by Adam Gopnik
Not long ago, I had coffee with Benedict Beauge, a French writer who occupied the necessary ground between history and food writing. “We no longer have a crisis of French food,” he said with the bright gloom, the Epicurean skepticism, of the French food lover. “Now we have a crisis of the French restaurant.” He meant, I discovered, that the best new cooks in France—Guy Martin at Le Grand Véfour, Passard, Pierre Gagnaire at his own restaurant—were as good as anyone, having absorbed the lessons of the Spanish with a greater aplomb, but their places were still rooted in the old Michelin system: three-star temples, fit for a voyage. There was a kind of permanent misfit between the cooking talent and the culinary temple. The idea of “worth a voyage” expresses its nineteenth-century nature. We now think of food being worth a revelation. And revelations, we know, happen in eccentric places, caves and chapels.
I was moved enough by memories of the old classic New York French restaurants—all those stuffed chicken breasts and tiny copper serving pots, all those waiters, by turns obsequious and imperious, all that puff pastry and red velvet upholstery—that I thought to salute them, or elegize them internally, at least, by being present for the last lunch at La Côte Basque. The classic, famous old restaurant was closing on March 7, 2004, as its chef-proprietor, Jean-Jacques Rachou, neared seventy. Along with the deaths of Lutèce and Gage & Tollner, the event marked the end of something or other, at a time of who knows what—but it needed to be observed.
The Côte Basque that ended was not the Côte Basque that began. That one, familiar to readers of Truman Capote (who set a gossipy story there), was actually one block over, east of Fifth Avenue, in the space that became a Disney Store. The entire operation—the tables, the banquettes, and the murals of the Basque coast by Bernard Lamotte that gave the place its name—was dislodged in 1995, and replanted more or less successfully in the new space farther west.
Historians, or, at least, chroniclers of the New York restaurant world, will also recall that the original Côte Basque was intended, rather defiantly, not to be what it ended up being—a temple of haute cuisine. It was Henri Soulé’s second restaurant, the “relaxed,” ostensibly bistro-ish alternative to his Le Pavillon, which was itself a relic of the 1939 World’s Fair. As Joseph Wechsberg explained in The New Yorker some forty years ago, the Pavillon was the first restaurant in New York to be emphatically and uncompromisingly major—three-star cooking, as they did it in Paris—and La Côte Basque was the first to be major in a minor way. (Reading Wechsberg now, one is struck by how tired the food sounds, much of it made earlier in the day and presented as a buffet froid, to be admired as people entered the restaurant.) La Côte Basque, however, became the fashionable place, on the universal principle that whatever is defined in advance as exclusive is uninteresting, while whatever is defined in advance as informal can have an overlay of exclusivity bestowed upon it. La Côte Basque, which stumbled after Soulé’ death, was revived in the early eighties by Jean-Jacques Rachou, who had earlier created what was for a spell one of the best places in New York, Le Lavandou. Rachou was the master of a brief rococo interregnum. (This had to be a food-magazine cover line back then: “The Rococo Interregnum.”) His chicken was still stuffed; his fish still imported; and if he met a tournedos he greeted it with a slice of foie gras and a truffle sauce. He was mostly famous for the free-form inventiveness of his plates, which often looked, one critic wrote, if memory serves, “like the flags of some effete nation.” The style had its moment, and the restaurant got a cheerful second life, which is now over. There is a second life for institutions when people in their twenties arrive; and another second life when people in their fifties return—the second sort of second life was the kind that La Côte Basque had.
And yet, looking around the room at the red-faced and the silver-haired, the soon-to-be-thrombotic and the recently revalved, the women who still tied their scarves to their bags in the manner of Babe Paley, and men who still dressed in trim gray suits in the manner of her husband, one realized that it was the restaurant’s thorough and even comic Frenchness that had made it so entirely New York. The banquettes, the lovely red-and-white-striped awning above the bar, the flow of penguined waiters, and above all those murals, showing Basque harbor scenes—no truly French place could be so resolutely French, any more than a truly New York restaurant would ever do itself up in pigeons and water towers. The colors, the open brushwork, and the sea beyond—all of which were intended, in 1962, to make you feel as if you had been transported to southwest France in 1905—now made you feel, one last time, as if you had been transported to New York in 1962. The Gotham Bar and Grill could be anywhere; La Côte Basque could only be in New York City.
And the food? It was okay, yet weirdly disconnected. What I had wanted, but not what I had dreamed of. Things were roasted crisp and sautéed crisper, the truffles were black and the Madeira sauce gleaming, and it was all done with the rich and, if truth be told, slightly sick-making flavor of the old-style cooking, of the kind Levin and Tynan had known. Had our palate changed, or had the cooking changed? More the first than the second, surely. The cobbler must stick to his last, but the chef must stick to his customers, and one generation’s delights are the next generation’s curiosities. At lunch, someone said, apropos of Capote, that taste is the last thing that passes after talent is gone—it is the most mysterious of gifts, the one thing that lasts, and yet the one that always changes. It seemed a sufficiently elegiac thought to take back home, along with the memory of lunch.
