French Cuisine Is Going Up in Flambe

Is French gastronomy dead? Certainly one of its most famous exponents is. It is nearly a year since Bernard Loiseau cooked his last lunch in Saulieu, about two hours’ drive south from Paris, and went home to have a word with his demons. A talented, driven, furious, needy, charming, affable individual, he rested only occasionally with a nap between lunch and dinner. But this time he didn’t sleep. Instead, Loiseau shot himself with his hunting rifle. He was 52.

Depressed by vertiginous debt, a slump in sales and mounting critical snittiness, Loiseau blew his brains out at the top of his game. He was an ingenious and high-minded innovator, among the first to purge fat from French kitchens with his rather batty cuisine a l’eau (water cooking). But it got him noticed. He smooched the system, glad-handed celebrities, hand-reared his staff, charmed his suppliers, promoted himself restlessly. His rise was a sort of mania.

Besides his flagship La Cote d’Or restaurant, he had three Paris bistros, a Japanese outpost in Kobe, publishing deals, newspaper columns, product endorsements and an altogether massive media presence. Loiseau had clawed, griddled and sauced his way to the very top of a very tasty pile of ultra-competitive egos. In short, he was France’s best-known man in whites, an apostle of French culture, a friend of the president.

But the system bit back. Just days before his suicide, the Gault-Millau restaurant guide demoted Cote d’Or to 17 out of 20, from his earlier rating of 19. The Paris newspaper Le Figaro started a rumor that the even more influential Michelin Guide Rouge would demote him too. His status, his stability, his pride depended on what these guides said. So he killed himself before a restaurant guide could.

The French invented the very concept of a restaurant, a word that originally referred not to a place but to “restorative” soups served in Paris in the late 18th century. But the current system owes its structure and standards to the rise of the motor car.

The Michelin tire company published its first Guide Rouge in 1900. Conceived as practical advice for chauffeurs (so-called because in those days heating up the carburetor was the necessary beginning of a car’s journey), it evolved into a hotel and restaurant guide whose ratings reflected the awesome divisions of French snobbisme. One star means “very good of its sort,” two stars mean “excellent cooking, merits a detour,” and three stars mean “the best cooking in the world, worth a journey.” And here too was a business mechanism: Every French chef wants to be worth a journey. But to get there, he has to conform.

Loiseau spent millions converting an old premises into a 32-room luxury hotel, in addition to his restaurant. The award of three Michelin stars in 1991 made him the youngest French chef to win the ultimate gastronomic accolade. But there was a sour element in this deal: Michelin, while offering celebrity, fame and riches, introduced a fierce but fragile personality to the competition and a workload that would undo him. A labor-intensive restaurant using expensive ingredients can never cover its costs -- expanding into more profitable activities is required. You win celebrity but are forced into prostitution.

Critics of Michelin complain that it is stultifying and conservative, that at the highest level it awards opulence in decoration as much as cooking. Michelin has been called the Vatican of gastronomy: absolutist, autocratic, infallible. And it is all intensely nationalistic: The French travel little, French chefs hardly at all. Loiseau had never even been to England, just a few hours away. In these cosmopolitan times, Michelin encourages a style of hermetic French cooking increasingly out of touch with international taste and fashion.

In any event, Loiseau’s fears were unfounded. The 2003 Michelin (which appeared just days after his suicide) confirmed the lofty status of Cote d’Or. Now the 2004 guide is imminent. No outsider knows yet what it will say, but one thing is sure: The terrible, unreasonable, dreadful, destructive power of gastronomy’s Vatican is still in force.

In fact, Loiseau’s death created a stir without cooking up much of any change in the sluggish, complacent French food establishment. The conflict between firm standards and changing tastes is not reconciled. The system is not in catastrophe, but it is in crisis, a reflection of a loss of French prestige on the world stage. Loiseau may have been too provincial to realize it, but for many serious eaters, the best restaurants in the world are now outside France: in London, Catalonia, New York, and Yountville, Calif. What French food needed was a shot in the arm. Instead, it got a bullet in the head. Shares in Groupe Loiseau fell 90.2% on the Paris Bourse the day after he died. A mighty souffle had collapsed.