery rémoulade and tomato purée was very pleasant; my main course, roast veal, was cooked perfectly but could have used a little more flavor; ditto the chocolate cake that ended the meal.

  I met with Hiramatsu in his small office overlooking the kitchen. A trim fifty-four-year-old with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, he was dressed in slacks, an Izod shirt, and a windbreaker, his eyeglasses dangling around his neck by a cord. He spoke some French but not enough to be conversant, and his secretary, who was also Japanese, didn’t speak any English. We decided that I would pose my questions in French, she would translate them into Japanese, Hiramatsu would reply in Japanese, and she would translate his answers into French. The office was very warm and I’d had two glasses of wine with lunch; between having to think and write in English, converse in French, and concentrate on staccato-burst Japanese, I felt as if my head would explode. After a few minutes, my mind finally came around, which was a good thing, because the soft-spoken Hiramatsu turned out to be a fascinating character—possibly the most interesting, erudite chef I’d encountered in France.

  He had developed an interest in France as a teenager, he said. As a fifteen-year-old, he had read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract, and it had been a life-shaping experience. “It was a shock for me—the appreciation of individualism, this idea of individual liberty,” he said. “This was something that didn’t exist in Japan.” This was surprising. Rousseau, a Calvinist by birth and, later, by reconversion, abhorred gourmandism and would just as soon have had his taste buds extracted, which made him an unlikely source of inspiration for a chef. “My interest in Rousseau had no relationship with cuisine, just philosophy,” Hiramatsu said. “This idea of respect for the individual—it hit me very hard. And I was attracted to France because it was the country that had this philosophy of individual freedom.”

  He had later learned about the School of Paris, and how foreign artists like Picasso, Chagall, and Modigliani had gravitated to the French capital and created some of the most innovative works of the early twentieth century. As Hiramatsu saw it, these men had been drawn to France by the liberty it offered—by the ideas that had animated Rousseau. At the age of eighteen, his head filled with what were, for a Japanese teenager, deeply subversive thoughts, Hiramatsu had realized there was no choice but to move to France. “I needed to live there,” he explained. “I saw that only in France could I be free.” It was then that he had decided to become a chef; food was a central part of French culture, and cooking would be his ticket to France.

  Another eight years would pass before he set foot in the place that had so aroused his imagination. During that time, he trained at the Hotel Okura in Tokyo, all the while studying Carême and Escoffier and immersing himself in the literature and culture of “the country of my dreams.” When he finally reached France, at the age of twenty-six, he first worked as a cook at a two-star restaurant in the city of Nantes. Six months later, he moved to Paris, then in the throes of the nouvelle cuisine movement. There, he worked for two years in an unstarred but well-regarded restaurant called Claire Fontaine. But just as he was immersing himself in French life, Hiramatsu experienced another epiphany. “When I came to France, I was sure it would be forever,” he explained. “But then I came to understand something Mr. Fernand Point had said. He said, ‘Young chefs, return to your country and cook for your compatriots.’ I realized that I had to return to Japan to share what I had learned in France and to teach the Japanese the real French cooking. I would be an ambassador, a missionary.”

  Twenty-five years later, with the Japanese having embraced French cuisine almost as if it were their own, Hiramatsu had accomplished his mission. “There is more passion in Japan for French food and wine than there is France,” he said. “The Japanese are now very cultivated and knowledgeable when it comes to French cuisine, and when the food is good, they are very enthusiastic. On Saturdays and Sundays, they’ll wait two or three hours to get a table! Even my mother will wait ninety minutes.”

  He told me that he had opened the restaurant in Paris not because he had wanted to conquer France but because he had needed a place where he could go to actually cook. “In Japan,” he said, “I’m a chef d’entreprise. With all the restaurants I have there, I don’t have the time or the energy to cook. Here, I can be a chef de cuisine again. This restaurant is a laboratory for me—a place to refine my cuisine, to create new dishes.” By now, I was slack-jawed. No French chefs that I knew talked about Rousseau and the Social Contract and notions of individual liberty, and they definitely didn’t open restaurants in other countries because they wanted to be in the kitchen cooking. Suzanne Chapel’s words were ringing in my head: They defend an ideal.

  Hiramatsu made eight trips a year to Paris, spending about one hundred days in total in France. He said that while the critics had responded enthusiastically to his Paris venture, the initial reaction among French diners had been cautious; they assumed, not without reason, that the food would reflect his Japanese roots. “At the beginning, the French clients thought of me as a Japanese chef,” he said. “They were looking for the Japanese side to my cooking.” But they now understood that while the chef was Japanese, the food was unabashedly French. “The other day,” he said, breaking into a smile, “I had a client tell me that he finds the French cuisine we serve here better than what the French themselves do.”