* * *
So France is gone, France has fled, what was once an empire is like Byzantium just before the Turks won for good—merely a citadel. Yet the Italian empire exists and flourishes. Why the New World over the Old World is easy to understand. But why Italy over France? Perhaps because what Italy represents in the American, or at least the New York mind, is the easy Old World. Olive trees and cheap red wine, pasta and garlic, tomatoes cooked down and cheese scraped off—it all feels accessible, where French cooking, even as it dates, has some evident degree of difficulty about it. The simple acts of French country food—separating eggs, making crème anglaise, beating egg whites, reducing sauces, making liaisons of a sauce and a thickener, even one as plain as flour and butter—are hard or, anyway, harder. Even the peasant dishes can wear you out; even cassoulet is complicated. There was a time, now passed, when the difficulty was itself an attraction. “Mastering” the art of French cooking was the point, and mastery is something different from merely making. We make Italian food; we master French. (And we muddle through with American and Greek and the rest.) We like results.
But there is also something ever more insular about French cooking itself, and that can’t be denied. To read, for instance, the most ambitious recent books about French food is to note a puzzling inability to see beyond France, even in defense or counterattack. Cooking: The Quintessential Art, for instance, by Hervé This and Pierre Gagnaire, is an attempt to revive the old eighteenth-century form of a romantic educational dialogue, in this case between two characters called Jean and Hélène, who flirt, in a cerebral way, as they talk about the meanings of food. The principle of “natural” tastes is explored and rejected, narrative in cooking is considered (“I’m not always sure how to ‘read’—that is, eat—dishes that consist of several elements,” Jean confesses), and the complexities of color and taste laid out (we describe red wine with dark adjectives; white with lighter ones).
But though the wonderfully named This advertises himself, not without reason, as one of the founders of molecular cuisine—he is, in fact, the first, or among the first, to use the term, and his discoveries include the Tesla-like use of an electrical field to smoke salmon—the national question is never raised anywhere in their book. Ferran Adrià and his brother Albert of elBulli, the prime Spanish magicians, if not the first inventors, of molecular cuisine, make no appearance in the book at all, as exemplars or enemies, and Gagnaire—a great cook, to be sure—is uncritically accepted as defining the totality of the
new cooking. The dominance of French cooking is simply asserted; the references to history are all narrowly French—Carême and Curnonsky—and even the world’s sense that French cooking is in crisis cannot penetrate the small hard shell of complacency. It reminds the reader of the statues in the Luxembourg Gardens, where Branly’s pedestal advertises him as the inventor of radio, and Lamarck’s as the father of evolution. Neither claim is entirely false, but both are a bit enclosed.
I had a doubled sense of this when I went to an epic French dinner in the company of Beauge. The Beard Foundation in New York had assembled three of the great chefs of France to cook together a single celebratory dinner. The three were Joël Robuchon, Alain Ducasse, and Guy Savoy—but it was well understood by all involved that, as fine a cook and restaurateur as Savoy is, he was very much a kind of Jordan placed between the Egypt of Ducasse and the Israel of Robuchon. Two grand masters of French cooking, the greatest since the heyday of Paul Bocuse, they were legendary for having, if not disdain, then at least a glossy indifference toward each other—not so much diva-ish as duke-like in its rivalry. Beauge is a self-conscious follower of Brillat-Savarin, about whom he has written the entry in the soon-to-appear revised encyclopedia of French food, and whom he recognizes, as not enough do, as the great liberal of gastronomy—the man who carved a progressive path. We agreed that one problem in French food, buried for a long time, to be sure, was the rich but reactionary tradition of Grimod de La Reynière. It made French cooking narrowly French, denying its mixed-up cosmopolitan basis, and turned France toward undue navel gazing. We are paying the price for the national narcissism now, which is, always, not the end of fascination with oneself, but the growing indifference of everyone else.
The lineup of wines was excellent, and we began with a Robuchon dish: potatoes with white truffle. We tasted it.
“Yes, this is delicious. But”—Benedict’s brow furrowed—“how could it not be delicious? If we are to root for white truffles and boiled potatoes?…” We stopped for a pull on a glass of Riesling. Benedict, in a red tie (I had gone tieless, as a little gesture of independence, I suppose), looked at my collar gravely. “I did not know the codes,” he said, “or what degree of idiosyncrasy one could show without spilling over into impertinence.”
Not long before, Guy Savoy had said, “There is no way that this dinner could happen in Paris. There is no way.” The implication was, it didn’t need to be said, that in Paris the competitive pressures would have just been too intense. “Ducasse is an emperor, a CEO of cuisine—omnipresent, omnismart, all-seeing… Robuchon is a man of the kitchen, a man devoted to technique and style. They have no rivalry, merely a division of labors,” one of their supporters who had come from France announced. This view of the two of them is not entirely wrong—it has been a long time since either has been cooking in a kitchen every night—but it does not, perhaps, define the other problem, which is that in Paris they are “marques,” brands, before they are cooks, and the difficulty in bringing them together is less the difficulty of having two sopranos singing side by side than it is the difficulty of making a blend of Pepsi and Coke, or, if that is too plebeian, of Chanel No. 5 and Lanvin’s Arpège. You could do it, of course, but it would not exactly be an advance, or an adventure, just an oddity of the evening. Each has a style so distinct that they can only be left alone.
