How French Chefs Cover Their Sins

Now a bit of disclosure. While I talk like I know what I’m doing in the food biz and I’ve been cooking since I was about 5 years old, I’ve had only one formal 3 hour class (with Luigi Buitoni, champion chef at his Locanda Della Rocca in Paciano, Perugia, Umbria) and a two year weekly tutorial of about two hours each with the chef at a sleezy college humor magazine near Boston. My daughter on the other hand, holds a certificate of completion of cooking school and my wife has cooked for over 50 years. So much of what I pontificate about comes from osmosis not education. In addition, I belong to the Francois Simon School of Food Criticism, that is, I believe that what you need to critique food is to eat, eat, eat rather than chemistry or physics training. (After all if swinging a thousand times a day and biking hundreds of miles works for Tiger and Lance, it sounds right to me). So what follows has no basis in fact or science, but here it is anyway. French chefs are masters in covering their sins; rarely is a dish junked, unless you’re eating a 700 € meal. Here’s how: 1. Covering your sins with salt. A few grains here and there is just fine; a few more, make something like beef look elegant, but too much means we’ve got problems in the kitchen. I learned this the hard way after returning to Paris from Eastern Europe in 1991 and eating (for the second time in as many months) in Alain Passard’s just-recently renovated Arpege and discovering that his staff used more salt than the untutored Czech, Slovak, Polish and Hungarian chefs combined. How do I know? I stopped urinating for a day after his meal. 2. Covering your sins with fancy ingredients – truffles, caviar and champagne being prime examples. Any miserable soup or pasta dish suddenly becomes glorious with a slice of truffle or dash of truffle oil. I learned this in a positive manner from Dominique Bouchet, who can improve already very good dishes with a slice of truffle, but I’ve since seen substandard stuff rendered stratospheric this way. 3. Covering your sins with spicy stuff – espelette, jalapeno and curry being examples. If you’ve got a piece of cardboard-tasting pork or bland fish, a little of this stuff will zip it up in a hurry – and no one is the wiser, especially if you pretend it’s Basque or Indian-subcontinent influenced. 4. Flooding the plate with food – the old Durgin Park trick, also made famous by Grossinger’s and other New York resorts that made up for quality in quantity. If you just put so much on the plate that people can’t manage it all, you don’t need to apologize for its tastelessness. 5. Sprays. This is a new one. Starting with truffles which really throw the customer off, one can be more subtle with mushroom, candy, BBQ, Balsamic or goodness knows what else to disguise bad stuff. 6. Perfect service. Now wait, how does that work? Oh, you’ve never had a meal that was off but the warm welcome, intimate waitressing, tender loving care in delivery of plates and solicitude from the entire team made you think, well, that wasn’t so bad? 7. Substitutions and apologies. How does this work? Well, let’s say you go to a place reputed for its thick veal liver and they’re out of it but they do have from Rungis just that morning the most divine lamb chops. Or they run out of the wine you really had your eye on, but they have a substitute from up the road 200 meters that’s much better and a year older at the same price. “We’re so sorry, we forgot to take it off the ardoise/menu/list” (even though these things are churned out of the printer 10 minutes before.) 8. Le bluffing. You order x and y and they arrive all shriveled up and dead twice over. “Ah, aren’t they a bit overcooked” you say, “the pigeon looks like leather and the fish is stinky-over-the-hill.” “Oh no, Monsieur that’s the way chef,” never the chef, chef as in Father or Doctor, “prepares it.” Oh well then, he must know what he’s doing. 9. Honesty. “The food seems a bit different tonight Madame.” “Yes, well,” she admits, “that’s because my son is off at the Opera tonight and well, I hope you’ll forgive us?” “And he bought the tickets how many months ago,” you want to ask? 10. Brutal Honesty. At Pierre Gagnaire, it is reported that both chef and sous-chef recently were hors combat (probably cooking for the President of the Republic in Bruxelles) speaking of which, how come Sarkozy is the only “President of the Republic” while Bush is the “current occupant”? Now I know the old Ducasse story – Q. “Who cooks when you’re not here?” Ans. “The same guy as when I am” but come’on guys, when William Ledeuil leaves with the flu he reassures you that his main man will be there. These thoughts were prompted by the good cuisine, sprays and substitutions at: Memere Paulette 3, rue Paul Lelong, 2nd, (Metro: Sentier) T: 01.40.26.12.36 Closed Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Menu: 2 courses for 15 and 3 for 17 € Au Gout Dujour 12, rue Beaugrenelle, 15th (Metro: Charles Michels) T: 01.45.71.68.36 Closed Sundays Lunch menu 20 and menu-carte 25 €. Blog: