A Canoga Park Kid Wows ‘em in France

A famous old hotel and restaurant in northwestern Burgundy, built around a 1707-vintage stagecoach stop. A three-star rating from the Guide Michelin, and many years of glory in the firmament of French gastronomy. Then a proprietor growing old and losing interest. A daughter taking over, making mistakes, firing chefs. A long, slow, sad slide into mediocrity, with two stars lost along the way. And then, suddenly, a rebirth--new owners (a small group of respected local food and wine people) and a new chef, young and innovative. Great hopes for the future. A dedication to regaining those three stars. . . .

That’s already a pretty good story as it is. But it gets even better: That innovative young chef, hired in the hopes that he can help the place regain its old quality and reputation, turns out to be not at all some Senderens- or Guerard-trained Gallic whiz kid, but rather 25-year-old Bob Waggoner of Canoga Park.

The hotel/restaurant in question is the Hostellerie de la Poste in Avallon, 145 miles southeast of Paris, not far from the Chablis region. And the road Waggoner took to get there had as many stops as any 18th-Century stagecoach route.

His first real awareness of food, Waggoner said when I visited the Hostellerie recently, came at Chatsworth High School, where he took an international food class--a combination food-history/cooking-lesson/restaurant-field-trip affair. Waggoner admits that he might have been drawn to the class initially at least in part because it included 42 girls and only two or three boys--but he was soon hooked on cooking and, at his teacher’s suggestion, he applied for a part-time job at the fanciest restaurant he knew, the Summer House in Woodland Hills.

At the time, he recalls, “I didn’t know the difference between rare, medium, and well.” But the chef there, a 30-year-old Italian named Eligio Miglia, took him in. “He taught me all the basics,” says Waggoner. “How to use knives, and so on. More important, though, he was really into his work, and he communicated his enthusiasm about food to me.” A year later, still in the 12th grade, Waggoner was running the evening service at the Summer House, preparing up to 400 dinners a night.

When Miglia went on to Trumps in West Hollywood, Waggoner followed. “(Trumps executive chef) Michael Roberts was terrific,” Waggoner says. “He really watched me and taught me a lot.” He stayed at Trumps for three years and then, with the help of Roberts and Burgundy-based American wine shipper Becky Wasserman, found a temporary room-and-board-only job at the then-new but rapidly up-and-coming Le Vieux Moulin in Bouilland, near Beaune.

The Vieux Moulin’s owner/chef, Jean-Pierre Silva, became “my Eligio in France,” says Waggoner. “He did everything for me, not just showing me things in the kitchen, but taking me out to taste wine, taking me hunting, inviting me along when he went to great restaurants like Alain Chapel--things that even most Frenchmen don’t get to do very often.” Silva also eventually encouraged him to leave Le Vieux Moulin--to volunteer for work in other French kitchens, so that he wouldn’t become just an imitator of Silva’s own style. Thus, Waggoner put in three months at the Rotisserie de la Paix in Beaune and then, with several trips back to California (and to Trumps--”sort of my home away from home”) in between, did stints at the three-star Lameloise in Chagny, Charles Barrier in Tours, Pierre Gagnaire in St-Etienne, and then two more three-stars--Boyer in Reims and Marc Meneau’s L’Esperance.

“At that point,” he recalls, “Jean-Pierre said, ‘Get out of here. Don’t work for free anymore. You’ve learned enough to get a real cooking job.’ ”

It might not have been exactly what Silva had in mind but, back in the United States again, Waggoner met a French chef named Jean-Paul Coupal, who had been working in Canada but who had just taken over a $3-million private club, called Members, in Caracas, Venezuela--and Coupal hired him as head chef. “The place had this great new-wave California look to it,” Waggoner says, “with an 18-speaker stereo system and a changing exhibition of contemporary Venezuelan art. Unfortunately, other than tropical fruit and some fish, there were virtually no raw materials available--so I made lots of different sauces to cover up the same few items day after day, and lots of wild fruit sorbets.”

