90 Michelin Stars--Count ‘Em

“There are more than 50 chefs here--90 Michelin stars and 41 Mobil stars in one room!” the suited VIP tells his young date. “Can you believe it?”

We are used to celebrity sightings in Southern California: Dustin Hoffman getting his car towed outside the Nuart theater, Beck looking for tofu at Wild Oats. We don’t give them a second look.

But to walk into the sprawling, noisy kitchen below the venerable Biltmore Hotel Friday night and spot just about every important two- and three-star chef from France plus some of the most celebrated chefs across the U.S. and around the world is something else. The purpose of the gathering is a $350-per-person “Relais Gourmands” gala dinner and auction to benefit PBS station KCET and to honor winemaker Robert Mondavi. The host is the international hotel and restaurant group Relais & Chateaux, of which each guest chef is a member. For the chefs, it’s a chance to meet or get reacquainted, to share good jokes and exchange new ideas.

There’s Roger Verge, the red, white and blue of the French flag trimming the collar of his crisp chef’s whites, chatting with Napa Valley’s Thomas Keller about rabbit. Yes, Americans do eat rabbit now, Keller tells the distinguished white-haired chef. Verge is pleased. “I remember the first time I came to the U.S. The only salad green we could find was iceberg lettuce,” Verge says. “It’s good progress.”

Nearby, Michel Guerard, leader of France’s nouvelle cuisine revolution and instigator of our own California and New American cuisines, assembles his elegant shellfish gelee at a folding table that would fit into any elementary school auditorium. “The 20-year evolution in America is unbelievable,” he says. “In New York 20 years ago, I couldn’t find shallots and tarragon.”

Across the warehouse-sized space, Alain Passard and Marc Meneau, two of France’s most creative chefs, are deep in discussion with Santa Monica’s Alain Giraud about the effects of the Michelin three-star designation. “Do three stars limit a chef’s creativity?” a female foodie asks. Passard shrugs an emphatic Gallic no. “I feel as if I have more freedom than ever,” he says. “It was a revelation.”

“It’s about the evolution of the customer,” Meneau says. “Each chef can now create his own style of luxury.”

“In my cooking,” says two-star chef Jacques Pourcel, “everything’s not automatically truffles, foie gras, lobster. It might be tiny calamari. For me, the most important thing is to buy the freshest I can.”

“Ingredients first,” Guerard says later. “You can’t betray the ingredients. It’s pointless to kill a duck or a fish for nothing. You have to respect them.”

“We’re focused on flavor here too,” Keller says when told of the discussion. “I think it’s a more mature thinking about cooking. Still, I don’t think we’ll ever lose our sense of drama in America, our sense of humor. The cuisine is not as embedded in us as it is in France.”

Consider Anne Pic, one of the few women chefs in attendance and the fourth generation to maintain the reputation of her family’s Restaurant Pic. “I used to see my father cooking,” she says as she forms what will be a walnut crust on a plump squab breast. “It’s deep within me. Still, I had to make my own style. I’m younger, so I like modern things.”

A waiter whizzes by with a loading cart stacked with trays of chocolate-dipped strawberries as if his cargo were UPS packages, barely missing a camera crew focused on New York’s Daniel Boulud. “Every chef has a state-of-the-art kitchen at home, and here we’re roughing it a bit,” he says of the tiny spaces each team of three chefs is assigned. “We’re having fun. It’s like going to camp. And it’s really manageable. Each of us is doing just 50 plates of one course; some of us are used to doing 800 to 1,000 plates a night.”

The chefs have been divided into teams of three; each team is assigned an average of four tables--40 to 50 people. The question buzzing among the guests: Who pulled what strings to get seated at the table with the menu from Alain Ducasse, Charlie Trotter and Japan’s acclaimed Kiyomi Mikuni? The chefs will serve about 700 dinners.

“In essence,” explains the Inn at Little Washington’s Patrick O’Connell, “we have our own restaurant with our own waiters.”

Chicago’s Charlie Trotter, between poses for various photographers, says he’s thrilled to be in such distinguished company. “It’s things like this that make all the years of hard work pay off.”

“Many feel that this event is acknowledging that America is an equal to France now in cuisine,” O’Connell says.

“We’re all different and we all like each other,” Michel Roux says. “Like artists, we appreciate each other, and that’s what’s so beautiful about this event.”

A loudspeaker announcement barely quiets the kitchen: “Attention please, main course chefs. Please make room at the stoves for chefs preparing their first courses. Thank you.”

It’s getting closer to serving time, and what was a relatively relaxed if crowded scene becomes more intense. Michel Rostang, the French chef who organized the chefs into teams, can barely spare a minute from the stove to talk. “One American, one French and one European or international chef went on each team,” Rostang quickly says before turning to his saute pan.

Upstairs in the Biltmore Bowl, the hotel’s grand ballroom, the auction action is hot too. At Table 1, cheers break out when the well-dressed man from Phoenix thrusts up his bidding card at the last possible moment and finds himself the dazed and thrilled winner of a 12-day trip to southwest France, first-class air fare, luxury lodging and three-star meals included. A relative bargain at $17,000, he says. It’s for a good cause, he adds. His wife beside him squeezes his hand.

With the bidding over and dinner about to begin, all of the chefs, a blinding sight in starched whites, parade through the ballroom to the stage. Robert Mondavi graciously accepts his award from Relais & Chateaux and his gifts from the chefs, including a tablecloth for his wife, Margrit Biever, with the handprints and signatures of every chef on the stage.

“We are very sorry,” Rostang says as the speeches end and the guests wriggle in their seats with anticipation, “but we have to leave now. We have work to do back in the kitchen.”