A birthday feast for the master chef in Monte-Carlo

Monaco. In another time, acrobats and go-go dancers would probably not have entertained a chef at his 80th birthday party. The food would not have been prepared by chefs from Japan, Australia, Norway and Spain — as well as France. A chef’s birthday would not have been an occasion for anything like the three days of hoopla this past weekend in Monte Carlo. But if the sedate world of fine dining has become a circus, no chef has a better claim to the title of ringmaster than the guest of honor, Paul Bocuse. Before chefs had their own TV shows and million- dollar book deals, when today’s international obsession with chefs and restaurants was in its infancy, Bocuse was on the cover of Time magazine as the champion of nouvelle cuisine. People knew his name when they could name no one else who worked in a kitchen. “He made it possible for chefs to be respected international celebrities,” said the New York restaurateur Drew Nieporent. “And he made haute cuisine popular. His restaurant was a pilgrimage destination, the way El Bulli in Spain is today.” Ferran Adrià, the chef and owner of the trendsetting El Bulli near Barcelona, attended the celebration with Juan Marí Arzak and other cutting-edge chefs from Spain, a country that was not on the culinary radar when the restaurant in Lyon that bears Bocuse’s name earned its third Michelin star in 1965. The weekend of birthday festivities, organized by the chef Alain Ducasse, were attended by about 330 people including more than 80 chefs from around the world. There was a cocktail buffet on Friday night, and lunch on Saturday with high-flying entertainers from the Monte Carlo Circus Festival. On Saturday evening, at a lavish dinner cooked by Ducasse’s chefs and served in the gilded ballroom of the Hôtel de Paris, there were fireworks and Dom Perignon Champagne. And in a nod to Bocuse’s reputation as a ladies’ man, gyrating young women in fishnet stockings. If anyone was still hungry, there was brunch on Sunday — scrambled eggs and sea urchin. “You have Davos for economics, now you have Monte Carlo for cuisine,” said the good-humored but immodest Bocuse, who actually turned 81 on Sunday. (Open heart surgery delayed the celebration for a year.)Saturday’s buffet lunch was cooked by 19 chefs. Many, including three women, had multiple Michelin stars. There were rivers of great Bordeaux like Château Haut-Brion 1995 and Château d’Yquem 1999. Tetsuya Wakuda of Tetsuya’s restaurant in Sydney prepared slow-roasted rouget on buckwheat in vinaigrette. Bent Stiansen of Statholdergaarden in Oslo presented filet of reindeer marinated in pepper with mushrooms and cauliflower cream. And there was a consommé of cèpes with foie gras from Yoshi Ito of the restaurant Hiramatsu in Paris. In the midst of the abundance, Bocuse kept nibbling from a frequently replenished plate of freshly sliced Iberico ham from Spain. “The best,” he murmured. His focus on the simplest fare was telling. Much of Bocuse’s cooking has been about good fresh ingredients, well prepared. One of the first dishes he said he recalled serving to the food critic Henri Gault was fresh haricots verts he had picked from his garden that morning, simply boiled and dressed with olive oil, shallots and salt. For Gault it was a revelation. Jean-Georges Vongerichten recalled that the first day he went to work for Paul Bocuse in 1978 he was sent out behind the restaurant to gather a bag of wild nettles. “I thought it was a joke,” he said. “Bocuse is known as a prankster and besides, they always do stuff like that with new chefs. But it was serious. They used the nettles in the soup.” Bocuse learned to value the market from his mentor, the great Fernand Point, chef and owner of La Pyramide in Vienne, south of Lyon, where Bocuse went to work in 1948. Point’s menu depended on what the chef found in the market, a new approach at the time. “Back then a lot of restaurants were doing the same kind of old-fashioned Escoffier-style cooking, with lots of sauces hiding the ingredients, and the same dishes night after night,” Bocuse said. “Point was a perfectionist who gave value and credibility to the finest ingredients.” Unlike other chefs who rose to international prominence in the heyday of nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s, Bocuse never went to extremes like arranging tiny, precious portions and disastrously undercooking vegetables. Like other top chefs whose restaurants have also been on gastronomic itineraries, including Jean and Pierre Troisgros, Alain Chapel and Michel Guérard, he is a believer in classical techniques, no matter how avant-garde your food. Though he is intrigued by new technology, he has refused to be seduced by trends that come and go. His favorite dishes remain roast chicken and pot-au-feu, honest and meant to be shared. Many of today’s prominent chefs worldwide, even those who have not worked with him, feel his impact, and not just because they can sell pots and pans with their names on them as he has. “He was a role model for me even though I never had a chance to work in his kitchen,” said Thomas Keller of the French Laundry in Napa County, California, and Per Se in Manhattan. “I remember dining in his restaurant, all the classic dishes, but they were so fresh they seemed light. And I love how he has so much confidence in his staff, how he gives them room to grow.” Bocuse said he is as old as Mickey Mouse without the eternal youth, but he still has the energy of a younger man. He does not talk of retirement; he was given a golden lamé toque at the party. His company will be opening four new brasseries in Japan starting this spring, and, about a year from now, they will add an inexpensive quick-service restaurant in a mall on the edge of Lyon, a city where he already owns five brasseries and his signature restaurant. “I’d like it to be like Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center in New York,” he said of his quick-service concept. “And I’m beginning to see that doing something like this and keeping the quality you want, making everything from scratch and even having an in-house bakery, is more complicated than I thought at first.” His enterprises are considerably less far-flung than those of other chefs today, including Ducasse and Vongerichten. But Bocuse is the one who is credited with setting the stage so that chefs would not have to be chained to the kitchen. 

 

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