Best Food Writing 2010 (13 page)

En route back to Paris, my wife and I stopped in the somniferous village of Saulieu, at the northern edge of Burgundy, to eat at La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant owned by Bernard Loiseau. He was the peripatetic clown prince of French cuisine, whose empire included the three-star mother ship, three bistros in Paris, a line of frozen dinners, and a listing on the Paris stock exchange. Loiseau’s brand-building reflected his desire to emulate the venerated chef Paul Bocuse, but it was later learned that it was also a matter of survival: Business in Saulieu had become a struggle, and Loiseau was desperate for other sources of revenue. The night we had dinner in Saulieu, the food was tired and so was he. It was another discouraging meal in what had become a thoroughly dispiriting trip. Maybe the muse really had moved on.

IN 2003, the
New York Times Magazine
published a cover story declaring that Spain had supplanted France as the culinary world’s lodestar. The article, written by Arthur Lubow, heralded the emergence of
la nueva cocina
, an experimental, provocative style of cooking that was reinventing Spanish cuisine and causing the entire food world to take note. El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià, the most acclaimed and controversial of Spain’s new-wave chefs, was the focus of the article and graced the magazine’s cover. Lubow contrasted Spain’s gastronomic vitality with the French food scene, which he described as ossified and rudderless. “French innovation,” he wrote, “has congealed into complacency . . . as chefs scan the globe for new ideas, France is no longer the place they look.” For a Francophile, the quote with which he concluded the article was deflating. The Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos told Lubow, “It’s a great shame what has happened in France, because we love the French people and we learned there. Twenty years ago, everybody went to France. Today they go there to learn what not to do.”

But by then France had become a bad example in all sorts of ways. Since the late 1970s, its economy had been stagnant, afflicted with anemic growth and chronically high unemployment. True, France had a generous welfare state, but that was no substitute for creating jobs and opportunity. By the mid-2000s, hundreds of thousands of French (among them many talented chefs) had moved abroad in search of better lives, unwilling to remain in a sclerotic, disillusioned country. France’s economic torpor was matched by its diminished political clout; although prescient in hindsight, its effort to prevent the Iraq war in 2003 struck even many French as a vainglorious blunder that served only to underscore the country’s weakness.

A sense of decay was now pervasive. For centuries, France had produced as much great writing, music, and art as any nation, but that was no longer true. French literature seemed moribund, ditto the once-mighty French film industry. Paris had been eclipsed as a center of the fine-art trade by London and New York. It was still a fashion capital, but British and American designers now seemed to generate the most buzz. In opera and theater, too, Paris had become a relative backwater. French intellectual life was suffering: The country’s vaunted university system had sunk into mediocrity. Even the Sorbonne was now second-rate—no match, certainly, for Harvard and Yale.

Nothing in the cultural sphere was spared—not even food. The cultural extended into the kitchens of France, and it wasn’t just haute cuisine that was in trouble. France had two hundred thousand cafés in 1960; by 2008, it was down to forty thousand, and hundreds, maybe thousands were being lost every year. Bistros and brasseries were also dying at an alarming clip. Prized cheeses were going extinct because there was no one with the knowledge or desire to continue making them; even Camembert, France’s most celebrated cheese, was now threatened. The country’s wine industry was in a cataclysmic state: Declining sales had left thousands of producers facing financial ruin. Destitute vintners were turning to violence to draw attention to their plight; others had committed suicide. Many blamed foreign competition for their woes, but there was a bigger problem closer to home: Per capita wine consumption in France had dropped by an astonishing 50 percent since the late 1960s and was continuing to tumble.

This wasn’t the only way in which the French seemed to be turning their backs on the country’s rich culinary heritage. Aspiring chefs were no longer required to know how to truss chickens, open oysters, or whip up a béarnaise sauce in order to earn the
Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle
; instead, they were being tested on their ability to use processed, powdered, frozen, and prepared foods. France still had its outdoor markets, but
hypermarchés
—sprawling supermarkets—accounted for 75 percent of all retail food sales. Most ominously, the bedrock of French cuisine—home cooking, or
la cuisine familiale
—was in trouble. The French were doing less cooking than ever at home and spending less time at the dinner table: The average meal in France now sped by in thirty-eight minutes, down from eighty-eight minutes a quarter-century earlier. One organization, at least, stood ready to help the French avoid the kitchen and scarf their food: McDonald’s. By 2007, the chain had more than a thousand restaurants in France and was the country’s largest private-sector employer. France, in turn, had become its second-most-profitable market in the world.

