Hungry at the Top

SAULIEU, France — “We are selling dreams,” French chef Bernard Loiseau says. “We are merchants of happiness.”

For the three-star Michelin chef, one of the most celebrated of his generation, it’s a risky, if rewarding, trade.

Balding and with the husky build of a rugby player from his native Auvergne region in central France, the 46-year-old Loiseau is taking time to chat with a visitor before he leaves for Paris later in the day. He plans to borrow 10 million francs, or about $1.75 million U.S., he says, to build 10 more rooms this year in his roadside hotel-restaurant, La Co^te d’Or. The previous day, the chef spent the morning poring over plans with his architect, accountant and banker, not working with his saucepans or 25-member kitchen staff.

Loiseau is already squeezed by so much debt that he has been paying monthly installments of 320,000 francs, or about $56,000, to his bankers. “The average customer’s [dinner] check runs about 1,000 francs [$175],” Loiseau says. “It’s not enough. What is that when compared to the number of people in the kitchen, the cost of the foodstuffs?”

For many of France’s most celebrated and honored chefs, those who have garnered the highest honors in the Guide Michelin, this is truly a challenging time. The free-spending era the French call “the Thirty Glorious Years” has come to a screeching halt, and more customers than ever are scrutinizing the prices before ordering.

Conventional wisdom had it that epicurean French and foreign foodies would pay any price for black truffle dishes or a bottle of vintage Bordeaux. Some still will and do. But the value-added tax on restaurant food adds a hefty 20.6% to an already stiff tab. And with an unemployment rate of about 13%, even people with good jobs are apprehensive about the future.

Business lunches are down, and the carriage trade has been stagnant in many locales. On top of everything else, the French, of all people, are watching their weight these days.

To reach Michelin triple-stardom, the greatest badge of popular recognition a French chef can aspire to, some chefs, Loiseau among them, took on plenty of debt in the 1980s. The dynamic, perfectionist Loiseau (“I’m a madman,” he admits happily) is making ends meet so well at his inn in rural Burgundy that, he says with great satisfaction, he will make a profit and have to pay taxes this year. But for others, changing market conditions have had the same calamitous effect as a cold snap on the dinosaurs.

Last spring, Pierre Gagnaire, one of today’s most innovative chefs, had to close his Art Deco restaurant in the grimy industrial city of St-Etienne, population 200,000, after becoming the first Michelin three-star chef in history to declare bankruptcy. He has since left St-Etienne, 30 miles southwest of Lyon, and opened a new restaurant in Paris near the Champs-Elysees--and a vastly larger customer base.

In October, Marc Veyrat, a self-taught chef famed for his use of mountain herbs that he gathers himself, shut his Auburge de L’Eridan on the edge of Lake Annecy near the Swiss border. He reopened only after the banks that had lent him $10 million agreed to cut the size of the monthly installments and stretch out payments.

Veyrat, the king of the debtors among French chefs, had gone in for such lavishness in his successful trek toward Michelin’s supreme rating that he even gold-plated the faucets in his auberge’s rest rooms.

(For the record, Michelin maintains that it is interested only in excellence, not in swankiness. “We have never told anyone that they have to make colossal investments,” guide director Bernard Naegellen has said. “We simply say they must cook well.”)

In a headline-making event that highlighted some of the other costs of super-chefdom in a food-crazy but highly demanding country, Joel Robuchon, considered by some to be the finest French chef of the century, retired last summer from his jewel-box restaurant in the wealthy 16th arrondissement of Paris, citing the unrelenting stress of his job and his need of a break.

“I noticed that many chefs--and this is curious--have died in their 50s of heart attacks,” Robuchon, who turns 52 next month, explained at the time.

So should the maxim for a French restaurateur be, “If you can’t stand the heat, don’t try to win a constellation of Michelin stars for your kitchen”? Not really, it seems. One two-star restaurant in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte did surrender its rating to go back to being a simple rotisserie. But if the costs of stardom have been high for some, the benefits can be heavenly.

“When it comes down to it, a third star [in the Guide Michelin] is the only fail-safe method for doubling business and joining the gods of haute cuisine,” says food critic Alexandre Lazareff, director of the Council on Culinary Arts, a government agency designed to safeguard French gastronomy. “Once admitted into this sacred coterie, business contracts and lucrative invitations to give demonstrations abroad will follow.”

