Some Like It Haute

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It's a Friday afternoon on a balmy Paris day, and lunch at the sixth arrondissement restaurant Maxence is in full swing. In the long, narrow dining room with its mustard-colored walls and polished parquet floor, a waiter proffers an amuse-bouche of crème de langoustine à l'orange to a couple of businessmen, while across the room another waiter walks a diner through the 45 Burgundies on the 18-page wine list. Over the course of the next few hours, dish after sumptuous dish — roast foie gras of duck served on a slice of gingerbread, sautéed redfish fillets, pigeon stew with cream of horseradish, an assortment of regional cheeses, a dessert of rhubarb and raspberry crepes — will be wheeled out of the kitchen, each a testament to the Michelin star that up-and-coming chef David Van Laer earned last year. This is French cuisine at its best.

Too bad there are only 10 people in the dining room enjoying it.

It's a sobering scene in a country that, from Escoffier to Brillat-Savarin to today's Michelin-starred celebrity chefs, has given the world its most dedicated gourmands and in which — as generations of visitors have found — it's almost impossible to get a bad meal. For in an era when France's language, cinema and literature have lost much of their erstwhile influence, the nation's proud culinary tradition remains the last bastion of French supremacy.

But that soufflé may be falling. The forces of globalization are circling the fortress and threatening to storm the ramparts. Some doomsayers insist the barbarians have already taken over the citadel in the form of ubiquitous burger chains, an eclectic invasion of "world food," the proliferation of sleek, trendy "fooding" emporiums throbbing with techno music and looking just like their counterparts in New York, Tokyo or Sydney. Others say the threat comes from within, blaming the failure of traditional French chefs to innovate, reach out to the world and keep in touch with the changing tastes of a younger generation. Still others blame a welter of legal and economic constraints — ranging from the controversial 35-hour workweek to confiscatory taxes — that are driving all but the leading stars in France's culinary constellation to the brink of bankruptcy.

On the surface, all would appear to be well in the world of haute cuisine. Just try to make a reservation at any Michelin three-star restaurant for next month and listen to the hollow laugh that greets your request. And famous chefs like Alain Ducasse and Bernard Loiseau have become veritable conglomerates, using the fame of their three-star restaurants to build international businesses that stretch as far as Tokyo and New York. Meanwhile, a generation of talented young chefs have sparked a revival of traditional-style bistros specializing in hearty, old-fashioned fare, and they're packing in the crowds night after night.

But it's a different story at the one- and two-star traditional French restaurants, the ones that form the very backbone of the haute-cuisine movement and which represent both the past and the future of classic French cooking. "It's the little independent guys, the intermediate group between the top chefs and the bistros, who are taking it in the teeth," says Luc Dubanchet, editor of food magazine GaultMillau.

Certainly, the numbers suggest that a real crisis is brewing. As recently as five years ago, a haute-cuisine restaurant might be able to get financing that would keep it going for five years, long enough for it to attract the customers and (perhaps more important) the reviewers that would then ensure its long-term success. Now, if a new restaurant isn't going to turn a profit in its first couple of years, backers aren't interested. Michel Del Burgo, chef at Taillevent in Paris, complains that the problem with investors today is that "just because they've got billions, they think they know the restaurant business."

Part of the problem is pure economics. A top restaurant's profit margin has been shaved to 2%, compared to 10% 10 years ago, in large part due to falling turnover, more expensive raw materials and higher wages. Many haute-cuisine restaurateurs say they are now barely eking out an existence: wage costs account for 46% of turnover, raw materials for over 30%, while vat eats up a whopping 19.6%. "We face financial difficulties, bankruptcies," says Van Laer, the 39-year-old owner of Maxence. "Why? Because haute gastronomie is like haute couture — it doesn't pay."

Under such financial pressure, many top chefs are angry that the government seems determined to make their economic conditions even worse. In October 1999, more than 1,000 chefs in white aprons and traditional white hats marched on the National Assembly and pelted riot police with eggs and vegetables before being driven back with tear gas and clubs. Specifically, they were protesting the imposition of a 19.6% vat on traditional restaurant meals while fast-food joints like the vilified McDonald's are charged only 5.5%. Beyond that, they were enraged by heavy payroll taxes and the 35-hour law that will force many of them to hire extra personnel or close their doors. "We're in a mess," says Loiseau, chef and owner of the three-star Côte d'Or in Burgundy. "We're headed for a clash, where everyone is up against the wall. The little restaurateurs can't face that. There will be a revolution in the streets."

One acute problem that confronts the entire profession is a shortage of talent, the sheer problem of finding people willing to work in a hot kitchen for relatively low wages. Enrollment in cooking schools has plummeted in recent years, and more than 70% of those graduates shun the restaurant industry altogether to go work for institutional kitchens (hospitals, company cafeterias) or the prepared-food industry. "It's practically impossible to find staff in France today," says restaurant-industry analyst Bernard Boutboul. "You can hardly find anyone who's willing to put up with the long hours, low pay and lack of weekends." An estimated 70,000 to 80,000 restaurant jobs in the country are currently unfilled.

