The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [171]
By 1995, Yves’s fellow sous-chefs at the Crillon had decided to follow him into the bistrot moderne business, as had other young cooks around town, many of them also trained at the fanciest restaurants. An endless economic recession in France had both lessened their chances for advancement in the haute cuisine and lowered the price of leasing a vacant restaurant. And Yves had shown his friends what they could accomplish on their own. For a while, Yves’s 160-franc menu set a maximum for the chefs who followed him; now some have crept toward 180. When you order the budget menu in an expensive restaurant, you feel like a second-class citizen; at a famous old bistro I was once told that I would be served supermarket ice cream while my wife and everybody else in the room would be treated to the handmade version. At La Régalade, there is no way for a tycoon to spend more than the student at the next table.
Meanwhile the grand cuisine of France was descending into a state of near collapse. Where two decades ago fifty or a hundred great establishments were thriving, it was now hard to list more than a dozen. The culinary world bubbled with rumors that several great chefs recently awarded their third Michelin stars—the highest accolade in France—were in a financial pickle. Each order of Bernard Loiseau’s $60.00 frogs’ legs with garlic puree and parsley juice earns him only $1.20—after he has covered the salaries of fifty employees and paid off his investment in silverware impressive enough for the Michelin inspectors. Loiseau’s profit comes from his boutique and the adjoining inn. The economics differ only slightly from those of haute couture, a dazzling show of artistry meant to lure the public to a designer’s more modest and lucrative productions.
Three years ago, I flew from Orly to Lyons in a driving rain, waited two hours for the airline to find my luggage, rented a car, returned fifteen minutes later to get windshield wipers that worked, and drove an hour and a half to Saint-Étienne, a tedious and dying provincial city where Pierre Gagnaire had his restaurant. Gagnaire had just received his third Michelin star, once a guarantee of fame and at least a little fortune. My memory of every morsel is indelible—I thought at the time that Gagnaire had lifted mankind to a new level of eating.
Then last summer a friend visiting Saint-Étienne reported that on a Saturday night at the end of July, a moment when the demand for tables should have been overwhelming, Gagnaire was only two-thirds full. That very night you could not have forced yourself into La Régalade with an assault-type weapon. I knew something was hideously wrong—wrong with Saint-Étienne, with France, and with the cosmos. I learned that Gagnaire’s revenues had dropped by more than half since my first visit and that he had let half his employees go. And by spring, after a strike of government workers paralyzed the nation’s transportation system and made travel to Saint-Étienne even more difficult, Pierre Gagnaire’s restaurant closed.
This was an inconceivable disaster, no less grotesque than if the Louvre itself had crumbled into the Seine. The French newspapers could write about nothing else. Gagnaire blamed Michelin, whose standards had forced him to borrow millions to buy and restore a spectacular Art Deco house in Saint-Étienne. Gagnaire’s wife, Chantal, blamed nearly everybody else, including the French people. If