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

tasted or what it looked like, but it was clearly an attempt by the chef, Paul Haeberlin, to combine the very best chicken he could find with a luxury ingredient necessary to legitimize the dish as worthy of three stars, a cooking method that set it apart from everyday oven-roasted chicken. The noodles, a regional specialty, added handmade, local distinction. This, in itself, was a daring modernism, a belated nod to the automobile age. Haeberlin had bet his future that garnishing his signature chicken with humble noodles instead of an array of elaborately turned vegetables out of the
Larousse gastronomique
would appeal to Michelin’s modernizing inspectors.

    Restaurant Paul Bocuse at Collonges-au-Montd’Or, which features culinary innovation in a flamboyant atmosphere. ( illustration credit 1.4 )
    This discreet nod to the Auberge’s remoteness from Paris, in a village so small it had no hotel, in a province whose identity was not securely French, would have resonated immediately with the Michelin inspectors looking for a rationale to justify adding this modest-looking hostelry to the pantheon of twelve three-star temples it had been enshrining almost without change for years. But, as neither they nor I could have said at the time, this dish, semiotically complex as it was (high/low, rustic/elegant, cosmopolitan/regional, French/German), would not count, when examined by hindsight anytime after 1972, as a forerunner of the radical changes soon to disrupt French kitchens. History was accelerating for chefs.
    For me, the Illhaeusern reportage was important and memorable because of two other historically trivial reasons. It gave me a taste of food journalism, and it gave my son Michael, then on the verge of two, a taste of a really good soft-boiled egg.
    I was traveling with him and my wife, Margaret, because the assignment had burst upon me on the eve of a skiing vacation. We piled into a rental Peugeot station wagon and drove due east through Nancy to Alsace. I had left Margaret and Michael in the hotel at nearby Ribeauvillé, thinking it would be unprofessional to bring them along for an interview at the restaurant. But when Jean-Pierre Haeberlin, Paul’s brother, who ran the front of the house, learned they were nearby, he insisted that Margaret and Michael be fetched for lunch.
    Paul prepared a special meal for our infant, the egg and some remarkable mashed potatoes. When the egg appeared, Michael took a look at the amazingly reddish-orange yolk and exclaimed, “Apricot.” A gourmet had announced himself. When he finished eating, two school-age daughters of Jean-Pierre’s came out in regional costumes and led our boy upstairs for a nap.
    Could this kind of unaffected hospitality survive the onslaughtof adult gourmets in diamonds and limos? Jean-Pierre Haeberlin was justifiably worried. He said (and
Newsweek
quoted him):
    We want to keep our simple country spirit, but from now on everything will have to be more expensive. We’ll need more help, a wider cheese selection, nothing but the choicest fruit. The higher prices will keep away some of our local clientele. To make up for that, we’ll have to draw many more tourists and that means we’ll be dealing with a more modish crowd. Between you and me, I don’t think we’re ready for the third star yet.
    It was also a moment of challenge and change for me. Despite this minor triumph in Alsace, and a more significant professional success with an interview I extracted from Orson Welles when his Shakespearean film
Chimes at Midnight
opened in America, my career as a Paris correspondent had not flourished. I brooded over that with the typical paranoia of someone working at the periphery of a large organization. Was I being stifled by a hostile bureau chief who felt I had been foisted on him by his bosses in New York? I thought so. And when Jack Kroll, the senior editor in charge of cultural coverage, invited me to return to New York and work for him in the “back of the