  The Japanese weren’t just passionate about French food; they were equally smitten with Frenc
h wines. In 2005, the wine critic Michel Bettane, France’s answer to Robert Parker, paid a visit to Japan and came away marveling at the connoisseurship and enthusiasm that he encountered. From the flawless stemware to the unfailingly perfect serving temperatures, he said, the level of respect accorded French wines in Japan was “unthinkable at home.” Likewise, the Japanese wine writers that Bettane met exhibited a curiosity and knowledge that he felt put his French colleagues to shame. And just as young Japanese cooks migrated to France, Japanese wine experts also went to the motherland to ply their craft. Hideya Ishizuka, who was named Japan’s Best Young Sommelier in 1987, relocated to France in 1991 and, without intending to, forced diners to reckon with the new face of French cuisine at their very table. He had set out intent on finding work with a Michelin-starred restaurant and quickly landed a position with a two-star in Brittany, where he spent a year. Then, in 1992, he met Jean-Michel Cazes, the owner of Château Lynch-Bages, a Bordeaux fifth growth. Cazes, one of Bordeaux’s most respected figures, was impressed by the young Japanese man and hired him to work as the sommelier at an inn he had recently opened just down the road from his winery. In a part of Bordeaux largely devoid of good restaurants, Cordeillan-Bages had quickly established itself as the area’s foremost dining destination. Because of its location, much of the clientele was in the wine business, which made the job of wine steward particularly challenging. Ishizuka’s nationality, it seems, made it all the more so: Some French clients were not receptive to the idea of a Japanese sommelier. “For the first three or four years, it was very difficult,” Ishizuka said. Cazes told him to ignore the skeptics and just go about his business. By 1999, the restaurant had won two Michelin stars and Ishizuka’s knowledge and charm had won over the doubters; Gault Millau even described him as the dining room’s star attraction.

  Two years later, Ishizuka, now married with children, decided to move to Paris, where he took a job with Hiramatsu, who was just opening his restaurant there. In 2002, Ishizuka received a call from Alain Ducasse. At the time, Ducasse was making plans for his first restaurant in Japan, and having heard of Hiramatsu’s talented and bilingual sommelier, he decided that this was just the person he needed for his Tokyo venture. In typical fashion, Ducasse swooped in on his prey, calling Ishizuka at regular intervals to try to lure him back to Tokyo. But Ishizuka was happy in Paris, and no amount of money or flattery could entice him. After several months, Ducasse finally surrendered. “He said that I was the only person who’d ever said no to him,” Ishizuka proudly recalled. In 2005, Ishizuka left Hiramatsu to fulfill his dream of owning a classic Parisian wine bar-bistro. On the fashionable rue du Cherche-Midi, he opened Le Petit Verdot, named for one of the grapes used in Bordeaux. It was a jewel box of a restaurant with an appealing menu (warm terrine of rabbit and artichoke, roast rump of veal with sorrel and tomato) and a wine list rich in great French names, prominent among them Château Lynch-Bages. Ishizuka said that some locals were not especially welcoming of a Japanese patron: “There was some racism,” he said. However, the bigots were a distinct minority, and a strong neighborhood clientele, as well as a fair number of Japanese and American tourists, had given the restaurant a promising start. Indeed, Ishizuka was now thinking of opening a second restaurant in Paris. Asked how the Japanese had come to so skillfully execute the flavors and forms of French cuisine, Ishizuka allowed a slight grin: “The thing about us Japanese is that we like to copy and are very good at it. In fact, we are so good at it that the copy eventually becomes better than the original.”

  The French, even if they weren’t necessarily receptive to the idea of Japanese chefs assuming the mantle of Carême and Escoffier, could at least take pride in how successfully they had managed to implant their culinary tradition in a country six-thousand miles from France and a world apart culturally. But this also raised a question: If the French could turn Tokyo into a city of cassoulet lovers, why couldn’t they do the same thing in the suburbs of Paris and Lyon, where many of France’s ethnic minorities lived? It was a question that spoke to a broader issue—the failure of France to successfully assimilate huge numbers of the estimated five million immigrants who now lived there.

  This failure was laid bare in October 2005, when two teenagers of North African descent were electrocuted in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. They had taken refuge in an electrical substation, apparently thinking that they were being chased by the police (whether they were being pursued has never been conclusively established and remains a source of controversy). News of the deaths sparked a night of violence in Clichy-sous-Bois, with immigrant youths vandalizing local businesses and burning cars. In the days that followed, the unrest spread, first to other Paris suburbs and then to other cities in France. By the time the violence subsided, three weeks later, one person was dead, nearly three thousand had been arrested, almost ten thousand cars had been torched, and more than three hundred million dollars in damage had been done in some two hundred communities across the country.

