The Terrible Threes

In 1978 I had been living in Paris for almost a year, subsisting on omelets and salads, charcuterie and fabulous obscure cheeses, supplemented by occasional visits to inexpensive bistros or wine bars, when I was treated to my first three-star meal.

Actually, it was my first experience of a restaurant that had been awarded even one of the coveted Michelin stars. It’s not that I wasn’t passionately interested in food: I spent all my time reading about food, browsing in wine shops and outdoor markets, hanging out with butchers, bakers and cooks. I knew some wonderful home cooks in Paris, and they had given me a generous and thorough grounding in the rigors of French cooking.

But the French people I knew didn’t really think about restaurants in terms of Michelin stars. Although they may have been to one of the fabled grand restaurants at some point in their lives, speaking of the experience ever after in hushed, reverent tones, those stars didn’t have anything to do with the way they ate.

I was thrilled, however, when I was invited to join a group of friends for a meal at Troisgros, the celebrated three-star restaurant in Burgundy. There’s nothing quite like starting at the top.

I arrived in Roanne on the train from Paris just at dusk on that gray fall day. Like most three-star restaurants in France, Troisgros had been started a generation earlier as a much humbler place than it became; it was, in fact, just across from the train station. I strolled across the square and met up with my friends at the restaurant’s bar.

After a glass of vintage Champagne, my friends and I were ushered past the old-fashioned dining room and into the kitchen for a little tour. They’d just remodeled, and I remember Jean showing off the gleaming new stove tops, the refrigerated drawers beneath the fish station, the efficient pastry kitchen. And there, in one corner of the kitchen, was our table, the perfect vantage point from which to watch the brigade of young cooks in tall white hats go about their business quietly and intently.

We talked and drank gorgeous old Meursaults and Volnays. And all the while, Jean Troisgros cooked for us. He plied us with thrush mousse scented with juniper berries and salmon in sorrel sauce; he served us his famous civet de lievre (hare stewed in red wine) from a copper braising pan. The bread was crackling and fragrant. The butter tasted as if it had been churned that morning.

It was a sublimely sensual meal, worthy of every star. It was akin to the best regional cooking I had experienced up to that time, raised to the nth degree. And I am certain that it made even more of an impression because it was experienced in such a wonderfully intimate and congenial setting.

What I didn’t know then is how hard it is to find that synergy of food, wine, setting and soul in the three-star restaurant experience.

Today, 20 years later, when trying out every three-star restaurant has become a rite of passage for enthusiastic gourmands (Americans, in particular), it seems inconceivable that French people haven’t made the same obsessive grand tour of the great restaurants of France. It’s inconceivable that all who have the means and the chance wouldn’t be engaged in racking up notches on their foodie belts. The conventional foodie wisdom: If you haven’t the cooking of Robuchon or Girardet (both now retired), tried out Ducasse’s or Gagnaire’s new place or passed judgment on the latest wunderkind, then you can’t really be passionate about food.

Not true.

The risks and the pressures involved in reaching and maintaining three-star status have turned chefs into hard-nosed businessmen trying desperately to keep their over-burdened finances afloat.

Most of the starred establishments have lost that sense of family and culture that made going to restaurants in France such an appealing experience--for me, at least. You can sense the tension in the staff. And see the panic in the eyes of the chef when confronted with a half-empty dining room, torn between bowing and scraping to customers, surveying the army of chefs, cooks and apprentices needed to staff the kitchen and hurrying back to his office to go over the figures once again.

The overwrought decoration, the number of employees, the gold and silver flatware, the elaborate bathrooms and the even more luxe hotel, where clients expect to be pampered to the maximum, all feed into some antiquated idea of what constitutes luxury. After all, restaurants in France date only from just after the French revolution, when the nobility’s chefs were suddenly out of jobs and had to fend for themselves in a suddenly uncertain world. And what they had to offer, the middle classes wanted: the chance to indulge in the same haute cuisine that once graced royal tables. In other words, to eat like a king. Lobster. Foie gras. Caviar. Black truffles. The endlessly repeated litany of the three-star restaurant.

Most three-star restaurants are stupefyingly ugly, gussied up in the worst taste imaginable. But Gerard Boyer’s Les Crayeres in Reims has a distinct advantage: a lovely 18th century building set in a park on the outskirts of Reims. It also happens to have the most relaxed atmosphere and service of any of the restaurants at that level, while still being very correct.

Lunch at Boyer, which is close enough to Paris that you can take the train for the afternoon, can be a glorious experience. You look out on the green park as young waiters cross the room with trays of Champagne flutes held aloft and Boyer sends out his entrancing and beautiful dishes.

