cooking in the French food world. Jack had settled in Parisafter World War II, studying photography on the GI Bill. He spoke hysterically ungrammatical but very fluent and vernacular French with a Chicago accent, and he understood the French character like no other American I ever met. I once saw Jack charm a crowd of Parisians packed onto a rush-hour Métro platform into posing for several takes of a picture. He wore florid sports shirts with no tie, which embarrassed Joel Blocker. And he wasn’t a very good photographer. One of the bureau reporters liked to say that Jack took snapshots, not photographs. But he was truly serious about the art of photography. His idol was the American surrealist Man Ray; Jack had a small collection of his prints. And he was very good company.
Jack was happy to go to Bocuse with me, but before we left, he pressed me to book a table at a little place called Le Pot au Feu, in a gritty Paris suburb, Asnières, where another young chef, Michel Guérard, was creating a sensation with radically simplified versions of traditional food.
On the train to Lyon, I picked up a copy of the regional edition of the newsweekly
L’Express
, which some other passenger had left behind on my seat. It had Bocuse on the cover in his tall white toque. The article hailed him as the
chef de file
, the leader, of a revolutionary moment in French culinary history. It had all started in another Rhône Valley town, Vienne, in the kitchen of Fernand Point, where Bocuse, Guérard and the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros, now flourishing in Roanne, had apprenticed and learned from Point about what looked like plain cooking but turned out to be a deconstruction and rehabilitation of the entire tradition and practice of cooking.
Thus instructed, I dined at Bocuse with Jack. The next morning, I became the very first of dozens of Anglophone journalists to be taken by the great man for a tour of the Lyon markets,where he performed a sort of primordial locavore shopping tour at dawn. Then I went on with him for a midmorning plat du jour at his favorite little hole-in-the-wall, the kind of bar-bistro known locally as a
bouchon
.
Back in Paris, I sat in the tiny dining area of Le Pot au Feu for a meal of staggering flavors concealed in dishes of deceptive informality. At another lunch, I ate old-fashioned dishes at Alain Senderens’s L’Archestrate. Some of them, like the fourteenth-century eel stew called
brouet d’anguille
, had been resuscitated from the earliest days of French cooking. Senderens also revived the intricate classic treatment of head cheese,
tête de veau en tortue
, and invented a subtle treatment of turnips in cider with a puree of celery on the side.
It was a spectacular week for an American gastronome, but for an American food journalist, it was the scoop of a lifetime.
On April 6, the Thursday after Easter, I did my best to describe the new world I’d blundered into, the “genteel revolution” soon to be known as the nouvelle cuisine. Paul Bocuse was the most theatrical of these Young Turks, as a person and in the kitchen. He served me a whole sea bass encased in puff pastry that looked like a scaly fish, with a tomato-tinged béarnaise sauce, what Escoffier called
sauce Choron
. But it was Michel Guérard’s twenty-seat hole-in-the-wall that served the most forward-looking food.
A slice of
foie gras des Landes
, fresh foie gras from southwest France prepared in the restaurant, had arrived entirely unadorned, without aspic or truffle or even parsley. But this foie gras was of a smoothness and puissance to stand alone. For those who wanted something more varied as a first course, there was the
salade gourmande
—deeply green beans mixed with slices of truffle, fresh foie gras, chunks of artichoke bottom and an evanescent vinaigrette dressing.
For a larger version of this menu, click here .
Forty years after I wrote about Paul Bocuse for the
New York Times
, a picture of the same sea bass
Jack was happy to go to Bocuse with me, but before we left, he pressed me to book a table at a little place called Le Pot au Feu, in a gritty Paris suburb, Asnières, where another young chef, Michel Guérard, was creating a sensation with radically simplified versions of traditional food.
On the train to Lyon, I picked up a copy of the regional edition of the newsweekly
L’Express
, which some other passenger had left behind on my seat. It had Bocuse on the cover in his tall white toque. The article hailed him as the
chef de file
, the leader, of a revolutionary moment in French culinary history. It had all started in another Rhône Valley town, Vienne, in the kitchen of Fernand Point, where Bocuse, Guérard and the brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros, now flourishing in Roanne, had apprenticed and learned from Point about what looked like plain cooking but turned out to be a deconstruction and rehabilitation of the entire tradition and practice of cooking.
Thus instructed, I dined at Bocuse with Jack. The next morning, I became the very first of dozens of Anglophone journalists to be taken by the great man for a tour of the Lyon markets,where he performed a sort of primordial locavore shopping tour at dawn. Then I went on with him for a midmorning plat du jour at his favorite little hole-in-the-wall, the kind of bar-bistro known locally as a
bouchon
.
Back in Paris, I sat in the tiny dining area of Le Pot au Feu for a meal of staggering flavors concealed in dishes of deceptive informality. At another lunch, I ate old-fashioned dishes at Alain Senderens’s L’Archestrate. Some of them, like the fourteenth-century eel stew called
brouet d’anguille
, had been resuscitated from the earliest days of French cooking. Senderens also revived the intricate classic treatment of head cheese,
tête de veau en tortue
, and invented a subtle treatment of turnips in cider with a puree of celery on the side.
It was a spectacular week for an American gastronome, but for an American food journalist, it was the scoop of a lifetime.
On April 6, the Thursday after Easter, I did my best to describe the new world I’d blundered into, the “genteel revolution” soon to be known as the nouvelle cuisine. Paul Bocuse was the most theatrical of these Young Turks, as a person and in the kitchen. He served me a whole sea bass encased in puff pastry that looked like a scaly fish, with a tomato-tinged béarnaise sauce, what Escoffier called
sauce Choron
. But it was Michel Guérard’s twenty-seat hole-in-the-wall that served the most forward-looking food.
A slice of
foie gras des Landes
, fresh foie gras from southwest France prepared in the restaurant, had arrived entirely unadorned, without aspic or truffle or even parsley. But this foie gras was of a smoothness and puissance to stand alone. For those who wanted something more varied as a first course, there was the
salade gourmande
—deeply green beans mixed with slices of truffle, fresh foie gras, chunks of artichoke bottom and an evanescent vinaigrette dressing.
For a larger version of this menu, click here .
Forty years after I wrote about Paul Bocuse for the
New York Times
, a picture of the same sea bass
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