STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

i dont know if you're into food writing or cooking but i can't wait to read "the perfectionist: life and death in haute cuisine." i have been waiting for months for it to be translated into english. it's basically a bio on this guy who owned and ran a three michelin star restaurant in france and how he killed himself after the lost one star. this article from the new yorker better describes the true topic of the book, the grueling discipline it takes to get and maintain three michelan stars and raises the question of the interesting difference between making food and criticing food.

i am psyched to read it. but that's probably just me.




DINING OUT
by ADAM GOPNIK
The food critic at table.
Issue of 2005-04-04
Posted 2005-03-28

There are two schools of good writing about food: the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic. The mock epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the small ambitions of the greedy eater as though they were big and noble, spoofing the idea of the heroic while raising the minor subject to at least temporary greatness. The mystical microcosmic, of which Elizabeth David and M. F. K. Fisher are the masters, is essentially poetic, and turns every remembered recipe into a meditation on hunger and the transience of its fulfillment.

The two styles can’t be mixed. If we are reading, say, about Liebling’s quest for the secret of how rascasse are used in bouillabaisse, we don’t want to be stopped to consider the melancholy lives of the remote fishermen who seek them out. And if we are reading David’s or Fisher’s sad thoughts on the love that got away on the plate that time forgot, we would hate to find, on the next page, the writer handing out peppy stars in modish kitchens. (The same thing is true of sportswriting: we go to it for either W. C. Heinz’s tears or Jim Murray’s jokes, Gary Smith’s epics or Roy Blount, Jr.,’s yarns, which suggests that, with the minor arts, our approach is classical and depends on unity of tone.)

So when we read, in “The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine” (Gotham; $27.50), Rudolph Chelminski’s forthcoming biography of the doomed three-star chef Bernard Loiseau, the story of Loiseau’s restless search for a way to transform cauliflower from a discouraging vegetable into a radiant side dish by caramelizing it, we smile at first, and are expected to smile. It is, after all, only caramelized cauliflower. As the search picks up momentum and intensity, however, and we learn how Loiseau began to blanch and strain and purée, we start to succumb to the grandeur of the quest. Why should the search for caramelized cauliflower be any less significant than Ad Reinhardt’s search for the pure-black painting, or John Cage’s for pure silence? But then when we read that Loiseau committed suicide after the failure of his caramelized cauliflower to impress his critics, we rebel again, in shock. It was, after all, only caramelized cauliflower.

Loiseau seems likely to become a mordant icon of the eternal war between critics and cooks, and Chelminski does a good job with the subject. He has, to be sure, a strange prose style, which seems to have been translated from the French—though in fact he writes in English—as evidenced in the peculiar French journalist’s taste for “racy” bits of American slang placed in unidiomatic sequence: “Bernard was a wise guy, or at least appeared to be a wise guy, and that was enough for Jean. Bernard was a talker, too. After the timid caution of the first few weeks of work had worn off, Massillon’s champion of gab returned in force, and soon he was entertaining the other apprentis with as much chatter and wisecracking as he could possibly get away with.” But Chelminski knows the French food world intimately and has a moving story to tell, with universal implications: the downfall of the artist through perfectionism and paranoia.

Loiseau suffered throughout his life from a too-late-identified bipolar disorder, a syndrome that ought to be known by its old French name, folie circulaire. It’s a syndrome that can strike truck drivers and Zen monks as easily as cooks, so any general principles should be taken with caution. Still, Loiseau, if not typical, is in many ways exemplary of the chef’s dilemma.

He was a member of perhaps the last generation of artists who were true to an ideal and a practice that had begun in the nineteenth century. He learned to cook as an intern in the kitchen of the Frères Troisgros, near Lyon, where he mastered the terrifying discipline by chopping onions and filleting fish for twelve hours a day; he even learned to kill frogs by slapping their heads casually against the kitchen table. The Troisgros kitchen opened every door in those days, and in the early seventies Loiseau, with almost no other apprenticeship, made a name for himself, doing simple country cooking at a glorified bistro just outside Paris. He was financed by a shrewd promoter named Claude Verger, who saw that elemental food could be popular and still presented to the critics as something new: a variant of the new cooking, or nouvelle cuisine.