Food had always been a tool of French statecraft; now, though, it was a source of French humiliation. In July 2005, it was reported that French president Jacques Chirac, criticizing the British during a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, had harrumphed, “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.” In the not-so-distant past, Chirac, simply by virtue of being France’s president, would have been seen as eminently qualified to pass judgment on another country’s cuisine—and, of course, in disparaging British cooking, he merely would have been stating the obvious. Coming in the summer of 2005, Chirac’s comment revealed him to be a man divorced from reality. Was he not aware that London was now a great food city? Just four months earlier,
Gourmet
magazine had declared London to be “the best place to eat in the world right now” and devoted an entire issue to its gustatory pleasures. As the ridicule rained down on Chirac, his faux pas assumed metaphoric significance: Where once the mere mention of food by a French leader would have elicited thoughts of Gallic refinement and achievement, its invocation now served to underscore the depths of France’s decline.
They’ve even lost their edge in the kitchen
.

French cooking had certainly lost its power to seduce. Several days after Chirac’s gibe made headlines, members of the International Olympic Committee, despite having been wined and dined for months by French officials, selected London over Paris as host city for the 2012 Summer Games—fish and chips over foie gras.

There were other indignities, less noted but no less telling. In October 2006, New York’s French Culinary Institute marked the opening of its new International Culinary Center with a two-day extravaganza featuring panel discussions, cooking demonstrations, and gala meals. The FCI was one of America’s foremost cooking schools, but it was also a wellspring of French cultural influence—a culinary consulate of sorts. Its faculty included Jacques Pépin, André Soltner, and Alain Sailhac, three expatriated French chefs who had helped unleash America’s food revolution. To assure a suitably splashy debut for its new facilities, the FCI brought ten eminent foreign chefs to New York. Amazingly, though, the list was headed not by a Frenchman but by three Spaniards: Adrià, Juan Mari Arzak, and Martín Berasategui. Not only that: the other seven chefs were Spanish, too. The French Culinary Institute threw itself a party and didn’t invite a single chef from France.

All this was a reflection of what was happening in France. Twenty-five years earlier, it had been virtually impossible to eat poorly there; now, in some towns and villages, it was a struggle to find even a decent loaf of bread. The France memorialized by writers like M. F. K. Fisher, Joseph Wechsberg, Waverley Root, and A. J. Liebling; that inspired the careers of Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Elizabeth David; that promised gustatory delight along every boulevard and byway—that France, it seemed, was dying. Even those epiphanic vegetables were harder to come by. When Waters started regularly visiting France, she would smuggle tomato vine cuttings home to California; now, she smuggled vine cuttings to her friends in France.

It saddened me to see this way of eating, and being, disappearing. In France, I didn’t just learn how to dine; I learned how to live. It was where my wife and I had fallen in love, a bond formed over plates of choucroute, platters of oysters, and bowls of
fraises des bois
(Ladurée pastries, too). When we began traveling to France as a married couple, great meals there weren’t just occasions for pleasure ; they were a way of reaffirming our vows. The calendar indicates that our children couldn’t have been conceived in France, but from the moment they were able to eat solid foods they were immersed in our Francophilia. They became acquainted with crème caramel before they ever knew what a Pop-Tart was. But it now appeared that the France I grew up knowing would no longer be there for them.

A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PRESENT

By Alexander Lobrano From
Gourmet

Forget the Michelin-starred gastronomic temples with their cutting-edge cuisine, countends Lobrano, an American food and travel writer based in France. Paris is still studded with wonderful vintage restaurants—if you know where to look.

O
n a stifling August night in 1974, I was led down a steep flight of stairs into a vaulted basement in the Latin Quarter. In my madras jacket, I immediately felt like a dork. Everyone else in the dining room was wearing jeans, and my mortification was magnified by the fact that both of my brothers were also wearing madras, while my sister was sporting a daffodil-yellow frock. Plunged into the heart of bohemian Paris, a place I’d always dreamed of, I was suddenly desperate to be elsewhere and furious with the aunt who’d told us we couldn’t miss this restaurant, a real old-fashioned bistro that had been a memorable find on her most recent trip to Paris.

