Steal the Menu by Raymond Sokolov Read Free Book Online Page A

clothbound press card and, fatefully, an expense account. So I busied myself with entertaining “sources” (most often just friends with marginally newsworthy job descriptions) at restaurants of high gastronomic quality. No one in the office minded. In fact, the bureau chief seemed glad not to have me nagging him for work, and it amused my colleagues that I was putting so much energy into establishing contacts in corners of French life they had no time to investigate.
    When I left for a job in the New York headquarters, in 1967, the bureau gave me a copy of the antiquated but still respected
Larousse gastronomique
as a token of my colleagues’ respect; or perhaps it was their mildly scornful recognition of my being a person for whom food was a passion.
    I had eaten at the big-name restaurants, the three-stars, which were venerable exercises in period performance. Chez Maxim was all deco froth. Lapérouse specialized in Gilded Age naughtiness, with dining alcoves that could be closed off from public view by pulling a drape to hide you and your
poule de luxe
. The Tour d’Argent gave you a card inscribed with the number of the
canard à la presse
they had just served you. Mine, I believe, was the 22,987th to be crushed and exsanguinated in that calf-sized silver device that glittered at one edge of the dining room high above the Seine with its famous view of Notre-Dame. On the street level was an actual museum, featuring menus from the Paris Commune of 1871, when the Tour d’Argent had served its besieged patrons with the flesh of animals “liberated” from the zoo of the Jardins des Plantes, a few blocks away.
    The closest a
fin bec
could get to a creative sensibility in a high-end Paris restaurant in 1967 was either at glamorous Lasserre, near our office, or at Chez Garin, the remarkable bistro near my Left Bank apartment. Lasserre had a mechanical roof that opened to the sky in warm weather, to provide relief from the heat and to clearthe accumulated Gauloise smoke from the elegant room. Tables sported costly articulated metal birds, which the intoxicated sometimes tried to purloin, under the waiters’ watchful eyes. It was part of the fun to see some pinstriper caught red-handed with a glittery peacock or snipe in his briefcase. The food was first-class and vibrantly
cuisiné
, showing the hand of a chef not yet ready for the mortuary.
    Garin wasn’t so flashy, but for a lot of money you got top-flight versions of conventional cooking tuned up and rethought, sometimes with enough complication so that they really edged across the line into haute cuisine, or made the boundary between bistro and haute cuisine seem beside the point. Gael Greene ate there in May 1972 for
New York
magazine, about the last moment when any major French restaurant could still elicit ooh-la-las for trout stuffed with a pike mousse. The influence of the nouvelle cuisine’s great young chef Michel Guérard was already visible, if unavowed, in the two vegetable purees (celeriac and string bean) that Garin served Ms. Greene as a garnish for a split grilled kidney.
    Just five years earlier, the nouvelle cuisine revolution had already begun simmering in the provinces. My bureau chief, Joel Blocker, proposed a story about someone named Paul Bocuse who was making news just outside Lyon. Joel struck out with his Bocuse proposal, but he would have been able to win space in the magazine for another modern French chef also trained by Fernand Point, if sudden political news hadn’t sidetracked him and forced him to send me instead to a small town in Alsace for the announcement of a third Michelin star to L’Auberge de l’Ill in tiny Illhaeusern.
    Although the article on the restaurant that appeared in
Newsweek
’s April 3, 1967, edition was unsigned, it was nonetheless my debut as a food writer. The food I ate on this fateful assignment included a spit-roasted
poularde de Bresse
with truffles and golden Alsatian noodles. I have no memory of how it