That it was simple and not genuinely new does not mean that it was without value; no one had been cooking that way with passion or conviction for a while. Calling plain cooking high cooking was in itself a radical act. Loiseau became a star, and, with money advanced by Verger, he bought La Côte d’Or, a famous old restaurant in the Burgundy town of Saulieu. In the dense, deep-eating days of gratins and casseroles, the place had held three stars in the Michelin Red Guide; by sheer effort, Loiseau built it back up, and the reader cheers with him when he finally gets his three stars, in 1991.

The trouble was that there was no reason to go to Saulieu except to eat, and this made Loiseau particularly, even uniquely, vulnerable to the Guide and its system of stars and inspectors. The Guide no longer had an easy or organic relation to French cooking. The Red Guide grew up with the automobile, and with the idea of the long journey away from Paris that required several stops for lunches and dinners. By the nineteen-eighties, though, the new autoroutes and the high-speed trains (and the planes, racing over) had reduced the need for road stops. The Michelin inspectors, gloomy middle-aged men eating alone, used to be indistinguishable from the other gloomy middle-aged men eating alone, and their stars were a kind of summary of the opinions of all those tired travelling professionals. Now all that’s left of this once self-evident system is the inspectors, dining alone and passing out stars. People do not drive by the restaurant and stop to eat; they drive to the restaurant and stop for a three-star meal. To be a destination is a difficult trade: it is nice to run a place where the food, in the famous phrase, is worth a journey, hard to keep it going when the only reason anyone makes the journey is to eat the food.

Loiseau was terrified of losing his stars, particularly when François Simon, of Le Figaro, hinted that La Côte d’Or was on its way down. The chef may have been paranoid in this, but he was hardly alone. All artists in all fields despise all critics all the time. (They may like the individual critic, but they despise his conviction that he has a right to criticize.) Still, there are levels of loathing, as there are circles in Hell. Writers at least recognize that the critic is a writer, and shares a table, if not an agent. Magicians, on the extreme edge, despair of those outside their circle ever knowing the difference between a trick that anyone can buy for six dollars and sleight of hand that only two people have learned in six years. Chefs are close to magicians in their certainty that their critics cannot tell the difference between something that takes time, thought, and talent and something that dazzles only by surprise, perversity, and snob appeal. But, even more than magicians, chefs depend on the good opinion of those whose opinions they cannot think are worth having—and the nature of Loiseau’s cooking left him open to the exhaustion of critics.

Chelminski points out that food critics are even more inclined than other kinds to fatigue. Most food critics are sick of eating rich, expensive food and will do almost anything to have something new; a perfectly prepared veal chop (one of Loiseau’s elemental specialties) first gets a smile, and then a yawn. But Loiseau, his biographer admits, was at an edge of simplicity so extreme that it hinted at innocence. (Chelminski suggests that Loiseau’s training was short on fundamentals; he was notorious among his staff for being unable to make even basic sauces.) Famous for the purity of his approach, Loiseau deglazed his pans with water instead of wine or even stock. It was admirably minimal, but it also tended to be oddly ascetic and depressing; the elemental and the elegant are sisters, but not twins. Loiseau had no hesitation about publishing a recipe for John Dory served with a purée made of boiled celery. (It seems so simple that one is convinced that it must be mysteriously great; I have made it, and it tastes like fish with boiled celery purée.)

Loiseau, it now seems, thrived briefly at a short, fundamentalist moment in the history of cooking, just between the Protestant Reformation of nouvelle cuisine and the rococo Counter-Reformation of today’s cuisine tendance (trendy cooking, though speculative cooking might be a better name), the kind of ostrich-tongue-with-rutabaga-foam-and-Jurassic-salt-on-a-stick cooking that unites the Spaniard Ferran Adrià, of El Bulli; the Californian Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry; and our own Wylie Dufresne, of wd-50.