There were perks, though: At one point, when the club’s owners wanted to do a week of Indian cooking, they sent Waggoner to New Delhi and arranged for him to bring back two accomplished Indian chefs and a couple of tandoor ovens.

Then Silva sent good news: One Mme. P. Gachon-Millot, who had owned a restaurant of some note in Beaune called La Dame Tartine, had purchased the Hostellerie de la Poste with three partners--Avallon’s best-known pastry chef, M. Labarre, and two important wine shippers, Alain Debouchaud (grandson of Louis Jadot) and Bernard Ropolt (director of Jaffelin). The latter two were old hunting buddies of Silva’s and Waggoner’s, and Silva had managed to convince them that hiring Waggoner as their new head chef would be a good idea. He spent a month at Silva’s, planning menus and reacquainting himself with local sources of supply and, in March of this year, became almost certainly the only American chef in charge of a major French restaurant kitchen in France today.

“I’m in complete charge here,” Waggoner stresses. “The owners don’t review my menus or question my purchases or anything. They want me to buy the best products available and cook the best food I can.” And that food is very good indeed. This is the meal Waggoner and sous-chef Gerard Charbonier (an old friend and co-worker from Pierre Gagnaire) prepared for me one autumn day in the Hostellerie’s comfortable, old-fashioned-looking dining room:

A tiny portion of crisply sauteed rouget or red mullet on a bed of miniature purslane, in a dressing of sesame oil and orange juice with slivered almonds; a small piece of a firm-fleshed ocean fish called thiof , simply grilled and then topped with a filet of grilled fresh sardine and cloaked in a light ginger sauce; a little copper cassolette of delicate amourette --which is, believe it or not, the spinal column of veal (and also, believe it or not, very good)--with red lentils and mustard seed; batter-fried salt-water crayfish tails, as light as fine tempura, on a bed of shredded green beans and thinly-sliced fried onion rings, dressed with a mild balsamic vinegar sauce; a lightly carmelized crepinette of salmon and foie gras, melting into one another in wild mushroom sauce; a demitasse cup of richly flavored vegetable bouillon with a super-fine dice of turnips, carrots, and celery (in pieces really no bigger than grains of coarse salt); a perfect rare pigeon breast (Burgundian pigeon is probably the tastiest in the world) in a sauce of wine lees and fresh thyme, accompanied by a little corn fritter topped with a fried quail egg; a wonderful plate of ratatouille around a mound of thread-thin fried potatoes, topped with slices of delicious rare lamb loin and a slice of roasted goat cheese; a simple, refreshing little nougatine glace , and a warm pear tart with honey-ginger sauce.

The meal was uniformly good, with no jarring notes, no needless complications. (Despite how some of the dishes might sound, none was overwrought or needlessly busy; everything was there for a purpose.) It was also very French in style, despite such “California” touches as balsamic vinegar, fried onion rings, and that orange juice and sesame oil dressing. (Waggoner also borrows one dish directly from Trumps--the latter’s deep-fried grapefruit-flavored pasta, which here is served with sauteed langoustines.) Waggoner, in fact, doesn’t advertise the fact that he is American. He has learned good French over the years, and when he tours the dining room after a meal, doesn’t speak in English, even to English-speakers, unless spoken to in English. (He enjoys the surprise of the revelation if and when it finally comes, I think.) There is one sure giveaway on the menu as to Waggoner’s ethnic origins, though: As a dessert, he offers gateaux au chocolat chauds a la facon de Madame Waggoner-- which is nothing more than his version of his mother’s Canoga Park chocolate brownies.

The Hostellerie de la Poste closes during the winter months and will reopen March 15.

Hostellerie de la Poste, 13, place Vauban, 89200 Avallon. Tel. 86.34.06.12. Dinner for two (food only), $60 (prix-fixe menu) to $150 (a la carte).