In the main kitchen, a short flight up, Pascal Barbot, the sous-chef, is keeping things under control. The atmosphere there, with eleven serious short men in white uniforms going about intricate tasks in a cramped space, does not so much resemble the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie as it does the bridge of a nuclear submarine in an action movie after it has been taken over by the Euroterrorists led by Alan Rickman: that kind of intensity, scared purposefulness, quickness, and heavy, whispered French. The kitchen is white and silver, with a few well-scrubbed copper pots hanging high up—not like the lacquered copper you see in rusticated, beam-heavy restaurant interiors but dull and scrubbed and penny-colored. The richest colors in the kitchen are those of French produce, which is always several glazes darker than American: The birds (chickens, pigeons, quail) are yellow and veined with deep violet, instead of the American white and rose. The assistant chefs start at nine o’clock and will remain at their stages until one o’clock the next morning. When the service begins, around twelve-thirty, they will experience an almost unendurable din, which, after a few days of work, they learn to break down into three or four distinct sounds: the thwonk of metal in water hitting the sides of a sink as a pot is washed by one of the Malinese plongeurs; the higher, harsh clank of one clean saucepan being placed on another; the surprisingly tinny, machine-gun rat-a-tat of a wire whisk in a copper pot; and the crashing, the-tent-just-fell-down-on-your-head sound of hot soiled pans being thrown down onto tile to be washed again. (In a good kitchen the pans are constantly being recycled by the plongeurs.)
The kitchen crew includes three Americans. They have worked mostly at California and New York restaurants of the kind that one of them describes as “grill and garnish joints.” They are all converts to Passardism. There is never anything entirely new in cooking, but Passard’s technique is not like anybody else’s. Instead of browning something over high heat in a saucepan and then roasting it in an oven, in the old French manner, or grilling it quickly over charcoal, in the new American one, Passard cooks his birds and joints sur la plaque: right on the stove, over extremely low heat in big braising pans, sometimes slow-cooking a baby gigot or a milk-fed pig in a pot for four or five hours on a bed of sweet onions and butter. “He’s just sweating those babies,” one of the Americans marvels under his breath, looking at the joints on the stoves. “Makes them cook themselves in their own fat. It’s like he does everything but make them pluck their own feathers and jump into the pan. Fucking genius.”
Downstairs, another of the Americans is slicing butter and teasing Guilhem about his D.C. plans. “Look at this butter,” he says to himself. “That’s not fucking Land o’Lakes.” He turns to Guilhem. “Hey, forget about D.C.,” he says. “It’s cold. There are no women. Where you want to go is California. That’s the promised land. Man, that’s a place where you can cook and have a life.”
Guilhem looks genuinely startled and turns to speak. “You can?” he says, softly at first, and then louder, calling out to the back of the American cook as he races up the stairs with the butter pats for the dining room. “You can?”
Most people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again. My first night in Paris, twenty-five years ago, I ate dinner with my enormous family in a little corner brasserie somewhere down on the unfashionable fringes of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. We were on the cut-rate American academic version of the grand tour, and we had been in London for the previous two days, where we had eaten steamed hamburgers and fish-and-chips in which the batter seemed to be snubbing the fish inside it as if they had never been properly introduced. On that first night in Paris we arrived late on the train, checked into a cheap hotel, and went to eat (party of eight—no, party of nine, one of my sisters having brought along a boyfriend), without much hope, at the restaurant at the corner, called something like Le Bar-B-Que. The prix-fixe menu was fifteen francs, about three dollars then. I ordered a salad Nicoise, trout baked in foil, and a cassis sorbet. It was so much better than anything I had ever eaten that I nearly wept. (My mother, I am compelled at gunpoint to add, made food like that all the time too, but a mother’s cooking is a current of life, not an episode of taste.) My feelings at Le Bar-B-Que were a bit like those of Stendhal, I think it was, the first time he went to a brotheclass="underline" I knew that it could be done, but I didn’t know there was a place on any corner where you could walk in, pay three dollars, and get it.
That first meal in Paris was for a long time one of the few completely reliable pleasures for an American in Europe. “It was the green beans,” a hardened New Yorker recalled not long ago, remembering his first meal in Paris, back in the late forties. “The green beans were like nothing I had ever known,” he went on. He sat suddenly bolt upright, his eyes alight with memory.
Now, though, for the first time in several hundred years, a lot of people who live in France are worried about French cooking, and so are a lot of people who don’t. The French themselves are, or claim to be, worried mostly about the high end—the end that is crowded into the Passard kitchen—and the low end. The word crise in connection with cooking appeared in Le Monde about a year ago, with the news that a restaurant near Lyons, which had earned three Michelin stars, was about to close. Meanwhile, a number of worrying polls have suggested that the old pyramid of French food, in which the base of plain dishes shared by the population pointed upward to the higher reaches of the grande cuisine, is collapsing. Thirty-six percent of the French people polled in one survey thought that you make mayonnaise with whole eggs (you use only yolks), 17 percent thought that you put a travers de porc in a pot-au-feu (you use beef), and 7 percent believed that Lucas Carton, the Paris restaurant that for a century has been one of the holiest of holies of haute cuisine, is a name for badly cooked meat. More ominously, fully 71 percent of Frenchmen named the banal steak-frites as their favorite plat; only people past sixty preferred a blanquette de veau, or a gigot d’agneau, or even a pot-au-feu, all real French cooking. (The French solution to this has been, inevitably, to create a National Council of Culinary Arts, connected to the Ministry of Culture.)
To an outsider, the real crise lies in the middle. That Paris first-night experience seems harder to come by. It is the unforced superiority of the cooking in the ordinary corner bistro—the prix-frxe ordinaire—that seems to be passing. This is partly a tribute to the international power of French cooking and to the great catching up that has been going on in the rest of the world for the past quarter century. The new visitor, trying out the trout baked in foil on his first night in Paris, will probably be comparing it with the trout baked in foil back home at, oh, Le Lac de Feu, in Cleveland—or even back home at Chez Alfie, in Leeds, or Matilda Qui Danse, in Adelaide—and the trout back home may just be better: raised wild or caught on the line. Even the cassis sorbet may not be quite as good as the kind he makes at home with his Sorbet-o-matic.