Yet Loiseau is hard not to love. He was, like everyone, a casualty of history and his own demons; but he was also, as Chelminski insists, a perfectionist, for whom the disapproval of a single diner was almost impossible to accept, which is what makes his story heartbreaking and instantly understandable. “Why didn’t he like it?” he would moan inconsolably when one of a hundred diners sent a dish back unfinished. The chef’s life is a long struggle with the reality that tastes differ, and tastes change.

The Loiseau example suggests that the divide between the mock-epic and the meditative schools expresses an even simpler divide between the way critics and cooks experience food. The diner experiences it as a form of comedy and the cook experiences it as a form of work. (The cook’s recompense for not having fun—for those hours and hours of life spent chopping onions—is a sense of soul and of significance.) One goes for pleasure and believes in his right to mock and have fun; the other cooks in desperate exhaustion and believes in his right to a livelihood.

Ruth Reichl’s “Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise” (Penguin Press; $24.95), a memoir of her time in the hottest of hot critical seats in America, that of restaurant critic of the Times, tells the story from the other side of the mirror. Her book would make a terrific romantic comedy, if Lubitsch or Billy Wilder were alive or if Nora Ephron wanted to make it. Reichl, in order to conceal her identity from the restaurant people who were desperate for her good opinion, dined in disguise throughout her five years at the Times, not merely wearing wigs and dark glasses but actually creating and inhabiting whole alternative characters: a chorine called Chloe, a sad “Glass Menagerie”-type lady called Molly, and even a version of her mother, homey and sensible. She came, a Method critic, to live these characters: they wrote the reviews. In the movie, of course, the hard-eating, Falstaffian R. W. Apple, Jr., character would hate her in her fussy office identity as a “nouvelle” eater, and fall for her in one of her disguises in the restaurant. (There is even a wisecracking, snooty but winning friend—obviously the Stockard Channing role—who has to be converted to the merits of sushi.)

What makes Reichl’s book genuinely touching is that—plangent complication—she sees herself as a cook, and seems to identify secretly with her targets. Compelled by admirable maternal instincts, within a two-career marriage, to take her son from one overpriced, overwrought restaurant meal to another, she convincingly suggests that the restaurant critic’s life is an ordeal; the recipes she inserts in the text (leg of lamb, matzo brei) seem to be intended as oases of sense in the midst of all this madness, and as signs of her real identity, as a cook.

At the same time, the book is wonderfully revealing about the double consciousness of the critic. Although pain-giving herself (and admiring of “delightful” pans), she is sensitive about criticism of her own criticism, and spends time collating phone messages for and against, walking the streets with anxiety when her first review comes out as she waits to hear what the bosses think. (Critics never allow these two parts of their brain to communicate, or stop to think that the pain you take is, as the Beatles might say, equal to the pain you make.) The back-and-forth between the soulful stuff that she writes about her family and the sometimes surprisingly catty stuff that she writes about her working life (she is not particularly kind about her editors at the Times) is conscious, certainly, but also deeply felt. You think, She really didn’t like the gig.

There is a moment when, after she reviews Le Cirque, she walks back to her childhood neighborhood, reconnecting with what actually made food into a significant thing for her. She clearly feels that there is something ignoble, or at least remote from her original infatuation, in sending expense-account diners off to this or that French temple. This is the lesson critics learn the hard way, and we are as relieved as she is when she is at last set free and gets a job as editor of the magazine Gourmet. She is tired, we know, of eating in disguise, when what she really wants is to be cooking for her family out in the open.

Reichl, after all her experience, compares the restaurant world of New York to a theatre, with the diners and critics merely players in it. But everything can be described in terms of performance and theatricality; all the world’s a stage. Surely it is identity politics, rather than just playacting, that is at stake in costly dining out. All those people waiting in line at Le Cirque are not waiting for their selves to be lost or exchanged; they are waiting to be affirmed, even enhanced, and they do it even at the risk of humiliation. Not Enter and become another! but You belong here is what we want the maître d’ to tell us. (And the illusion that we want the chef to give us is not I work for you but I feed you from love.) This affirmation, it seems, is easier to get than we might think. Steven A. Shaw is identified by his publishers as a former attorney who began a second career as a food and restaurant critic in 1997. He has an upcoming book called “Turning the Tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out” (HarperCollins; $24.95), and it attempts to show you how not to be intimidated or overwhelmed when dining out: he wants you to be an expert at eating in restaurants, even as the author is an expert on eating in restaurants. This seems a queer expertise, a self-evident specialization, but he does give much sound, neighborly advice on getting reservations (just humble yourself to the person who answers the phone, and someday the table, like your prince, will come) and some sane if fairly obvious counsel: “Understanding one’s own preferences and needs, as well as those of your dining companions, is foundational to making good restaurant choices.”

