Word: robuchon
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...ancien régime by letting the people eat cake - a Sichuan pepper dacquoise cake to be precise - for €17. The dish cost €60 at his old place. Senderens is only the latest top chef to drop out of the star system. Jöel Robuchon cashed in his Michelin status in 1996 to colonize Las Vegas and Tokyo and supermarket refrigerators with gourmet fast food. Many talented chefs refuse to join the ratings rat race altogether, opting to run more casual bistros. Some latter-day sansculottes can't wait for the extinction of la cuisine snob...
...sure that the kitchen's hard work is not undermined in the dining room, Robuchon employs a staff of more than ten as captains, waiters and busboys, which means that 45 diners are served by at least 30 employees. Among them is his slender, blond wife Janine, who oversees the checks. She also cooks dinner at home around 6:30, relying on bourgeois fare like gigot with flageolets. Robuchon loves it, as he did his mother's cooking back in his native Poitiers. Says he: "Such food is prepared with maternal love, and it cannot be judged by ordinary standards...
...might be expected, reservations at Jamin should be made at least six to eight weeks in advance. Like many proprietors of popular Paris restaurants, Robuchon tries for a balance between French and foreign customers, roughly a fifty-fifty split. "Nobody likes to be in a 'tourist' restaurant," he explains. What nobody seems to mind is the $30 to $90 check for dinner, which includes food and service but not wine...
Between meals and phone calls, Robuchon does more research in his kitchen, ever on the lookout for new combinations and dishes. Indicating the drawing on his menu of a lone, Lincolnesque figure, he says, "I am a compagnon and will always be one," explaining that he served as an itinerant apprentice, cooking in various regional kitchens before becoming a fully fledged member of the French chefs' guild...
...Robuchon is branching out. It comes as a surprise to see boil-in-bag main courses simmering away in his kitchen. "It will be used by the French railways for their first-class passengers on the Paris-to-Strasbourg route," the chef says. "It cooks for 14 hours, then it can be kept without freezing or preservatives for eight days. Now I test it in large quantities, then it will be packaged in portions." To Joel Robuchon, not even the sky's the limit. "Who knows?" he says wistfully. "May- be someday men will eat my food on the moon...