The invention of the French restaurant, Eugenio believed, depended largely on what every assistant professor would now call an “essentialized” idea of France. One proof of this was that if the best French restaurants tended to be in Paris, the most “typical” ones tended to be in New York. Yet the more abstract and self-enclosed haute cuisine became, the more inclined its lovers were to pretend that it was a folk art, risen from the French earth unbidden. For Eugenio, the key date in this masquerade was 1855, when the wines of Medoc were classified into the famous five growths in which they remain today. “The form of metropolitan rationalization being extended to the provincial earth, in the guise of the reflection of an order locked in the earth itself,” he announced once, bringing his fist down on the tablecloth. He was a big man, who looked uncannily like John Madden, the football coach.
On that occasion we were eating lunch in one of the heavy, dark, smoky Lyons places that were popular in Paris then. (There is always one provincial region singled out for favor in Paris at any moment—privileged would have been Eugenio’s word. Then it was Burgundy; now it is the southwest. This fact was grist for his thesis that the countryside was made in the city.) The restaurant was, I think, someplace over in the Seventh; it may have been Pantagruel or La Bourgogne. At lunch, in those days, Eugenio would usually begin with twelve escargots in Chablis, then go on to something like a filet aux moelles—a filet with bone marrow and Madeira sauce—and end, whenever he could, with a mille-feuille.
The food in those places wasn’t so much “rich” as deep, dense. Each -plat arrived looking mellow and varnished, like an old violin. Each mouthful registered like a fat organ chord in a tall church, hitting you hard and then echoing around the room: There’s the bass note (the beef), there’s the middle note (the marrow), and there’s the treble (the Madeira in the sauce).
It couldn’t last. “We have landed in the moment when the metaphors begin to devour themselves, the moment of rhetorical self-annihilation,” Eugenio once said cheerfully. This meant that the food had become so rich as to be practically inedible. A recipe from the restaurant Lucas Carton that I found among a collection of menus of the time that Eugenio bequeathed to me suggests the problem. The recipe is for a timbale des homards. You take three lobsters, season them with salt and pepper and a little curry, saute them in a light mirepoix—a mixture of chopped onions and carrots—and then simmer them with cognac, port, double cream, and fish stock for twenty minutes. Then you take out the lobsters and, keeping them warm, reduce the cooking liquid and add two egg yolks and 150 grams of sweet butter. Metaphors like that can kill you.
Something had to give, and it did. The “nouvelle cuisine” that replaced the old style has by now been reduced to a set of cliches and become a licensed subject of satire: the tiny portion on the big oval plate; the raspberry-vinegar infusion; the kiwi. This makes it difficult to remember how fundamental a revolution it worked in the way people cooked. At the same moment in the early seventies, a handful of new chefs—Michel Guerard, Paul Bocuse, Alain Senderens—began to question the do-something-to-it-then-do-something-else-to-it basis of the classic cooking. They emphasized, instead, fresh ingredients, simple treatment, an openness to Oriental techniques and spices, and a general reformist air of lightness and airiness.
The new chefs had little places all around Paris, in the outlying arrondissements, where, before, no one would have traveled for a first-rate meal. Michel Guerard was at Le Pot-au-Feu, way out in Asnieres; Alain Dutournier, a little later, settled his first restaurant, Au Trou Gascon, in the extremely unfashionable Twelfth. In the sad, sedate Seventh Arrondissement, Alain Senderens opened Archestrate, first in a little space on the rue de 1’Exposition, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and then on the rue de Varenne.
From the beginning, the new cooking divided into two styles, into what Eugenio identified as “two rhetorics,” a rhetoric of terroirs and a rhetoric of epices—soil and spice. The rhetoric of the terroirs emphasized the allegiance of new cooking to French soil; the rhetoric of the epices emphasized its openness to the world beyond the hexagon. The soil boys wanted to return French cooking to its roots in the regions; the spice boys wanted to take it forward to the new regions of outre-mer. Even as the new cooking tried to look outward, it had to reassure its audience (and itself) that it was really looking inward.
On the surface the beautiful orderly pattern continues. Alain Senderens is now in Michel Comby’s place at Lucas Carton and has replaced the timbale des homards cooking with his own style.
Senderens’s rue de Varenne Archestrate is now occupied by Alain Passard, the Senderens of his generation, while the original Archestrate is occupied by a talented young chef and his wife, just starting out, who have named the restaurant after their little girl, La Maison de Cosima.
But twenty-five years later the great leap forward seems to have stalled. A large part of the crise is economic: A hundred-dollar lunch is a splurge; a four-hundred-dollar lunch a moral dubiety. Worse, because of the expense, the cooking at the top places in Paris is no longer a higher extension of a commonplace civilization. It is just three-star cooking, a thing unto itself, like grand opera in the age of the microphone. Like grand opera, it is something that will soon need a subsidy to survive; the kitchen at Arpege depends on regular infusions of range-struck Americans to fill the space left by the French kids who no longer want to work eighteen-hour days for very little money while they train.
And it is like grand opera in this also: You can get too much of it, easily. It is, truth be told, often a challenge to eat—a happy challenge, and sometimes a welcome one, but a challenge nonetheless. It is just too rich, and there is just too much. The new cooking in France has become a version of the old.
At Lucas Carton you begin with, say, a plate of vegetables so young they seem dewy, beautifully done, but so bathed in butter and transformed that they are no longer particularly vegetal, and then you move on to the new lobster dish that has taken the place of the old one. Where the old lobsters were done in a cowshedful of cream, the new lobsters are done, epice style, with Madagascar vanilla bean. This is delicious, with the natural sugar of the lobster revealing the vanilla as a spice—although, for an American, the custard-colored sauce, dotted with specks of black vanilla, disconcertingly calls to mind melted lunchroom ice cream. For dessert, you might have a roasted pineapple, which is done on the same principles on which Passard’s tomatoes are braised: It ends up encrusted in caramel. This is delicious too, though intensely sweet. Lunch at Lucas these days can fairly be called Napoleonic or Empire; the references to the revolutionary principles are there, but finally it’s in thrall to the same old aristocratic values.