The next plate was by Guy Savoy, one of his classics: an artichoke soup with black truffle and a brioche. (I was so hungry that I ate the brioche first.) “This is a classic plate,” Benedict said seriously. “But it is not quite as perfect as it is at his place, where the quality of the bouillon is better. Still—it is beyond complaint.” And it was, too: pungent and rich by turns. However, we had had two plates, and one turned on white truffles and the next on black, and though doubtless Ferran Adrià and René Redzepi use truffles when they want to, in neither’s cooking is the truffle ever the point, the climax, the concluding phrase.
All the wines—save one good Oregon Pinot Noir—were French, and they kept the evening going. “Except explain to me,” Benedict said, “why in America I am always served red wines that are ten degrees too hot, and white wines that are ten degrees too cold?” It was true: red wines, even Burgundies, in America tend not to be served at cave temperatures but at room temperatures, and they get soupy and too obviously alcoholic tasting, instead of being neatly gripped by the proper bouquet of smoke and dried fruits, in the process. “It is part of the predicament—the meaning of room temperature has changed so much from the nineteenth century,” he commented. We agreed that we liked our champagne, at least nonvintage champagne, very cold indeed, and we began to talk about the best champagnes we had drunk.
Benedict furrowed his brow again. “Well, a great Salon. Or perhaps a Winston Churchill Pol Roger.” This was the great prime minister’s favorite, and, despite the recent vintage of its name, it really is great. (Though, to be sure, most of the grandes marques of champagne—Dom Pérignon and Grand Siècle and so on—despite the antiqued bottles they often come in, are actually quite new, in the wine scheme of things, usually dating from after the Second World War.)
“I recall,” he said, “I recall a plate that one of the Troisgros brothers prepared for me once to go along with a bottle of the Churchill cuvée. He took a plate of scallops, coquilles Saint-Jacques, and then minced them, and turned them into a gently adhering ball, with raw black truffles adhering to the outside!” His excitement was manifest and contagious; he turned toward me as he spoke. “Then he poured a boiling, a truly boiling, reduction of asparagus! My God! It was served with a white Hermitage. My God! Perhaps it was the single best thing I’ve ever eaten.”
He shook his head, and I sensed the mix of remembered delight, nostalgia, and continuing sense of impasse that such memories would set off in a great French eater in this day. It was great, it was simple—too simple, probably, to be kept on a three-star menu—and it… led nowhere. It was an announcement about ingredients, produce, more than it was a new idea about cooking. Delicious, but not driven. It wasn’t that it was too simple to be praised; it’s that it was too elemental to become essential. Boiling broth and raw scallops was, in the day of complex illusionistic desserts and freeze-dried foams, like a beautiful tune played on a recorder: it might be more beautiful than anything made in an Auto-Tune mix, but you couldn’t really call it modern.
There was a fancy, heavy grilled aubergine by Ducasse, which seemed to both of us typical of Ducasse’s cooking: complex in statement and lacking in point. The main course, prepared—“prepared,” of course, more by decree than work—by the New York interloper Jean-Georges Vongerichten, was a rack of lamb with a hyper-hot sweet-and-sour Chinese glaze. We agreed that it was good, but so essentially Asian that it didn’t point a new way as much as surrender the field.
“There are no new restaurateurs in Paris,” Benedict concluded gloomily. “We have star chefs in three-star temples, each sunning himself in the light of his own name—but it is a food spectacle, not a food culture.” Not a food scene, I thought, and I explained to him what I meant, a little laboriously. “No real magazines, no real food plates… no wonder the next generation looks outside France for the future.” He shrugged. “Did I tell you about the butter I had in Montenegro? Serbian butter!”
No American or British eater would eat with such philosophical aplomb, with such innocent, unwatchful enthusiasm or with such an unfussy, reliable, vigilant feeling for all the details, long ago acquired—the temperature of a wine, the taste of a butter, the placement of a plate. It was not the dreary fussing to get it “right” of the anxious new eater—that nose-sniffing, brow-creasing, glass-swirling show—but a wry French sense of order and irony. French civilization has a taste for excessive order, and then an ironic sense about its own taste. (Italians have the ironic sense and Germans the excessive order, but neither has both together.)
French food persisted as a civilization after it was finished as a form. I loved the civilization so much that I wou
ld take it, so to speak, on an empty plate. But I would rather have the form and the civilization to go with it, and don’t see why we can’t. But Benedict knew that Brillat-Savarin’s tradition was being endangered by its own heirs, and when he talked about the best butter, he talked about a table in Montenegro. Without his saying so, it was plain to me, by the lift of an eyebrow and a benevolent shrug of the shoulder, that he regarded the Fooding folks as a bit silly and self-promoting—but it was also plain (by the droop of the eye and a sigh of the mind) that he knew that what they said was mostly true.