About 20 years ago I had dinner at a small restaurant near the station at Brive-la-Gaillarde in Périgord. It was the sort of unpretentious family establishment used by commercial travelers and those (like myself) about to put their car on the overnight motorail to Boulogne. You know the plot: red-check tablecloth, plateau de crudités, steak with thin-cut jaundiced frites, local cheese, fruit or crème caramel, a bottle of red opened and left on the table. The kind of friendly, reliable place that leaves no special memory. This one did. I was sitting there in genial anticipation of my final French meal of the trip when something awful happened: They brought me an amuse-gueule.
Nowadays this wouldn’t even provoke a pause in the conversation. Then it made my spirits sink. You think this is what you ought to do? You think this is what I expect? You think people will have a lower opinion of you if you fail to offer a dinky je ne sais quoi in a flaky-pastry whatsit? My doomy response may have been excessive but was not, in retrospect, inaccurate.The French, for all their reputation as anarchic individualists and committed regionalists, have also been ruthless centralizers and dogged followers of fashion. One minute it’s the amuse-gueule, next it’ll be plates the size of birdbaths, followed by an outbreak of courgette circles topped with hillocks of fake caviar, and before you know where you are the chef at the humble Restaurant de la Gare will be shaking your hand, bugging you for praise, and trying to sell you raspberry vinegar and his book of culinary secrets on the way out.
It’s not nouvelle cuisine and its auxiliaries that have been the villain for the past quarter of a century. It’s the turning of that style into an orthodoxy, and the craven implementation of its supposed principles by chefs whose talents lie elsewhere. It’s also the languid, preening prose of its long-time propagandists at Gault-Millau, who do not blush to begin a restaurant description thus: “Artists often feel, at a certain moment in their lives, the need once more to hear the world begin to shake.”
There is nothing wrong, or odd—or, for that matter, nouvelle—about nouvelle cuisine. The first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary may date only from 1975, but the phrase itself is as old as the mid-18th century. As Elizabeth David pointed out, “Nouvelle cuisine then, as now, meant lighter food, less of it, costing more.” Then, as now, new meant healthier and more delicate; then, as now, the wiser of the “nouvellistes” admitted that their innovations were only successful because they were based on a sound foundation of traditional methods. A fair comparison might be made between nouvelle cuisine and the slightly earlier nouvelle vague. The younger film directors were revolting against what they called le cinéma de papa, just as later the young chefs were rejecting la cuisine de maman. But with time, most revolutions turn out to have been evolutions, a fact some revolutionists admit. Truffaut quickly came to revere Jean Renoir, while Bocuse acknowledged that most of his recipes were adaptations of Alfred Guérot, “one of the great chefs, the most comprehensive chefs, of the first half of this century.”
This doesn’t mean that damage hasn’t been done. Anyone who’s eaten through the last few decades in France knows that at the day-to-day level the quality of cooking has fallen, that you never know when you will be suddenly ambushed by pretentiousness, and that generally you will eat much better in Italy. Elizabeth David recorded in 1980, “the melancholy fact that during these [last] fifteen years I have eaten far worse meals, and more expensively—a bad meal is always expensive—than I would have believed possible in any civilized country.” It is, then, a more general postwar decline, to do with loss of technique in the kitchen and changing social habits (fewer native French in the dining rooms, more uncomplaining foreigners) as well as with culinary fashion. But the oppressive orthodoxies of nouvelle cuisine concentrate and epitomize much that has gone wrong. And the matter is made worse because our expectations of a French meal remain so high. Such expectations are both genuinely based—on the sight of the rich landscape, the weather, the quality of produce in the markets—and artificially massaged by chauvinistic propaganda about the French art de vivre.
