THE French culinary world vented its wrath against food critics yesterday after Bernard Loiseau, one of the grand stars of Gallic cuisine, committed suicide a week after he was demoted by a restaurant guide.
Chefs, from the venerable Paul Bocuse to the patrons of humble bistros, blamed the tyranny of the ratings business for the death of Loiseau, 52, who shot himself with a hunting gun after lunch on Monday at his home in Saulieu, Burgundy.
Loiseau was also a television personality, businessman and the only chef with shares quoted on the stock market. The share price, already weak, collapsed 90 per cent on news of his death.
As a national treasure was mourned, fingers were pointed at the Gault-Millau guide for devastating the chef with its review of his oeuvre in this year’s edition. The guide, second only to Michelin in its influence, dropped the rating of Loiseau’s Cote d’Or restaurant at Saulieu from 19/20 to 17/20 points and proclaimed it less than perfect. “Everyone knows that this cuisine is hardly dazzling, just simply very well carried out,” the guide said.
The faint praise was apparently the final straw for a perfectionist chef who had pioneered a pared-down revamp of classic terroir cooking after the 1970s fad for minimalist nouvelle cuisine.
For decades, the darling of the critics had basked only in accolades for his dishes. His most famous were jambonette de grenouilles á la purée d’ail et au jus de persil (frog’s legs in garlic puree and parsley juice), volaille (chicken) Alexandre Dumaine, and sandre au vin rouge (pike-perch in red wine).
Friends said that Loiseau, who had the highly strung temperament of the virtuoso, had been cast down by recent critical sniping and rumours that Michelin might remove one of the three stars that it had bestowed upon him since 1991.
One three-star colleague said that Loiseau, who had run the Cote d’Or hotel and restaurant since 1975, had told him that he would kill himself if he ever lost the ultimate accolade. Michelin retained his stars in its Red Guide, published this week. But the damage to Loiseau’s pride by Gault-Millau was compounded by their promotion last week of Marc Veyrat to the unprecedented rank of a perfect 20/20.
M Bocuse, 80, the patriarch of haute cuisine, said: “Gault Millau took away two points and that, along with two or three press articles, is what killed Bernard Loiseau. He was a fragile man. I saw him yesterday and he seemed a little depressed and I sent him a photograph of the two of us and I wrote on it: ‘Bernard, la vie est belle’.”
Dominique Loiseau, the chef’s wife and mother of their three children, said that Loiseau had recently been exhausted by the 27 years that he had worked with barely a break. She said: “He had become weak, to the point of losing perspective about things. It is true that he had been hurt by recent press articles, but he had a euphoric, excessive nature while being always worried.”
While others spoke of Loiseau’s extreme sensitivity to criticism, there was no mercy for Michelin, Gault-Millau and the other guardians of the gastronomic temple, whose annual reviews make and break careers in a business in which it is tough to stay afloat. M Bocuse said: “Critics are like eunuchs. They know how to, but they cannot do it.”
Laurent Pourcel, the three- star chef of le Jardin des Sens at Montpellier, said: “The métier of a chef is the only one in which you are judged every year. There is terrible media pressure. Every year you wait with anguish to see if you keep the third star. You have to make the business work and reconcile it with family life. Bernard Loiseau did not manage and it killed him.”
Marc Meneau, chef of the Esperance at Saint-Pere-sous-Vezelay, in the Yonne, said that he had felt for Loiseau because he had lost his own third Michelin star in 1999.
“I thought of suicide at the time, because you have the impression that you are nothing and you are suddenly abandoned,” he said. Gault-Millau insisted that it had not been unfair to Loiseau. Patrick Mayenobe, the company chief, said: “A grade does not kill, nor does the removal of a star. This great French chef must have had other problems, other worries. In fact he told us that if he went down in the rankings he would see it as a challenge.”
A few of the masters called for calm. Alain Ducasse, another legendary chef, refused to be drawn into the anti-critic row. “I am not going to feed polemics. It is time for reflection and memory and not for agitation and noise,” he said.
Seduction on a plate
This is the critique in the 2003 Gault-Millau guide of the Cote-d’Or restaurant at Saulieu:
- When Bernard Loiseau forces his smile on the cameras, hammering each syllable like he’s driving in a stake, his desire to seduce seems accompanied by a sublimal fear that he is not succeeding . . . The stakes are huge. To keep Saulieu alive, without subsidy, without multinational backing, the world created around his name has to function flat out . . .
Today we will write what everyone more or less knows: that this cuisine . . . is not exactly dazzling, but simply very well done and pleasant . . . If you have the financial means to take out your family or friends . . . the Cote-d’Or is still one of the best initiations into the very highest level of restaurants. Everything is friendly, the service is classically friendly and direct, the clientele is not snobbish and numerous local supporters of Burgundy pride pay tribute to his unsurpassed regional wine cellar.