L’Esperance, surrounded by emerald hills and patches of forest and set at the foot of the diminutive Burgundian hill town of Vezelay, is worth the hair-raising drive I once made from Italy to get there in time to lunch on Marc Meneau’s earthy and sensual cooking. I remember, vividly, every morsel I have eaten there: an entire lobe of foie gras gently poached in a covered casserole on a bed of fat white beans, served in thick slices, a trembling pale pink at its center; filet of veal in a burnt caramel sauce, served with a subtly sweet endive tartlet; a fragile tart of tender fresh white cheese. There’s a directness and simplicity to his cooking that could come only from a self-taught chef.

But the dining room, with its mirrors and awful paintings and horrid lighting, absolutely gives me the willies. Not to mention the tacky display cases of gaudy gold jewelry and the gift shop filled with the requisite high-priced tchotchkes and souvenirs, which are the first things you see when you walk through the door.

Although I admire the cooking of France’s top chefs, I can’t say I really enjoy eating in most three-star restaurants. Hideous decor aside, their atmosphere is stifling. When you’re paying $600 for a meal for two and find yourself talking in hushed tones, there’s something wrong with the experience. I also resent being nickeled and dimed to death--being charged $15 for an aperitif of rather ordinary white wine (from the chef’s own vineyard, madame) or more than $5 for an after-dinner coffee. Or feeling bullied by the sommelier.

I much prefer the places with fewer stars, where the atmosphere is more relaxed and familiale, where you can have an experience that goes beyond the dining room.

I’m thinking of a restaurant like Auberge des Cimes in a remote part of the the Monts de Vivarais, where Regis Marcon is the chef and his wife is the sommelier.

After breakfast, you can set off down the path behind the restaurant and explore the countryside. Or hang around and watch Marcon’s two little boys help him unload what he’s brought back from the market an hour away. An admirer of two-star chef Michel Bras, Marcon collects herbs from the mountains and has a passion for wild mushrooms and game. In winter, when St-Bonnet is too cold, he closes down for a few months. He travels. He visits winemakers. He hunkers down in his kitchen cooking for the sheer pleasure of it, teaches cooking classes and holds seminars with artists and thinkers on a variety of topics.

A couple of years ago he added a small hotel with a dozen rooms with views--comfortable, but certainly not grande luxe. The fact that Marcon garnered a second star this year from Michelin can only be a heartening sign that the quality and originality of the food are more important than the pamper quotient.

Or La Belle Gasconne in Poudenas, deep in the heart of Armagnac country, where Marie Claude Gracia, one of the handful of women chefs to have earned a Michelin star (she lost it last year), has created a romantic auberge. (She was born next door, and her mother and grandmother had a restaurant here.)

In two whitewashed rooms simply decorated with country furniture and bouquets of wildflowers, she offers terrine de foie gras marbled rose-pink and gold, served in egg-shaped scoops directly from the terrine it was baked in. She also makes rustic civets and stews and comforting desserts (such as a delicate vanilla custard decorated with a single leaf of vervain), regional cooking at its best. After dinner, a young waiter will lead you to a table set up on the grassy riverbank, bringing coffee and rare old Armagnac.

I haven’t been back to Le Cerf in Marlenheim for years, but I remember visits there with affection. This small Alsatian hostelry, with its flowered courtyard and father-and-son chefs, feels cozy and familiale. Robert Husser and his son, Michel, still have time to take guests down to the river bank and show off their herb garden or let them peek into the kitchen from the flower-filled cobblestone courtyard.

Le Cerf had one star for 50 years before earning a second. “Finally!” says Michel with a laugh. When I was there, the grandfather who earned that first star was busy polishing doorknobs.

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I’ve also had some of the most pleasant meals in memory sitting outside on the terrace (with no view whatsoever) at La Beaugraviere, practically a truck stop on the route d’Orange, outside Avignon. After hours on the hot autoroute, it’s heaven to stop and sip an opulent white Cha^teauneuf-du-Pape and eat one of the simple dishes of the region: omelet with black truffles, lamb roasted in its juices with thyme or the old Provencal recipe for pieds et paquets (lamb’s feet cooked with packets of tripe rolled up with a stuffing of parsley, garlic and salt pork).

The chef, Guy Jullien, has a passion for wine and a phenomenal cellar of Rho^ne wines. If fate hadn’t made him a cook, he’d clearly have been a winemaker. Jullien has put what money he has into his wine cellar (well, a few years ago he double-glazed the windows on the handful of basic rooms upstairs to soften the rumble of the big trucks roaring down the highway just outside), not into decor. Not that he’s about to get a star anyway.

The parade of astonishingly delicious seafood dishes at the stylish one-star Paul Minchelli in Paris a couple of years ago still lingers in memory: gorgeous little orange shrimp in salt and pepper, grilled St. Pierre fileted at the table, tiny rougets (red mullets) perfumed with saffron, cod steamed with seaweed. We ate, too, these strange creatures called patates de mer--or potatoes of the sea. I felt as if I’d just taken a master class in seafood.