Elizabeth David first wrote about the Hôtel du Midi, in Lamastre, in 1958. Even then it seemed to her like a throwback: a modest, old-fashioned provincial hotel in an unfashionable part of France where the restaurant rightly got two Michelin stars. She found prime ingredients, skilled cooking, and reasonable pension terms. Her article, in British Vogue—unique for that publication in that it contains not a single recipe, merely a description of what she ate—acquired a certain cult status. British gastronomes have been heading to Lamastre ever since: The last-ever governor of Hong Kong, whose gratified embonpoint caused Beijing to nickname him “Fat Pang,” went there on his honeymoon. My only excuse for not having been before was that Lamastre isn’t on the way to anywhere (technically, it’s on the way from Tournon to Le Cheylard, or from Valence to Le Puy, but there isn’t much through traffic). Also, I had a lurking fear that the place might not live up to its description, that the docking of one of its Michelin stars a couple of decades ago was indicative of a decline, that the old actor was beginning to lose his lines.
Unwittingly, I forearmed myself against this danger. On my way down to the Ardèche I broke my journey at an auberge in the Forest of Rambouillet, where Gault-Millau promised a 13-point “cuisine simple et ‘nature.’ ” The chef’s idea of simplicity that day was to stuff every vegetable in sight with a heavy pigeon farce and to serve these cannonball garnishes with—well, with whatever you ordered, be it my knuckle of lamb or my companion’s roast pigeon. After dinner I grouchily checked Gault-Millau’s take on the Hôtel du Midi. Only a single point more than for this temple of simplicity, and the promise of “fine and imperturbable classic dishes.” Something patronizing about that “imperturbable,” I thought. Not enough menu changes, they probably mean. Well, good. Imagine a theater critic calling Hamlet an “imperturbable classic.” Night after night, the same old perfect tragedy.
I confess to being prejudiced in the Midi’s favor before I arrived. The more so when the entrance terrace turned out to look exactly as it does in the photograph in my Elizabeth David. Apart from “Hôtel du Midi,” the façade still bears the name “Barattero” in large capital letters.The original Monsieur Barattero came from Nice to Lamastre in 1925 and opened his restaurant two years later; he died in 1941, and his widow, Rose, ran the establishment for the next 30 years or so, with one of her husband’s former apprentices, Monsieur Perrier, in the kitchen. After Rose’s death, the place passed to M. Perrier and is now run by his son Bernard. The current Mme. Perrier is front-of-house; a correct, almost stern figure at first, but (as Gault-Millau rightly, for once, observes) “full of intelligent suggestions.”
Our room was large, quiet, reasonably priced, and doubtless unsatisfactory to the modern business traveler: creaky floors, thin doors, approximate locking systems, furniture with no nod to recent fashion. It was indeed like being back in old France. I especially approved of the bath mat: thin, pink, and proudly embossed with the name “Barattero.”
As for the restaurant, let’s begin with the essential inessentials. The chairs are plain, straight-backed, rush-seated. The tablecloths are white. The front dining room is simple, its walls decorated with little but a framed reproduction of a French Revolutionary document. The cutlery is wonderful—old, and heavy in the hand. The knives, each with a large B on the handle, are so well-used that the serrated edge is worn to a mere scalloped decoration. And then the plates & guess what! They are of a normal size, smaller even than the ones you and I serve food on nowadays; in other words, the size to fit the amount of food put on them, rather than a vast blank stage on which vegetables may prance their stuff.
When Elizabeth David wrote about the Hôtel du Midi, she listed five signature dishes: galantine de caneton, pain d’écre-visses sauce cardinal, poularde en vessie, saucisse en feuilletage, and artichauts Escoffier. The second and third of these were both available, on the top-priced of three menus. The galantine (featured on the cover of the British edition of David’s French Provincial Cooking) is still sometimes served in winter, and the saucisse occasionally as an hors d’oeuvre. I asked about the artichoke dish. “We don’t do that any more,” Madame replied. “It’s a bit old-fashioned. Cooking has to evolve, you know.” But not that much, and not that fast, and not, fortunately, here. We ordered, naturally, the two imperturbable classics. But first an (unresented) amusegueule, an eggcup-size asparagus velouté with a scatter of baies roses (pink peppercorns). The pain d’écrevisses that followed would convert any quenelle skeptic with its lightness of texture and rich, creamy crayfish sauce. The presentation of the poularde en vessie was quietly spectacular. The bird is stuffed with girolles and its own chopped liver, roofed with tarragon leaves, and dampened with a little Cognac and white wine, then encased in a pig’s bladder and poached. The bladder neck is ceremonially cut in your presence and the contents revealed. The dish is sauced merely with the bird’s juices—now that is “simple et ‘nature’ ”—and accompanied by a simple green salad dressed with hazelnut oil.