He is briskly tough, though, and quite courageous in his assaults on the Times’ reviewing. The whole elaborate, boastful rigmarole of disinterestedness and disguise celebrated in Reichl’s book he sees not as honest but as ignorant and provincial, common sense clouded over by fear—as though restaurants were there to scam you. He insists that the food in the kitchen is, of necessity, the food that gets served to everyone, critic or yokel (and the few exceptions are those restaurants where contempt for the paying customers is apparently part of the charm, as at Le Cirque). There is no more need for the elaborate masks of the restaurant critic than there is for Robert Hughes to go to a museum in a Groucho Marx nose-and-glasses. A good critic can’t be fooled. The best that the critic can hope for is to be treated as a friend of the house, but all you have to do to become a friend of the house, Shaw says, is to be one. Restaurants are businesses before they are anything else. Dine twice a week at Le Bernardin, the thought is, and you will magically have the table you want at Le Bernardin. This is only partly true; the known critic gets sent out far more plates and extras and desserts than you or I do, and often far more than he knows what to do with. (I once ate with a very fine chef who had the habit of sending out extra plates to friends at his own place. When the chef at the place where we were eating kept sending out extra plates to him, he said, finally, “You know, it never occurred to me before how annoying this is. You’re forcing people to eat things they weren’t in the mood for and then to make a big show of appreciating them.”)

Shaw, it emerges, is a rare thing, a food writer who identifies not with cook or critic but with the restaurant owner, whose struggles and exasperations he admires and sympathizes with. (Please call to cancel that reservation, he urges.) He wishes that restaurant critics, instead of skulking around cross-dressing and pretending to be called Marmeluke, would, like critics in other fields, be “champions of excellence who promote the best . . . while exposing the worst.” But, of course, all those other critics, though rarely dressed up in wigs and makeup (or dressed at all, for that matter), are notoriously irascible, tendentious, bad-tempered observers who like nothing more than settling old scores, indulging eccentric prejudices, and using someone else’s table or text as an occasion to riff on their own obsessions. Critics cannot be made responsible any more than chefs can be made calm; it is the occupational disease. The real use for the food critic’s disguises, anyway, one suspects, is not as a form of espionage but as a form of armor: it is not we who are protected from getting a false impression but the critic who is protected from violating the most primal of all taboos—being publicly ungrateful to someone who has shared his food with you. (If it wasn’t really you, then you weren’t really ungrateful.)

From these practical essentials, it is a pleasure to move to the world of encyclopedic knowledge. The encyclopedia form, of brief and then longer bursts of pure weird data, only just touched by the spry hand of commentary, is irresistible, and alphabetical organization, being both hyper-orderly and completely random, is irresistible, too. In the extraordinary new “Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America” ($250), edited by Andrew F. Smith, the dour history of Pizza Hut abides near the basic conundrum of Plates, which nestles beside the joys of Plums, while a neat, disabused bit on the Politics of food in America gives way to the fun of Pomegranates and Popcorn, before the social historian resumes his seat with a history of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits. Anyone who can put it down is unburdened by curiosity about anything. Through its countless entries, two stories emerge. First, of the overwhelming abundance of the American larder, and how capitalism has struggled to enlarge and exploit it, and, second, of how the Protestant tradition of making people feel guilty about eating well—expressed in fad diets, health scares, and so on—has been balanced by the Protestant tradition of making people feel guilty for not eating well, expressed in cooking lessons, recipe books, and the growth of a huge industry of food writing meant for home cooks. One has only to compare the great French chef Alain Ducasse’s “Culinary Encyclopedia” (Les Éditions d’Alain Ducasse/Stewart, Tabori & Chang; $250) to see what can be made elsewhere of the same idea. Ducasse’s encyclopedia consists not of entries on food but of pictures of and recipes for good things to eat. Under “P,” we get a picture of simmered suckling-pig chops and feet with porcini-mushroom polenta in a sage sauce, and the recipe. Even for a good cook the dishes are essentially unrealizable, but that does not alter their encyclopedic significance: images of Heaven are painted to encourage you to go there, not to help you build it in your back yard.