Still, I haven’t entirely given up on three-star restaurants. It’s like following haute couture. I love to see what these super-palates are doing. And yes, I can put everything that irritates me aside in order to experience the hautest of the haute.

The last time I was in Paris, I had a last glorious meal at the great three-star Robuchon.

(Joel Robuchon has turned in his apron now, and three-star chef Alain Ducasse from Monte Carlo took over the posh restaurant in a bid to become the first chef ever to win a second three stars. But though this year’s Michelin awarded him three stars for his Paris restaurant, he was stripped of one of his Monaco stars. The message? Not so fast, Ducasse.)

And I also ate at Arpege, which I’ve followed for years, just before Alain Passard won his third star last year. Like Robuchon, Marc Meneau and Pierre Gagnaire, he is one of the true originals, a genius in the kitchen.

But I have to note that the service at Arpege that night was certainly nothing close to three-star level; one waiter urgently whispered instructions to a junior waiter, leading him step by step through the dissection of our lobster. I guess the Michelin inspectors aren’t always as demanding as they’re said to be.

I’d give Passard three stars myself for his charred foie gras sitting in a pool of sweet caramelized onions ringed with a faint line of lemon, which gives the dish a sweet-sour effect. Passard works with a palette of pure, focused tastes as vivid as the colors in a fauve painting.

Getting that third star can be a blessing--or a curse. Not everyone is cut out to be a restaurateur or (as is required more and more these days to lure guests to remote locations) a hotelier at this level.

Consider the Grimm’s fairy tale in which a fisherman catches a flounder and lets it go. The grateful fish (really an enchanted prince) grants him a wish. His wife wishes for a hut to replace their pigsty. A castle in place of their hut. Mais non, she wants to be king so they can live in an even larger castle. Then emperor, then pope, then God . . . until the flounder loses patience. And takes it all away.

Gagnaire is a case in point. In the kitchen, he’s white-hot, generating more ideas in an afternoon than any other chef in France could come up with in a year. He’s an incredible technician to boot. But probably not a savvy businessman. Reaching for his third star, he went deeply into debt restoring a grandiose Art Deco structure to create his “palace” and attract more customers to the industrial town of St-Etienne. He went bankrupt, moved to Paris, opened a cozy 35-seat restaurant in the Hotel Balzac and this week, regained two stars. If he’s smart, he won’t shoot for that third star quite so quickly.

I was knocked out by his food a decade ago in St-Etienne, so of course, I’m going to try it when I go to Paris in April. I’ll also probably try Ducasse’s new place, just out of curiosity, but after that, I’m going to mix it up. To eat in nothing but three-star restaurants--or even starred restaurants--in France is like deciding you’re going to drink only wines that have scored 95 points or more. Not only are you missing out on the best simple country wines but it can get monotonous.

The great thing is to move from the modest bistro where the waiter sets the terrine on the table and lets you help yourself to the satiny glory of Marc Meneau’s foie gras mingling its gold-pink juices into the dish of plain white beans.

It’s good to be hungry.

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Eating by the Stars

* * * Arpege, 84 rue Varenne, Paris (7th arrondissement); telephone: (1)45.51.47.33; fax: (1)44.18.98.39.

* * Auberge des Cimes, St.-Bonnet-Le-Froid (44 miles northwest of Valence); telephone: (4)71.59.93.72; fax: (4)71.59.93.40.

* * * Boyer “Les Crayeres,” 64 Blvd. Vasnier, Reims; telephone: (3)26.82.80.80; fax: (3)26.82.65.52.

* Hotel de France, Place de la Liberation, Auch; telephone: (5)62.61.71.71; fax: (5)62.61.71.81.

La Beaugraviere, route 7, Mondragon (about 30 miles north of Avignon); telephone: (4)90.40.82.54.

Le Moulin de la Belle Gasconne, Poudenas (about 30 miles southwest of Agen); telephone: (5)53.65.71.58; fax: (5)53.65.87.39.

* * Le Cerf, Marlenheim (13 miles south of Strasbourg); telephone: (3)88.87.73.73; fax: (3)88.87.68.08.

* * * L’Esperance, Vezelay; telephone: (3)86.33.39.10; fax: (3)86.33.26.15.

* * Pierre Gagnaire, 6 rue Balzac, Paris (8th arrondissement); telephone: (1)44.35.18.25.

* Paul Minchelli, 54 Blvd. La Tour Maubourg, Paris (7th arrondissement); telephone: (1)47.05.89.86; fax: (1)45.56.03.84.

* * * Troisgros, Place de la Gare, Roanne; telephone: (4)77.71.66.97; fax: (4)77.70.39.77.