Belatedly, I understood: If this was supposed to be ancienne cuisine, then it had a lot in common with the best nouvelle—indeed, as with the nouvelle vague, the whole quarrel, however useful for publicity purposes, was largely misconceived. I also realized that there was no immediate threat to my powers of locomotion. At least, not at this stage. A fine cheese board with a starring Saint-Félicien led to a tiny and exquisite anise-flavored crème brûlée. Complacently, we prepared to rise, but had misread the menu. This was merely a second amuse-gueule leading to puddings proper: a fork-crumbling chocolate cakelet with a molten chocolate interior, and then a post-David house specialty, soufflé glace aux marrons de l’Ardèche. Gault-Millau says the puddings “keep on getting feebler” and “need seeing to.” No, it’s the compilers of the guide that need seeing to.
The food that we ate (ducking one entrée course on the top menu) cost Fr 310. This was put in perspective a few nights later when we dined at another Michelin one-star in Champagne and my main course, a veal chop, was priced at Fr 280. The Midi’s wine list, which is Rhône-based, is also very reasonable. You can drink inexpensively and well, or drink superbly without being ripped off.
After two meals at the Midi (filet de sandre in veal jus being the highlight of the second), I had already begun worrying about the restaurant’s next 75 years, more perilous than its first. For a start, the Perriers have only one child, a daughter, who is an optician; end of the line there. Secondly, this is not prime tourist country (number 9 of the Ardèche’s top 27 attractions, the Living Museum of Sheep and Wool, sounds even more missable when the description is in locally rendered English: “The sheep, the whool [sic] and the man & a passionated story presented with fun and pedagogy”). So the restaurant relies on gastronomes from afar and loyal locals. This results in unevenness of bookings: On a Thursday night in mid-May, we were two of only six diners; whereas Saturday lunch and dinner were full. Thirdly, there is the problem known as “les 35 heures,” which is particularly punitive to this sort of restaurant. French employment law surprisingly offers no loopholes to the trade, so the old days of necessary flexibility—or, if you prefer, the old days of galley-slave conditions, with bullied potato peelers working a 60-hour week—are gone forever. Restaurants like the Midi are obliged to close from Sunday lunchtime until Tuesday lunchtime, plus Friday evenings as well in low season. This makes the traditional three-day demi-pension arrangement almost impossible to fit in outside high season. It is also a turnaround from the traditional rule whereby a hotelier might close his restaurant to nonresidents but was always obliged to serve food to those staying beneath his roof.
It’s not sentimentality, or nostalgia for old France, that wants a place like the Hôtel du Midi to survive, and flourish, and remain open seven nights a week—although there is a bit of that. It’s more a desire for a choice of traditions, for a greater democracy of cooking (and of bath mats). As we were leaving, we noticed a poster in the hall showing a cheery lineup of the Ardèche’s top 20 chefs. I asked Mme. Perrier which was her husband. “Surely you recognize him?” she replied. We confessed that we hadn’t set eyes on him all the time we’d been there. “Ah,” she said, “that’s because he’s always in the kitchen.” A different tradition indeed: not promoting himself, just turning out unseen his imperturbable classics.
Hôtel du Midi
Place Seignebos Lamastre 07270 France
(011-33) 4-75-06-41-50
Fax: (011-33) 4-75-06-49-75
Closed December through mid-February and Mondays and Sunday evenings. Menu ranges from $25 to $57.