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Those that don’t make it--the “quality restaurants” whose prices average about 600 francs (about $105)--are the ones that are getting pummeled by the recession, according to Lazareff.

Veyrat has estimated that the Michelin three-star rating made his annual turnover balloon $2.3 million to $2.65 million. Quite logically, the loss of the guide’s blessing can spell disaster. In 1966, Alain Zick committed suicide after Michelin stripped his Paris restaurant of its twin stars. The owners of one of the French capital’s most famous eating places, Maxim’s, flew into such a pique after the restaurant lost one of its three stars in the late ‘70s that they asked to be stricken from the guide altogether.

Like an Oscar for an actor or director, Michelin’s top honor can mark the high point of a French chef’s career. It is a “permanent ray of sunshine that doesn’t go out,” says Alain Passard, a 40-year-old Breton whose Arpege restaurant on Paris’ Right Bank was elevated to three-star standing last year. He now feels “liberated,” Passard says, to experiment even more, most recently with a dish of hot oysters and mushrooms in a veloute sauce made of buckwheat, butter, a bit of smoked eel and shellfish broth.

To keep stress levels under control and to refresh himself after workdays that can last until 2 a.m., Passard plays the soprano saxophone and musical saw, paints seascapes, goes to art exhibits and skydives.

“For a cook to keep his nose in the oven isn’t good, because you get saturated,” Passard says.

Saulieu, where Loiseau has officiated in La Co^te d’Or’s kitchens for the last 22 years, is 45 miles from the nearest town of any size and is bypassed by the main Paris-Lyon highway. Come by TGV rapid train from Paris and you’ll have to travel by bus from the station at Montbard about 25 miles to the north.

This market town of 3,000 people is one good place to work out the cost-benefit ratio of striving to own and run one of France’s greatest restaurants. In his successful attempt to hoist himself into the three-star class, Loiseau borrowed 30 million francs, or $5.25 million, to build new hotel rooms and construct a new kitchen and dining room. The old restaurant in the former 18th century post house, once the site of one of Franc’s greatest three-star restaurants run by the legendary Chef Alexandre Dumaine, had been facing the highway, and trucks and cars rumbled by the windows, endangering diners’ digestion.

In March 1991, when Loiseau won his third star, he says, the guide’s director called with the happy news but said the star had been decided on before he embarked on the latest renovations. True or not? Only Michelin knows. But such is the pull of a third star that La Co^te D’Or’s annual turnover instantly zoomed up by 60%, despite its remote location. “And we were in the middle of the Gulf War!” Loiseau exclaims.

Business has progressed constantly since. He grossed $4.8 million last year. From as far away as the United States and Japan, gourmets come to sample Loiseau’s reinventions of Burgundian and other French fare.

Loiseau’s “refined rustic” type of cuisine ranges from a five-course vegetarian prix-fixe at 450 francs ($79), wine not included, to a 1,200-franc ($210) spread featuring scallops with asparagus and truffle-laced dishes.

Loiseau is celebrated in France and abroad as the creator of la cuisine a l’eau, or the use of water and the natural juices of foods to make sauces instead of butter and cream, in the interests of a lighter meal. One dish highlighting that approach is an entree of frog’s legs that the diner dips in accompanying purees of garlic and parsley, at 295 francs ($52).

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Financially, though, it’s still tough sledding. Loiseau, who has owned the inn since 1982, says it will be at the dawn of the 21st century that he starts making serious money. A downward drift in interest rates has allowed him to refinance his debts at 6%, compared to 10%.

La Co^te d’Or averages 65 customers a day on weekdays and double that on weekends. There is virtually no lunch traffic. “Fortunately, we have a hotel here,” Loiseau says. “If we didn’t, I would have had to close.” That, he believes, may have been the reason for Gagnaire’s failure in Saint-Etienne: There weren’t enough luxury accommodations nearby to tempt gourmets to make the trip.

For many French chefs, the Michelin stars have had an impact way beyond putting people into dining room chairs. They have helped consolidate Loiseau’s status as a cultural superstar in a nation where food is a passion and a historical obsession.

