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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Poularde Alexandre Dumaine, a two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-dollar chicken offered at La C?te d'Or, Bernard Loiseau's gastronomic temple in Burgundy, is filled with julienned leeks and carrots, lightly basted and seasoned with salt and pepper, and baked in an earthenware pot. Truffles inserted under the skin give the bird an earthy flavor, and the meat is tender and pungent. Early on the afternoon of February 24th, Loiseau watched his team of a dozen chefs prepare the poularde for two American chefs who were completing internships in France. After the dish was served, he went home for a siesta. Sometime later that day, he shot himself in the mouth with a hunting rifle. He was fifty-two.
Loiseau was one of only twenty-five French chefs to hold Europe's highest culinary award: three stars in the Michelin Red Guide. He often pointed out that, unlike other chefs, he had not inherited his restaurant: he had built a multimillion-dollar culinary empire, Groupe Bernard Loiseau, himself. A poll published a few years ago in L'H?tellerie, a trade magazine, showed that nearly nine out of ten Frenchmen recognized Loiseau by sight, making him the most famous chef in France. He revamped a line of soups for the French division of Unilever, a fifty-billion-dollar corporation, and created twenty-five varieties of vacuum-packed prepared meals, such as zucchini gratin with Roquefort, for Agis, a French company. A large photograph of Loiseau--ruddy face, bald head, wide smile, wrinkles cascading from the corners of his eyes--dominated the packages. He was the "international ambassador"for Perrier-Jou?t champagne, and designed menus for overseas promotional events. He published eight cookbooks, ranging from "My Recipes from the Land,"an expensive book with glorious photographs of Burgundy in different seasons, to a collection of recipes for children called "Cooking Like a Chef."
Loiseau's suicide startled the culinary world, and, because he left no note of explanation, theories proliferated. For more than a decade, he had suffered from bouts of depression, and colleagues said that he appeared particularly morose in the weeks leading up to his death. Business at La C?te d'Or was stagnant, and Loiseau feared that his restaurant was losing its place at the forefront of French cooking. Earlier in February, the GaultMillau guidebook had downgraded him from nineteen points out of twenty to seventeen, and an article in Le Figaro suggested that La C?te d'Or was close to losing its third Michelin star.
The GaultMillau isn't highly regarded--it accepts advertisements and has a limited circulation--but the loss of a Michelin star can mean financial strain: business can drop by as much as twenty-five per cent. (When Loiseau got his third star, in 1991, business at La C?te d'Or increased by sixty per cent.) Even when the 2003 Red Guide for France was published, in mid-February, and La C?te d'Or maintained its three-star rating, Loiseau despaired.
Jacques Pourcel, another chef whose restaurant was demoted by GaultMillau, and was also reported by Le Figaro to be in danger of losing its third star, sent a letter to his colleagues blaming "terrible media pressure"for Loiseau's death. Loiseau's mentor, the seventy-seven-year-old chef Paul Bocuse, said, "GaultMillau took away two points, and, along with two or three press articles, that is what killed Bernard."
Several weeks after Loiseau's funeral, I travelled to Burgundy. A hundred miles south of Paris, there is an exit off the highway for the Nationale 6, the old north-south artery, which passes through farmland and villages marked by yellow and red tiled roofs. Gradually, the landscape gives way to groves of birch, beech, oak, and pine. The French describe this region, the Morvan, as the heart of civilisation lente--unindustrialized, "slow"France.
Saulieu, population 2,917, is the commercial center of the Morvan. In the era of horse-and-carriage transportation and early automobiles, the town provided a pleasant rest stop on the main road between Paris and Lyons, and it has always had a number of small restaurants. When a...
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