In addition to all these woes, there is an existential debate raging inside the food establishment about what French cooking should be in the 21st century. "We're at a turning point that's linked to a worldwide sociocultural phenomenon," says the food writer Perico Legasse. "Globalization is affecting all the cultures of the world and all levels of society, including cooking."

Some chefs have embraced this multiculturalism — among them Pierre Gagnaire, whose adventurous cooking proved too much for the customers of his three-star restaurant in St. Etienne, leading him to declare bankruptcy, but who has since found a devoted following at his eponymous restaurant in Paris' Hotel Balzac. There, in a modern-Oriental setting, he serves up such surprising juxtapositions as pigeon with chocolate and turbot with pear chips. "I've been called the gravedigger of French cuisine because I've always used products from all over the world," says Gagnaire. "But French cooking can only get richer by assimilating influences from foreign countries." Then there's Korova, off the Champs Elysées, where chef Patrice Hardy is drawing huge crowds with such unlikely (and one would think indigestible) dishes as chicken finished in a sauce of Coca-Cola or hot dogs paired with lobster. "Paris is modernizing," says co-owner Hubert Boukobza. "London and New York were way ahead for a while, but because people travel more, it's created a need for a place like this."

"The new generation has a basis in nouvelle cuisine," says GaultMillau's Dubanchet, speaking of the '70s minimalist movement that represented the last great revolution in French cooking. "They have traveled, they have a broad culture and understand that their cuisine is not just a plagiarism of their elders. They play with tradition. They invent."

Perhaps the chef who has best bridged the gap between the traditional and the new is the phenomenally successful Ducasse, with his fleet of restaurants, each with its own style. His gilded dining room at Paris' Plaza Athénée hotel is classic haute cuisine, the Louis XV in Monaco is Mediterranean-style, his two country auberges, La Bastide de Moustiers and L'Hostellerie de l'Abbaye de la Celle, are Provençal terroir (regional, from the soil), while his Alain Ducasse at the Essex House in New York is French technique applied to American products. At the far-out end of the Ducasse empire is spoon with branches in Paris, London and Tokyo, that features an international "fusion" menu ranging from bean sprouts, Chinese soup and seviche to pasta, tandoori sauce and bubble-gum ice cream. "What links all these restaurants together?" asks Ducasse. "A spirit of quality. The French influence is in the technique and the savoir faire. That means knowing how to cook, to reduce a sauce, to season — the real basics of cuisine."

Though Ducasse was one of the original signers (along with fellow chefs Joel Robuchon and Loiseau) of a 1996 manifesto that warned against the encroaching "globalization of French cooking" and "uncontrolled creativism," he has now swung to the other side. "We long believed that French chefs should remain within the Hexagon [France], we put up barriers. Then little by little, we realized that French chefs can have their word to say on other cultures. Globalization is a booster for quality, because chefs now exchange, assimilate, propose different things."

Of course — given that this is France — those are fighting words to yet another element of the haute-cuisine world. "Nowadays," grumbles Antoine Westermann, traditionalist chef of the three-star Buerehiesel in Strasbourg, "you can't tell if the ingredients on your plate are French or Japanese. If you open up too much, you end up losing your soul and your identity. Every people has its own story and its own culture. We need to hold on to that integrity. I don't want to go to Tokyo or Melbourne and eat the same thing as I would in Strasbourg."

The real threat may come not from French chefs who have seemingly turned their back on their own country's traditional cooking, but from chefs around the world who have learned from the French and are now applying their lessons with more creativity and spontaneity than their masters. America's Alice Waters, Spain's Ferran Adria and Britain's Gordon Ramsay — and many other top international chefs — are now challenging the French for supremacy and, some believe, may be surpassing them. In fact, the American food magazine Saveur recently proclaimed that the "last great French restaurant in the world" was Michel Bourdin's The Restaurant at London's Connaught Hotel.

"Those of us who learned French cuisine have barriers of technique and taste that foreign chefs do not have," says Gilles Choukroun, who opened his Café des Délices in Paris this spring after running into financial difficulties at his former one-star restaurant in Chartres. "The foreigners have fewer constraints — especially the Americans. We'd better get on the ball, because others are doing work as good as ours. We must stop saying we're the best." Marc Veyrat, who owns a pair of three-star restaurants in Savoy, thinks he knows why French cuisine has fallen on its face: "It's because 95% of French chefs are conservative. It's no accident if Spain and Italy are on the rise and New York is the city where you eat better than anywhere else in the world."

That shock of recognition may be the hardest blow of all. "Today, when French chefs say there is a crisis," says Pertini, "it's because they accept that they're no longer the best." Allons, enfants de la patrie. Nearly two centuries after Brillat-Savarin codified the glory of French cuisine, more than two decades after nouvelle cuisine breathed new life into the nation's culinary patrimony, it's time for another French Revolution.