In 1995, Loiseau was decorated with the Legion of Honor by the late President Francois Mitterrand, an appreciative diner whose legislative district in the Nievre department was nearby. From New York to Tokyo, the photogenic, media-savvy chef has been on front pages and magazine covers.

It was the Michelin rating that opened the door to such opportunities, as well as to the sort of endorsement contracts about which only athletes or entertainers can dream in most countries.

“We are like top fashion models,” Loiseau says of his three-star confreres. “We are known everywhere.”

For Loiseau, such marketable fame has meant his own line of canned soups and an endorsement contract for Perrier-Jouet champagne. Gagnaire, meanwhile, endorsed a brand of canned cat food while fellow chef Alain Ducasse is plugging a line of cast-iron cookware, an ashtray for cigar smokers and a collection of French country furniture.

Next to La Co^te d’Or, Loiseau has opened a boutique where visitors can purchase stainless steel pasta strainers, pails of Dijon mustard, cooking aprons embroidered with his name and other products he recommends. It is in such “ready-to-wear” fields, Loiseau says, as opposed to the “haute couture” of his gastronomic restaurant, that he now makes his money.

It must be said that longer established restaurateurs, or their colleagues in Paris, the French business and tourist hub, don’t face the same fiscal pressures as some of the younger chefs.

The Troisgros family, famed for its sauteed salmon fillet in sorrel cream sauce, is into its third generation of owning and running a restaurant in Roanne, a mill town on the upper Loire. Paul Bocuse, the dean of French chefs, holds the long-term record among Michelin three-star restaurateurs: He’s had the rating uninterrupted since 1965. At 71, he is happily ensconced in his restaurant at Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or outside Lyon.

But most members of the country’s gastronomic elite appear to agree that the fat years of customers with money to burn are gone for good. “For me, it’s a time to fine-tune the perfection we have tried to establish here,” Georges Blanc, a three-star chef who runs a family restaurant in Vonnas near Lyon, told the International Herald Tribune a year and a half ago. “Things will never be as they were in the 1980s. That we know. We are only happy now that we can maintain what we have and continue to thrive.”

In his new Paris restaurant, which Michelin blessed with a two-star grade this week, the now-wiser Gagnaire is offering entrees, desserts and wine by the glass for 50 francs (about $8.85) each at the bar. He learned a few lessons from Saint-Etienne, he says. The first: “A restaurant is a business before anything else.”

New economic realities have also compelled some established three-star locales, like Alain Senderens’ Lucas Carton on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris, to open bistros for the lunchtime traffic. Blanc, whose family has run an auberge in Vonnas since the 1870s, has founded his own winery and built two hotels, a bakery and a sausage factory.

But the pressures are not only economic. Gagnaire has spoken of the extraordinary demands, as well as opportunities, that the highest mark in French gastronomy brings to the bearer.

“When I got my third star, suddenly there was a crazy number of people around me,” he told Paris Match magazine. “People wanted to meet me, interview me, taste my cooking and also, no doubt, take part in my success.”

Typically, the three-star cook is a driven perfectionist, aware that he is only as good as his last meal. “I have three stars, but I work as though there were a fourth,” Antoine Westerman, who first donned a toque in the kitchens of the Strasbourg train station and now owns and runs one of the Alsatian capital’s most famed restaurants, Buerehiesel, said this week.

So can Michelin stardom, the incarnation of culinary excellence, become a trap as well? Yes, Loiseau says.

For customers, he says, “It’s like a play. . . . When they come to Saulieu, they expect to see Bernard Loiseau. If he is not here, they’ll say the soup isn’t as good. They’ll say it would have been better if he had been here.”

Only 40% of a typical visitor’s satisfaction depends on what’s on the plate, Loiseau says. The rest comes from atmospherics, the warmth of the welcome, the country-style architecture--”sizzle” rather than “steak.”

Given customer expectations, Loiseau feels he has no choice but to spend as much time as possible in Saulieu and keeps his restaurant open 365 days a year. “I’m fed up with people wanting to see me. Fed up!” he grouses good-naturedly.

But he is ever aware that his standing and livelihood have come, to a large degree, to depend on how many of its little typographical marks the Michelin company decides each year to print alongside his name.

“It’s a permanent challenge,” says Loiseau. “Because every year I can lose the third star.”