Still, I liked the slightly musty smell of the room, which reminded me of a country well, and the sour stink of the Gauloises that were sending up small curls of blue smoke from every table but ours. The bread was delicious, and it was a relief when the waiter understood Mom’s French, especially since a wonderful salad of sliced tomatoes in a silky mustard vinaigrette—so simple, but so good—arrived a few minutes later, along with a pocked white porcelain plate of sizzling snails for Dad, who insisted I try one (I gulped it down with a big sip of water). Then, after a stately pause, the graying waiter returned with a heavy copper casserole, which he set at my end of the table. Lifting the lid, he released a fleeting cloud of steam. The mingled aroma of wine, beef, and onions was so intoxicating it seemed an eternity before everyone had been served and I could dig in. I burned my tongue, never quite realizing that I was experiencing my first round of primal pleasure at table. Nothing had ever tasted as good to me as the shiny mahogany sauce, an amazing mixture of wine and butter, that glazed the tender chunks of beef on my plate. That
boeuf bourguignon
, served at a long-vanished restaurant on a street I barely remember how to find, left me with an irresistible craving for more—more Paris and, most of all, more French food. So much so that 21 years ago I moved to Paris.

Last fall, I decided that spending all my time chasing talented young chefs around the city as they moved from kitchen to kitchen (usually before opening places of their own) was only part of the culinary equation. I set out to rekindle an old flame, tracking down those restaurants that, while not especially chic anymore, deliver the kind of soul-satisfying
boeuf bourguignon
on which French cuisine was built. I started with
L’Ambassade d’Auvergne
, which continues to serve some of the best regional food in Paris. Anyone who loves real French cooking cannot afford to live in fear of fat. At this outpost near the Marais, creamy lentil salad comes with a healthy dollop of goose fat, while blanched cabbage leaves are layered with a fine filling of pork, salt pork, pork liver, Swiss chard, and fresh bread crumbs before being popped into a hot oven where all the flavors fuse into a superb terrine—a brilliant work of edible masonry. The “embassy” also understands basic tableside theater: After serving a generous length of grilled
auvergnat
sausage, the waiter returns with a copper saucepan and a wooden spoon to whip the
aligot
—that heavenly concoction of potatoes, cheese curds, and garlic—into a cascade of melting sheets, a coup de théâtre that dazzles the occasional tourist while reassuring the serious Parisians that French cuisine is still alive and well.

Running late for my next stop, I rush into
La Grille
, a peculiar dining room (it reminds me of Miss Havisham’s) festooned with lace, straw hats, and dusty dolls, as my friend waves away my apologies. “What a wonderful idea to eat here,” she says. “I’d forgotten about this place—so much character.” Geneviève and Yves Cullerre have run La Grille for nearly half a century, turning out almost anthropological classics like duck terrine with hazelnuts, mackerel poached in white wine, and his plat de résistance, a superb grilled turbot in black fishnet stockings (thanks to the scoring of the grill) with a sublime beurre blanc. I live in dread of the inevitable day when the Cullerres retire to some sunny place by the sea. Then again, I might just tag along.

I also hope that Michel Bosshard (“Boboss”) at
Auberge Le Quincy
won’t hang up his indigo cotton apron anytime soon. With his blue-framed glasses and teasing style, Boboss is as much a part of the ambience as the bric-a-brac that fills this cubbyhole of a restaurant. After greeting me with a big slice of
saucisson
to nibble on while reading the menu, he insists I have the
caillette
, an Ardèche specialty of small patties of grilled pork, pork liver, Swiss chard, and herbs that have been rubbed with fat from the caul (the lacy membrane enclosing an animal’s abdomen). I’d been dreaming all day about the foie gras, but he is firm. “If you hate the
caillette
,” he says, “I’ll bring you some foie gras.” But I don’t, not this
caillette
—whose bed of mesclun dressed with vinaigrette is the perfect “grassy” foil for the rich meat. I move on to rabbit cooked in shallots and white wine, ending the meal with one of the best chocolate mousses in Paris—all fine with Boboss.

