The Trouble With French Food

What Michel Richard wants most he can’t have: a small, quiet, intimate restaurant, say 40 seats, where he could cook his most creative, personal food. There would be at most two seatings, for dinner only, and he would have a staff large enough to give each table plenty of attention and skilled enough to charm even the grouchiest customer.

This, he knows, is a dream.

The problem: Michel Richard cooks in Los Angeles. And as much as hardcore foodies cry otherwise, few diners in this city are ready to pay for or even sit still long enough for a complicated French meal--at least on a regular basis.

Los Angeles may be the most interesting restaurant city in America, but when it comes to French restaurants of the three-star sort, well, there aren’t any. Only a handful of restaurants--among them, Michel Richard’s Citrus; Joachim Splichal’s Patina; Ken Frank’s La Toque; l’Orangerie, which recently hired Jean-Claude Parachini from the three-star l’Ambroisie in Paris; Patrick Healy’s Champagne, and Tulipe, run by chefs Roland Gibert and Maurice Peguet--serve the kind of innovative French food that might attract serious Michelin attention. And none charge Michelin three- star prices, though l’Orangerie comes closest. Even Roger Verge, with his three-star rating and superstar status, would have a hard time succeeding here on an L.A. budget.

In his restaurant in France, Verge can charge $200 per person for dinner; here, a $70 menu is considered outrageous--some even say, a ripoff. What other cities (especially New York) are starting to experience because of recession, Los Angeles has dealt with for years because of lifestyle. High prices mean serious, stuffy food, which can be a drag in a town that thrives on spontaneity.

But price is only part of the problem. Many people simply don’t want to eat French food anymore. Judging by the Los Angeles restaurants that have opened in recent years, the influence of French cuisine on California cooking is in decline, too. “Unfortunately,” says Michel Richard, “people are afraid to open French restaurants.”

Fifteen years ago, most good Los Angeles restaurants were judged by French standards. In older restaurants, if you couldn’t cook a good sole Marguery, you weren’t worth the Limoges you served it on. The newer restaurants of the California cuisine movement, which took hold in the late ‘70s, were rooted in French traditions, too. They were, in fact, directly influenced by French nouvelle cuisine.

Young American chefs regularly made pilgrimages to the top restaurants of France, where they acquired the sort of finishing-school training that allowed them to be taken seriously when they opened their own restaurants in Los Angeles. And they used French cooking techniques for even the most kiwi-infested nouvelle experiments.

But in the mid-’80s, the Italians took over L.A. It turns out that the food of Italy--lighter, simpler, cheaper and more fun to eat--suits our California lifestyle more than our perception of rich, stuffy French food, no matter how small the portions. In West Hollywood, there are nearly as many stylish Italian restaurants as there are hair salons.

L.A.’s French-trained chefs have had to adjust. Restaurants that once were popular for their French food have switched their allegiance to Italy; Pasadena’s Cafe Jacoulet, for instance, is now Tra Fiori. L’Ermitage recently lowered its prices and added pasta to Michel Blanchet’s French menu. French- trained American chef Patrick Clark, who last year was cooking at his own Metro in New York, is now at the very Italian Bice in Beverly Hills . . . and learning how to cook pasta.

Add Asian, Mexican, Indian and Middle Eastern influences to the mix of what is being called eclectic or World cuisine, and you have even fewer purely French restaurants.

“There’s a real big difference between customers here and customers in France,” says Ken Frank, chef/owner of La Toque in West Hollywood. “In France people will eat the same thing year after year, and as long as it’s perfect and wonderful they’re happy. But Los Angeles is a city hooked on the new and exciting. People here have something delicious once and they don’t care to have that same delicious thing again. There’s a certain amount of good in that--it’s nice to explore--but there are so many things that don’t need to be improved on, things that are just absolutely wonderful and shouldn’t be missed just because you’ve already had it once.”

“It’s basically Wolfgang (Puck) who started all the casual dining at Spago,” says Patina’s Joachim Splichal. “And out of that a lot of young restaurants developed the California type of feel. They pushed the traditional French people, the more stuffy, heavy restaurants into a corner and asked them for a change in a sense--a fresh approach.”

Actually, Ma Maison, where Wolfgang Puck cooked for Patrick Terrail, was the pioneer of this sort of casual California dining. But for all of Ma Maison’s patio furniture and come-as-you-are (as-long-as-you’re-famous) dress code, it was still, at heart, a traditional French restaurant. With the reputation he had built at Ma Maison, any other chef would have followed up with a serious French restaurant. With Spago, however, Puck changed the rules of eating out. Though there were still California-French entrees and appetizers, Puck made it possible to order a salad and a pizza, ogle a few of your favorite soap stars and get out of the place for less than $50, knowing you’d eaten an important chef’s food.

The days of quiet sophistication had effectively ended. But Joachim Splichal is slyly trying to bring them back. He failed once. When he opened Max au Triangle in Beverly Hills in the mid-’80s, he cooked what critics around the country called amazing, perfect food, ambitious and uncompromising stuff that took all his attention. He let other people run the business side of the place. Max lasted less than a year.

And Splichal learned his lesson. At Patina, one of the most successful restaurant openings of the past two years, Splichal and his wife Christine hover and worry over every detail of the place, down to the waiters’ Hugo Boss ties. These days he talks more about his wine profits and expansion plans than about new ways to cook a lobster. The restaurant is quiet, the service attentive. In the beginning, though, Splichal’s food was what few expected: uncomplicated. The first reviews were mixed.

“I think I let a lot of people down at first because I wasn’t as daring as I was before,” Splichal admits. “A lot of people expected that I would do a second Max. But our strategy was more European. I think building a restaurant is a growing process--a restaurant doesn’t become a three-star in France in one year. Now, our crew is stronger and over the year and a half we’ve been open we’ve given the diners more and more exciting things.”

The strategy seems to have paid off. Business increased, even as other restaurants experienced recession-related drops; the food has become more daring; the reviews have become adoring.

The other best California-French restaurant in town is Michel Richard’s Citrus, down the street a few blocks from Patina. Richard has what may be the perfect French restaurant for Southern California. With its stark clean lines and white surfaces, it looks like a California restaurant: There are no precious decorative details. And it’s a big place where the noise level, while not deafening, makes its presence known.

“Some French restaurants in town, I find they’re very snobby,” he says. “That’s because our tradition in France was to cook for the bourgeois. Food was very pretentious. Service was much more technical. A waiter was never deemed smart enough to talk to the bourgeois, that’s why he never did. In this country, though, there’s a democratization of food--that means service has to be friendly. We don’t snob the customer; we make him or her feel at ease. “Most of what we do at Citrus is very light,” Richard continues. “We don’t use a lot of cream. It’s silly to not eat French food because it’s too rich. Only in people’s minds does French food mean rich food. I don’t believe that Italian food is lighter than French. One thing, though, French food does not forgive mediocrity.”

When French food is bad, it can be very, very bad.

In “The Italians,” journalist Luigi Barzini wrote “Italian cuisine merely presents Nature at its best. French cuisine is a challenge to Nature, it subverts Nature, it creates a new Nature of its own. It is an art.” And art is hard to franchise.

Ask Michel Richard. Even he banishes his most creative food from his regular Citrus menu.

“People are afraid of it,” he says. “They don’t want it. So we have a system: If you want special food, you call Michel. It’s the kind of food I’d want to do at my dream restaurant all the time--but with the understanding that the customer has to enjoy it too. I don’t want to be the kind of creator that nobody understands.”