  The spasm of violence shocked France, but it shouldn’t have: It was the inevitable harvest of decades of failed integration. France had a large and growing population of predominantly Muslim émigrés from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, three of its former colonies, and it was also home to scores of recent arrivals from other parts of Africa. But little effort had been made to absorb these newcomers. Many of them lived in blighted communities on the edge of Paris and other cities, out of sight and out of mind of both the French government and broader French society. Within these largely minority enclaves, there was little work to be found, and racial discrimination often prevented immigrant job-seekers from finding jobs in nearby areas. While the overall employment situation in France was abysmal, nowhere was it worse than in the banlieues, as these depressed suburbs were known; by some estimates, joblessness among minority youths was as high as 50 percent. The result was simmering resentment that finally boiled over in the autumn of 2005.

  At the same time that the French suburbs were exploding in violence, the French hospitality industry was grappling with a dearth of workers. The shortage was mainly caused by onerous labor laws. But for some restaurateurs, the money wasn’t an issue: They simply couldn’t recruit willing people to fill all the positions they had to offer. During a morning that I spent with Christian Constant, a neighboring restaurateur stopped by to check out some of the furnishings at Les Cocottes, and the two men got to commiserating about staffing. “Impossible these days,” said Constant. His colleague nodded and said, “We just can’t find enough people to do the work.”

  This conversation took place less than ten miles from Clichy-sous-Bois—ten miles from a community with a huge number of able-bodied young men and women desperate for work. They needed jobs, and restaurateurs like Constant and his neighbor needed help. Yet no one seemed to have put two and two together. To an American, this failure was especially mystifying because the restaurant trade has been so central to the immigrant experience in the United States. For countless European, Asian, and Latin American immigrants, restaurant work had been a gateway to a better life. For France, wrestling with an ethnic minority crisis on the one hand and a restaurant manpower crisis on the other, the solution seemed obvious: Get the kids in the banlieues jobs as cooks, waiters, and runners.

  True, McDonald’s was providing them with work, but it was an American company specializing in fast food. Why weren’t French restaurants offering similar opportunities? Doing so would not just be a means to a paycheck; it would be a way of connecting minority youths to French culture. Food was central to French identity, and for other, earlier immigrants, it had served an assimilative function; eating pot-au-feu and sipping a glass of Beaujolais was a way of being French and a statement of belonging. Gilles Pudlowski, the restaurant critic, he said that as a child growing up in Alsace, the son of Jewish émigrés from Poland, it was food that had made him feel French. “The only France I know is gourmet France,” he wrote. “My exemplary French … are master chefs … master vintne
rs, cellar men, and vine growers … This country, as vast, multifarious, and well-fed as it is gourmand, is indeed a gigantic, convivial, perpetual, quotidian feast.” Bringing the disaffected youths from the banlieues into the restaurant trade wouldn’t just be a way of easing unemployment; it would be a way of alleviating their sense of alienation and more fully integrating them into French society.

  Equally important, it would be a means of perpetuating France’s gastronomic tradition. Every cuisine, in order to endure and flourish, needs a steady infusion of new blood—both new practitioners and new consumers. France was becoming increasingly multiethnic and multiracial; simply as a demographic matter, it seemed imperative that a knowledge of, and passion for, French cuisine take root in places like Clichy-sous-Bois. What sort of future would French cuisine have if 20 or 30 percent of the French population never touched the stuff? Non-French immigrants had embraced ethnic fare with some enthusiasm; in fact, couscous was said to be the most popular dish in France (admittedly, part of its appeal was that it was cheap). Cultivating a taste for French cuisine among France’s ethnic minorities seemed no less important.

  Yet nearly every time I raised this subject with eminent French chefs and pointed out the absence of dark-skinned faces—either clients or staff—in the kitchens and dining rooms of leading restaurants, I was met with quizzical expressions, as if the idea had never occurred to them. The only Michelin-starred chef who seemed genuinely interested in the topic was Alain Senderens, and his take on the issue was revealing. We were chatting one afternoon in his restaurant, and I noted that the swankier establishments in Paris didn’t seem to reflect the city’s changing complexion; there were few if any customers of North African descent, and it appeared to me that there were few if any North African employees. Senderens begged to differ. “All of the dishwashers here are Maghreb,” he quickly replied. He then jumped out of his chair, left the room, and returned a few minutes later with his arm around a young North African dishwasher, who smiled sheepishly as he was put on display for me. “You see?” Senderens triumphantly declared.