The high highs and low lows of haute cuisine
The finalists at this year’s Bocuse d’Or produced painstaking masterpieces. But sometimes, don’t you just want a slice of pizza?
THE Bocuse d’Or is the World Cup of cooking — and the equivalence is evident from the patriotic clang produced by spectators from the 24 qualifying countries at the finals.
The tournament is named for the late French chef Paul Bocuse, who pioneered nouvelle cuisine in the 1960s, and has been held biennially in his native Lyon since its inception in 1987. This year, France took the gold medal under chef Paul Marcon. It’s the ninth time the country has won the prize.
The official Bocuse d’Or website provides a count of the winners and runners-up over the past four decades. Brian Mark Hansen of Denmark triumphed in 2023, the country’s third first-place finish (it took silver this year). Nordic neighbour Norway has five gold medals (it also has four silver and three bronze). Luxembourg, the US and Sweden have one apiece.
But the Bocuse d’Or has really always been all about France. The contest purports to have global scope – and indeed, Singapore and Japan have placed in the past. The awards ceremony on Monday (Jan 27) was mostly conducted in English. But French domination of the contemporary culinary world is built into modern history.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Georges Auguste Escoffier set forth what would become the established text of French recipes and cooking techniques. He also created what’s called the kitchen brigade system, assigning cooks to specific stations and tasks (in a quasi-military style) to streamline the production of a restaurant’s fare.
The system is now almost invariably deployed in larger restaurants, no matter the cuisine. It is to the French, too, that we owe the universal image of a chef in a white toque. That headgear became de rigueur under Escoffier’s predecessor as France’s top chef, Marie-Antoine Carême.
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Together with the country’s agricultural produce, the consistent quality of its restaurants over the last three centuries laid the foundation of French culinary primacy. It’s no accident that we call the highest levels of cooking haute cuisine.
To this day, the knee-jerk option for cooks thinking of opening a restaurant is “why not French?” After all, professional training is all about mastering French techniques and traditions.
The latest crop of hot, acclaimed eateries in New York have got a lot of Gaul, including the likes of Chef Fifi, Zimmi’s and Le Veau d’Or. They may not be fancy French, but the country’s rich culinary tradition is part of its global appeal.
In the posh restaurants in the Western half of London, French-trained chefs command kitchens that night after night produce plate after plate of intricately constructed lapidary masterpieces – some so beautiful they wouldn’t be out of place in a jewel box.
As efficient as this artisanal assembly line typically is, it can break down. The brigade system was instituted to feed a restaurant full of people in a timely manner. When fully pressed – and with hungry diners waiting – things can fall apart.
I feasted recently at a multi-Michelin starred restaurant – among the most exclusive in London – and as I gazed at the gorgeous caviar-and-seafood mousse in front of me, it started to collapse like an iceberg struck by climate change. There wasn’t time to photograph the masterpiece before it became a ruin.
What happened? Our table had several people and the dish – served to everyone simultaneously – may have waited a little too long to maintain structural integrity. Or maybe the server just put mine down with too heavy a clunk?
Apart from technical mishaps, there’s limited room for spontaneity in a high-end French restaurant kitchen. Unless the chef takes everything in hand solo, getting the line of cooks in the kitchen to shift out of their normal drill could be a recipe for disaster.
At the Bocuse d’Or finals, each team consists only of a chef and a commis (French for clerk but here meaning assistant) but they’ve had weeks to strategise and then practise, practise, practise their dishes before they go in front of the nerve-wracking huzzahs and razzes of the partisan crowds.
By then, they’ve also sent the recipes to the contest organisers, which judges can use to gauge how well the contestants are getting along in the final run to the prize.
Perfection is hard won and much to be admired in the world of haute cuisine. But sometimes, don’t you just want a messy but enormous plate of lobster cheung fan – the Cantonese standby of steamed crustacean doused with the restaurant’s special sauce with all the lovely juices soaking into the layer of thick rolled noodles below it?
Or a midnight slice of pizza from Joe’s in Greenwich Village in New York? Or, if you want your food to be prepared under meticulous attention, there’s the wonderful haleem of old Delhi: goat and mutton and offal slowly braising away in an enormous metal tank in an alleyway. It may not look pretty, but it’s delicious. This isn’t bas cuisine – or “low” cooking. It’s just good food.
We too often forget that the secret to cooking sometimes can’t be taught and certainly not systematised for mass replication. The British food writer Elizabeth David recalled a story about a Normandy hotel serving omelettes of such “exquisite lightness and beauty” that people came from far and wide to taste them and try to fathom the recipe.
Finally, one day, a fan decided to ask Madame Poulard – the hotel proprietor – directly. She wrote in response: “I break some good eggs in a bowl, I beat them well, I put a good piece of butter in the pan, I throw the eggs into it, and I shake it constantly. I am happy, monsieur, if this recipe pleases you.”
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