La Jeune Cuisine Française - a new generation of chefs

If you’ve had your finger on the French pulse of late, you can’t have failed to pick up a palpable sense of malaise. ‘France’, in the words of a recent survey in The Economist, ‘is gripped by a belief in its own decline’. And as if political uncertainty, economic instability and civil disturbances were not enough, the identity crisis seems to have spread to the kitchen, where the French are not normally burdened by doubts about their superiority.

The rot set in when France’s neighbours started to develop an annoying habit of stealing her culinary clothes.

First came the Italians, with their inspired idea of the Slow Food movement. Slow Food’s passionate defence of culinary and gastronomic traditions under threat from the creeping standardisation and industrialisation of food was just the sort of thing the French might logically have thought of - but they didn’t. (Instead they got the globe-trotting anti-globaliser José Bové, who famously trashed a branch of McDonalds and rails furiously against la malbouffe - crap food.)

Next came an armada of Spanish chefs led by Ferrán Adrià of El Bulli. They proceeded to garner armfuls of stars from that bastion of French gastronomic correctness, the Michelin guide, and to win worldwide plaudits for their exhilarating cuisine. 

Equally galling have been the results of the London-based Restaurant Magazine’s annual roundup of the world’s top 50 restaurants, judged by an international panel of chefs, restaurateurs, food critics and industry specialists. In the just-published 2007 rankings (more intently scrutinised in France than most people would care to admit) Pierre Gagnaire’s restaurant in Paris managed only a modest third place, trailing El Bulli (Catalunya) and The Fat Duck (England) and hotly pursued by The French Laundry (California) and Tetsuya’s (Sydney). 

When the New York Times weighed in too and declared that French cuisine had gone right off the boil, the momentum became unstoppable. Nowadays it’s de rigueur to dismiss French food as frumpy, stiff and out of sync with modern tastes and trends.

But wait. Don’t rush to bury French cuisine just yet. The bell may be tolling for elderly three-star establishments bristling with silver cloches and sycophantic wait staff, or for middle-aged provincial restaurants burdened with sclerotic menus. But the future’s bright for a new wave of young chefs in the vanguard of a movement that’s been christened la jeune cuisine française.

Thumbing their noses irreverently at the Michelin Guide (though definitely not averse to the odd star if it lands their way), this new generation talks of ‘une cuisine d’auteur’ – by which they mean a highly personalised brand of lightened up, chilled out, cheekily inspired cuisine. They’re enjoying a new-found freedom to cook what they want, not what they think the Red Guide requires.

Most have earned their spurs working in France’s grandes maisons (Robuchon, Ducasse, Bras) but they’ve also moved around the world exploring distant cuisines (notably Asian). White toques are out, black tee-shirts are in, tattoos, earrings and dreads are commonplace – and a new and deliciously subversive element of fun has burst into French kitchens.

Their restaurants are small (between 20 and 30 covers) and casual, with jokey names like Youpala Bistrot! – Hooray Bistrot! They're affordable - with menus generally ranging from 30 to 55 euros - and ex-centric, often buried in the depths of the French provinces. Their creations include humorous deconstructions of regional classics (a multi-layered ‘bouillabaisse’ of different temperatures and textures in a slender glass from Lionel Levy in Marseilles), joyful parodies of fast food (Christophe Picard’s ‘hamburgers’ of wild duck and foie gras with sweet potato frites in the Sologne), and intriguing east-west combinations (a warm ‘sashimi’ of bream with a crumble of sesame seeds and orange zest from Nicolas Pourcheresse in deepest Franche-Comté).

But as any publicist knows, it’s not enough to have a great idea and to do it well; you need to tell the world about it. A handful of movers and shakers have been instrumental in identifying and illuminating this new trend.

First, two journalists, Luc Dubanchet and Laurent Seminel, then on the staff of the GaultMillau magazine and restaurant guide, became aware of a swathe of young chefs up and down the country whose talents were going unrecognised because they didn’t fit the conventional French guidebook straitjacket. Dubanchet and Seminel left GaultMillau to found Omnivore (now shortened to Omni), an edgy, subscription-only foodie pamphlet whose first issue led with a piece entitled: ‘jeune cuisine: ça commence aujourd’hui!’ The movement was launched.

At around the same time, the ubiquitous Alain Ducasse, weary of the relentless sniping (both from within and without France) and the oft-repeated assertions that French cooking had lost the plot, dreamed up a brilliant riposte in the form of his Fou de/Food France campaign. (Its distinctive logo neatly fuses fou de - ‘mad about’ - with both food and France.) With the help of a panel of experts (including chef George Blanc, Marc de Champérard of the eponymous guide, Jean-Claude Ribaut, food critic of Le Monde), he tracked down 43 young chefs from the provinces.

Over the past 3 years Ducasse has given each of them a platform at the Plaza Athenée in Paris, inviting them to devise a menu which they would personally cook and present to a Parisian audience on the first Monday of their two-week guest slot. The dishes showcased then featured on the Plaza Athénée restaurant menu for a fortnight, blazoned with the young chef’s name. 