At the opposite pole lies Denise Gigante’s “Taste: A Literary History” (Yale; $35), which takes food and eating as a metaphor for Western experience. Gigante’s is the kind of book that one can mock with ease and imitate at peril: “If we approach Wordsworth’s concept of feeding through the mechanics of assimilation, as described in Romantic Naturphilosophie, we find that the feeding mind naturally exists in a precarious state of tension with its own abjected matter,” and so on. But it makes an arresting point: the model of food as a metaphor for pleasure is balanced uneasily between the mouth and the anus, between taste that urges us on and the excrement (“abjected matter”) that food becomes. The larger argument is that the bourgeois age of the restaurant was born of (or accompanied by; it is sometimes hard to be sure which) an aesthetic shift, vast in scope and incarnated by the poets, in which the old attempt to banish excrement from the discourse of appetite by emphasizing the purity of the eater was overtaken by an aesthetic in which the reality of digestion was accepted and made part of the acceptable way in which people thought and talked about life. Appetite need be neither indulged nor suppressed—it could be modified, by that very thing called “taste.” Gigante has a nice section on Charles Lamb in which she shows how, in his famous essay on roasted pig, he invented a comic but still largely melancholic, elegiac tone with which to write about eating.

Gigante is surely right that eating, along with seeing, provides the most universal of all metaphors of value: along with the sensations of light and dark, which properly belong to painting, the perception of sweet and bitter is the most natural of all natural metaphors. (“Sweet” was one of Shakespeare’s favorite modifiers.) The metaphors of taste are so basic that they imbue and infiltrate our entire experience, and we no longer think of them as metaphors.

With no other crafted thing is the line between sensation and meaning quite so quickly crossed, quite so easily extended from something felt to something known, as with food. The tongue has no sooner said “Sweet” than the heart says “Home!” All art, it has been said, aspires to the condition of music. But we want some of our art to aspire to the condition of background music. What makes Mozart, Vivaldi, the Beatles essential to our lives? Is it the hours we spend, scores on knees, listening in the dark? Or the hours and hours and hours we spend with them just on, wrapped around our lives—giving them some emotion to organize that they, miraculously, do? What makes Piero’s pillars or van Gogh’s stars and cypresses or Botticelli’s faces so dear to our existence: the minutes we spend footsore, staring at them on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, or the glimpses on posters and in books and postcards that fill the corners of our eyes and lives? Good cooking is beloved because, when it is good enough, it gives more immediate pleasure and then recedes more rapidly, more gracefully, into the metaphoric middle distance than any other cultural thing, letting us arrange our lives, at least for one night, around it.

The metaphors of food are so closely tied to our sensations that they must be elevated to ring out. That would explain why good food writing, by cook or critic, has been so expansive in theme. All animals eat. An animal that eats and thinks must think big about what it is eating not to be taken for an animal. This largeness of vision (“I write of hunger,” Fisher said flatly, when tasked with writing about food) seems to have become harder to achieve, perhaps because the subject has become so specialized.

There is too much food in most food writing now—too much food and too little that goes further. When Liebling and Fisher wrote, they gestured from plate and glass to something bigger, outside the dining room—to France, or to appetite itself—and the gesture carried instantly, because there was little else in the room to absorb it. These days, the old twin circles (the family around the table, the cosmos beyond) have been supplemented by so many other circles of attitude that the writer points from the plate to—another writer. Like so many other subjects, food writing is constricted within these ever-tighter circles of opinion, when what we want from it is ever-broadening metaphors of common life. Metaphor is social and shares the table with the objects it intertwines and the attitudes it reconciles. Opinion, like the Michelin inspector, dines alone.