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The Best Chef in the World1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Recipe | Itinerary | Home
Michel recalls the restaurant he returned to as being more like an auberge, a simple inn and gathering place. The bar displayed basketball and tennis trophies, not cognacs in crystal decanters. “It was a place of warmth, where people were welcomed with all our heart. It was a modest place, except for one thing – the kitchen. I am not sure I would have had the courage to do what my father and uncle did.” The kitchen of Troisgros, all shiny steel, with electric burners and picture windows, seems entirely of today. It is actually of 1977, when Pierre and Jean had it built. Michel, pleased as always when he discusses his family, says how clever it was for his father and uncle to construct this expensive kitchen because the journalists came to write about it and to photograph it and to exclaim in wonder that great food could be cooked on electricity instead of gas. “This was crazy to do in 1977,” he says, “To do a kitchen so well built it is like a Rolls-Royce instead of investing in the hotel or in the comfort of the guests. But it was a great decision. The priority for them was the most beautiful and comfortable kitchen in the world. The stoves are still here, 30 years later. And now they are economical; the price of gas is so high.” The kitchen is essentially unchanged. It has a small table for guests. The walls are decorated with cartoons celebrating the once essential relationship between the restaurant and the railroad. In one, a waiter lifts a cloche, and under it is a section of track. In another, a conductor wearing a napkin around his neck cries out, “Roanne! Roanne!” In this kitchen, 20 cooks prepare food for an average of 60 guests per meal, not nearly as many as in the old days, when it seemed all travellers passed through the great textile centre of Roanne. The dining room is more attractive than I remember from past visits, when it seemed like a holdover from the cosmetic excesses of the 1980s and ’90s. It is serene and pale, dominated by a large black-and-white photograph of the gnarled branches of an old tree. I suggest to Michel that it has the feel of a traditional Japanese room, but he says, “I don’t want Japanese architecture. I want refined and pure, simplicity and wood.” |