‘It was a fabulous experience - a young chef like me cooking at the Plaza Athénée!’ enthuses Stephane Carrade of Chez Ruffet in Jurançon, across the river from Pau. ‘I’d been toiling away down here in the southwest but no-one really paid much attention. Fou de/Food France changed all that – plus we realised we weren’t alone!’

Carrade – who’s refusing to be fazed by his recent second Michelin star - is a prototype of the young generation, dishing up explosively delicious food in a little four-square Béarnaise town house where pretension and stuffiness are notably absent and surprises ever-present (a foaming green essence of spinach conceals discs of sweet purple carrot and a plump, briny oyster; barbecued foie gras on a mattress of grapes and walnuts comes with chicory lollipops). Little blackboards and chalks are provided to counter attention deficit disorder between courses.

David Zuddas at the Auberge de la Charme in Prenois, a village that’s no more than a smudge on the map near Dijon, is another notable Ducasse protégé. His food - joyful, original, intensely flavoured and incredibly beautiful – is greatly influenced by Japan, which he visits regularly – nothing new there, even the older generation of French chefs did time in restaurants abroad, but they were generally on a gastro-colonial mission to spread the word about la grande cuisine française. Zuddas visits, on his own admission, to learn and to incorporate Japanese sensibilities into his own cooking.

Nicolas Pourcheresse - who also raves about his spell at the Plaza Athénée – illustrates perfectly the fact that young talent can survive and thrive even out in the boondocks. The punters are beating a (sometimes muddy) path to the door of his ultra-modern, minimalist Hôberge de Chavannes (a ‘ho-ho’ cross between a hotel and an auberge), improbably perched beside a minor country road just off the elusive A39 motorway in the depths of the Jura. He describes his cooking style as ‘reassuring and provocative at the same time, all about taste – and full of paradoxes (like me!), and his most exciting dish as ‘the one he’s not yet created’.

Many of the Omnivore discoveries and Ducasse protégés also belong to a loose fraternity of chefs calling themselves Générations.C. The C stands for Cuisines and Cultures, both in the plural to indicate openness to many different foods and cultures. A third C could be added for Communication – a central issue for a generation of chefs who have hitherto felt rather out on a limb and out of touch with one another. Générations.C’s aim is to restore the restaurant to its rightful place in society, where enjoyment and informality are to the fore and where the two worlds of restaurant and home are no longer so separate.

‘French food never died - it just dozed off a bit’, observes founder Gilles Choukroun of Angl’Opera in Paris, whose signature dish - a sinfully smooth crème brûlée of foie gras with crackly brown sugar shards on top and a sharp salad of herbs on the side - has been frequently aped and seldom matched. ‘The talent was always out there, but we were really bad at getting it across – and hopeless at communicating amongst ourselves.’

The final piece in the puzzle is Omnivore’s annually published Carnet de Route, just into its second edition. While most guides feature several thousand establishments, the 2007 Carnet de Route has singled out just 200 budding young chefs from every corner of France, devoting a generously illustrated and annotated two-page spread to each, outlining their style of cooking and detailing what it is that makes them tick.

Amongst the well-established and much-chronicled iconoclasts (Michel Bras, Marc Veyrat, Jacques Decoret) and the Ducasse protégés included in the guide, there are some young talents whose names aren’t (yet) on everyone’s lips.

Even in Alsace, a region with deep gastronomic roots and the ultimate bastion of traditional food, things are visibly on the move. Sébastien Buecher, who recently returned to the family fold of the Auberge Frankenbourg in La Vancelle up in the Vosges, tactfully balances tradition and innovation so as not to frighten the horses (viz his crusty, salt-speckled foie gras on a bed of lightly frothy lentils with bitter/sharp herbs and sprouted seeds served in a white bowl set on a black slate).

Similarly, Thierry Schwartz at the Bistro des Saveurs in Obernai is steering a skilful course between ancient and modern, twinning pike-perch from the Rhine with a rich smooth black pudding and a vivifying shot of verjuice, or roasting a whole lobe of foie gras on the open fire and serving it with fruit and vegetables and Riesling ‘lollipops’. 

On the other side of France in the hamlet of Cahuzac-sur-Vère near Albi, Guillaume Servan has completely re-thought his approach at La Falaise since my last visit. ‘Three years ago I started cooking the way I wanted, not what I thought was expected of me’, he observes, in a familiar refrain. His cuisine remains strongly rooted in the southwest (‘we still faithfully serve our confit de canard, with its fabulous crusty frites and Lautrec pink garlic’, he notes reassuringly), but new personal, contemporary dishes have come in (Marennes oyster in a fragile tempura batter with sprouted lentils) which maximise use of local, seasonal produce without being stuck in some sort of groove.

French cooking has always offered an extraordinary range of eateries from haute to humble, and a huge number of highly distinctive regional variations. But the tyranny of terroir had begun to operate, silver cloches ruled and things were most definitely not okay. Now, as sacred regional cows are being discarded (or deconstructed) and dining rooms dusted off, a new generation of French chefs – young at heart, talented, motivated and absolutely at ease with itself – is spreading its wings.
 
Did somebody mention malaise?

The Young Chefs’ Hit List
(lowest price is for a weekday lunch menu, highest is for the tasting menu/blowout)

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