For a meal that’s equally animated but more anonymous, I love
La Tour de Montlhéry
, one of the last of the night restaurants that fed the workers at Les Halles before the market decamped to the suburbs. Like the décor, the menu here is as authentic as a Doisneau photo—grilled marrowbones,
oeufs en gelée
, calf’s liver with bacon, and massive
côte de boeuf
, all accompanied by a cheap but harmless Beaujolais from the barrels inside the front door.

Atmosphere is also the lure at the magnificent
Le Train Bleu
, inside the Gare de Lyon rail station. The nice surprise here, though, is that aside from being the best place in town to savor the visual opulence of fin de siècle Paris, the ornate dining room also serves some surprisingly good French food. Ignore the contemporary dishes (like scallops sautéed in tamarind-spiked
jus de poulet
) and go straight for the escargots or oysters to start, followed by grilled sole, steak tartare, or the succulent leg of lamb, which is carved tableside on a silver-domed trolley and served with a delicious potato gratin made with Fourme d’Ambert, a wonderful blue cheese from Auvergne.

As an American, I remain neutral in the ancient quarrel between the French and the English but still find it curious that the French derisively call the Brits “rosbifs” (roast beefs) when they’re such avid
boeuf
lovers themselves. Just watch the way hungry Gauls go for the hearth-grilled
côte de boeuf
at
Robert et Louise
, a rustic hole-in-the-wall in the Marais with exposed half-timbers and a grumpy house poodle. Almost everything here—from the crusty sautéed potatoes that come with the storied rib steak to the great dishes like boudin noir and confit de canard—is cooked over an open fire.

Beef is also very much the focus at
Au Moulin à Vent
, in the Latin Quarter, where the walls are decorated with shiny copper saucepans and the menu is vast. Make it easy on yourself and go for either the Salers beef chateaubriand with homemade béarnaise sauce or the veal kidney flambéed in Armagnac. But be sure to start your meal with the frogs’ legs
à la provençale
, little bites of juicy meat on tiny bones in a wonderfully garlicky sauce—the best to be found anywhere. No place in Paris quite channels the jubilation that ended the privation of the World War II years like this standard-bearer from 1946.

I have a soft spot for
Chez Georges
, a bistro that succeeds brilliantly by flatly ignoring the passage of time. The last time I ate there, I had exactly the same meal I’d had 15 years earlier, when I met Julia Child, who also loved this place. “It’s not often I get real bistro cooking anymore,” she told me before ordering a frisée salad with lardons (“It never tastes as good at home as it does in France,” she insisted) and calf’s liver with bacon. I had the
blanquette de veau
. Just before dessert, a French designer stopped by to pay his respects, congratulating Madame Child for “civilizing” the American palate. After he’d gone, she asked, “Who was that? Oh dear, I hope this place doesn’t become fashionable.” Well, it has, as a quick look at the antiques dealers and fashion-house bigwigs filling the banquettes makes clear, but the kitchen turns out the same guilelessly retro cooking it always has.

For anyone who lives in Paris, few things are more treacherous than the nostalgia trap, that fretful and despairing mind-set that insists that everything tasted better in the past. Sometimes, though, restaurants change for the better, as I find with
Josephine Chez Dumonet
, a beautiful 1898-vintage place near the famous Poilâne bakery. Now under the management of Jean-Christian Dumonet, a second-generation owner, I find the food fresher and more vivid than it has been in a long time. The clientele has changed, too. Just as I finish a homemade
terrine de campagne
, a ripple rises up in the dining room. Joey Starr, France’s most notorious rapper, dressed in immaculate dove-gray sweats and a Yankees baseball cap, is shown to the table next to mine. After my meal—panfried foie gras; monkfish with white beans; and, finally, a plate of cheese from the nearby Quatrehomme
fromagerie
—Starr and I exchange sheepish grins as our Grand Marnier soufflés arrive at exactly the same time.

Later, walking home, I am elated that France’s bad-boy rapper also chose this place. I have no doubt that Paris’s old-fashioned restaurants will survive, and I also know that the
boeuf bourguignon
I ate in the Latin Quarter 35 years ago had been every bit as delicious as I’d remembered. Maybe even better.