Star Search : How far will a chef go for Michelin’s highest rating? : BURGUNDY STARS: A Year in the Life of a Great French Restaurant, <i> By William Echikson (Little, Brown: $22.95; 311 pp.)</i>

The most revolutionary change brought about by nouvelle cuisine, mega-chef Paul Bocuse has claimed, is that more chefs now own restaurants. Perhaps it’s only fitting then that one of the best recent books on life behind the scenes in a great kitchen would focus more on business than cuisine.

Written in breezy, news magazine style by Fortune correspondent William Echikson, “Burgundy Stars” focuses on the efforts of one Bernard Loiseau to earn his third Michelin star.

The story is a simple one: Bernard Loiseau is an immensely talented chef who, through a combination of happenstance and ambition, takes over La Co^te d’Or, a formerly grand restaurant in the Burgundian backwater of Saulieu. Built in the 1870s, La Co^te d’Or achieved three-star greatness in the 1930s when it was owned by the legendary Alexandre Dumaine, one of the leaders of the previous revolution in French cooking.

Loiseau took over the restaurant in 1975. Fifteen years later, through a combination of daring, inventive cooking, meticulous attention to detail and a natural talent for self-promotion, he has built the business back up to two stars.

Indeed, in Echikson’s telling, it takes a heady mixture of the three to succeed in the culinary world today. Loiseau’s personal peculiarity is a fixation on purity of taste. Like a character out of Dostoevsky, he is so driven by the notion that he eventually ends up with what he calls cuisine d’eau (“water cooking”)--dishes undisguised by butter, cream, stocks or spices. (It was this that spawned another memorable Bocuse quote: Staring down at the surging waters of the river Sao^ne, he is said to have commented, “Poor Loiseau, all that sauce going to waste.”)

Still there are about 90 two-star chefs in France. There are only 19 three-stars. It’s that drive for excellence--and the accompanying fever for recognition--that animates “Burgundy Stars.” Will Loiseau get his third star? All you have to do is look in any restaurant guidebook of the last three or four years to get the answer. For Echikson, the better question is, “How will he get it?” and, more interestingly, “Why does he want it?”

What will men do for three stars? (Of the 600 starred restaurants in France, fewer than a dozen are headed by women.) Almost anything, it turns out, including, as Loiseau does, renovating to the tune of almost $3 million--an investment on which he could break even only by earning a three-star ranking. The building itself begins to take on aspects of metaphor: Dumaine’s old dining room is retained as a kind of bar / museum swallowed up by new construction.

At least in the minds of the chefs, this kind of money chasing money is brought about by the demands of the Guide Michelin, the great dictator of French dining. Though Echikson is careful to point out that the third star is not handed out to every rural restaurant that hires a prestigious architect and builds a luxurious inn (in at least a couple of cases, with helicopter pads), there is ample evidence that those things don’t hurt.

Indeed, one of the strongest parts of “Burgundy Stars” is Echikson’s examination of the role Michelin has had in codifying (some would say ossifying) French cuisine. “Decor and family status matter,” he writes. “It is haughty. It is impersonal and boring. It is traditional and passe in its cooking preferences.”

Beyond these non-culinary comforts, a three-star ranking requires near perfection in almost every aspect of running the restaurant, from selecting the stinkiest epoisses cheese and the most exclusive family-made Burgundies to--in one hilarious episode--finding local suppliers of frog’s legs.

It is in these sections that Echikson really shines. For the pastoral French countryside of 20 or 30 years ago, where every farmer made his own cheese and every baker his own bread, has given way to a meaner modern European reality where agriculture seems to be rushing willy-nilly toward the American model of industrial mediocrity.

Cheese is now made in factories, and the average village baker uses prepared doughs full of the same kinds of bleaches and conditioners that make Wonder bread. Despite sometimes hilarious efforts to the contrary, in the end Loiseau ends up--as most French chefs have--using Greek frog’s legs.

“Burgundy Stars” is anything but a cookbook. Not only are there no recipes, but the representations of dishes are frequently dead wrong. (Try making oeufs a la niege a la Echikson--”When boiled in water and whisked with sugar, the egg whites become light and airy”--and you’ll end up with an industrial product. It’s the sugar and water that are boiled and whisked into the egg whites.) But while the food facts are frequently off, the more important details are right on.

And it’s those that raise the most interesting question of all: What kind of person is willing to pay the price--both fiscally and emotionally--to devote themselves as wholeheartedly to the quest for perfection that is required of a three-star chef? (Perfection being unattainable and the pleasures of the table notoriously transient.) In the end, as Loiseau proposes--quite seriously--that what is really needed is another category, a fourth star, we’re left alternately fascinated and horrified.