Les Frères Troisgros: A Gourmaniacal Detour
This is about a mad, nutty gastronomic lark in a little nowhere town called Roanne one Alka-Seltzer east of Lyon, 242 miles south of Paris. Of all the whims that move man, few bring him to Roanne. It is a small plain town, 50,000 citizens at most, modestly big in munitions and double-knits. But there is honey here in an ever-so-tacky little hotel looking toward the train station. Love object to our consuming passions, target for a thousand gourmaniacal detours: the restaurant Troisgros.
The Restaurant of the Pyramide in Vienne still numbs with joy, though now it seems an adolescent passion. There is no questioning the creative vitality of Lyon's culinary giant, Paul Bocuse. Even his homely sausage set into a brioche diadem marks the master hand. A heady crayfish cream precedes the exquisitely etched pastry-wrapped loup (bass) and the best baby lamb ever tasted anywhere, lamb nurtured on salt marshes, its flesh like butter. I love the Auberge of Père Bise on the Lake of Annecy with its blush-fleshed omble-chevalier fresh from the day's catch, in some divinely humble butter bath. The winding descent from the cliff-top road to the shore of Talloires moves through Brigadoon fog and green to a beauty that can't possibly exist. Even the sun emerges on cue, a shimmering benediction after the endless rain of Paris.
But in five weeks of fiercely serious eating -- research verging upon obsession, with its bitter disappointments and dizzyingly brilliant discoveries -- Les Frères Troisgros proved to be the most ingenuous sorcerers of all. Nothing in the solemn dignity and clarion discipline of France's gastronomic temples quite prepares you for the sweet silliness of the maison Troisgros. The Marx Brothers are not defunct. They thrive, mustaches en pointe, serious over their stockpots, wondrously zany at play, primitive and ribald. Here is brother Pierre in his tall white toque playing gin rummy in the middle of the dining room, the awed pilgrims still nibbling petits fours. What do they make of this madness? There are dogs sniffing and champagne corks popping and old tante asleep propped on her elbow.
The feast is sacred; the temple, blissfully profane. In the bar, today as in decades past, citizens of Roanne sip their pastis and 15-cent café espresso and gossip away the day. In the dining room gather the worshipful Americans, cognoscenti and nouveau gourmandizers, each year a greater muster, to die a thousand deaths over the sorrel cream and pay the bills.
We arrive with friends, Americans whom the family Troisgros has determined to lionize. One delivers one's body to this celebrated bourgois inn empty, fit, a keen edge on the appetite, prudently, painfully honed with restraint and denial in the very heart of gastronomic freakout country. But the Troisgros family does not take "no" for an answer. Are you thirsty? No. Well, here is a glass of icy Sancerre. Hungry? No. What a pity. The you will have one giant triangle of clafouti -- sublimely simple pear and custard tart…not two. Monday the game is basketball. Tuesday it is tennis. Today, gin rummy, and a sentimental farewell for the lean gray-haired American engineer from St. Louis who is taking Pierre now for 11 francs. He is Frank Riordan Jr., director of Research and Development for Monsanto fabrics and an ambitious Sunday chef. Fate brings him to Roanne annually. Double-knits, actually. And his nutritional needs are fed Chez Troisgros. "You must come some day to work in our kitchen," the brothers Troisgros once said. And so he has come. Two weeks' vacation in the kitchen of Troisgros.
"I'm beyond lechery," Riordan explains. "I've replaced lechery with gluttony."
Pierre is down now another four francs. He is rounded and all the lines turn up, in bliss I suspect. There is a dark and liberated mustache on the face that could easily do commercials for Ronzoni.
"Someone heard me say I make love to my wife in the frigo," he confides. "So he wrote to the Guide Michelin to complain…Pierre Troisgros is not gallant." Pierre's dark and animated Olympe grins. But the Americans don't exactly get it. Frigo? The walk-in cold box, of course.
Olympe giggles. "You don't need the frigo if you have the Tokyo suite," Pierre is reminded. "Suite" is an expression used most generously. But there are rooms upstairs, sixteen of them (the more glorious have names), with not an ounce of charm. Bizarre and sensual with red fake-fur coverlets and carpet that goes right up the wall, they offer Je Reviens soap by Worth and impeccably modern plumbing. You wake to the morning kitchen clamor and the urgent perfume of veal stock wafting upward. Champagne for breakfast and homemade jam.
Now everyone en voiture. Into the cars. Three of us crowd into the back seat because the front is reserved for Pierre and a giant wheel of almond custard tart. First stop: the House of Bonnin, Roanne's most elegant delicatessen, just to be sociable with good friends. There is the Troisgros mousse of thrush with juniper berries in a crock in the Bonnin fridge and lemon and lime-scented mustards from the celebrated house of Fauchon. But the Troisgros brothers and hangers-on, pets and relatives head directly for the cellar. Here are wines in bins and a giant vat which Brother Jean's red-eyed hunting dog refuses to climb into despite Jean's insistent urging. Jean, squarer, quieter, with a gentleman adventurer's beard and the deep, dignified Maria for his wife, solemnly demonstrates for the disdainful animal. There is champagne and a bottle of Burgundy and Pierre divides the almond tart with scissors.
What time is it now? Mon dieu! Off to the photographer to capture the apprentice's graduation on film. While Pierre and Jean button into chef's coats and tilt their tall white caps, the ménage is busy debating the comparative irresistibility of the oiled thighs in the photography gazette. The Troisgros brothers will have the last word on that. Now some prodding and pushing and arranging, some mustache-twirling. The camera snaps, capturing umbrellas, dogs, roses, mugging, Troisgros brother front and rear, the American in his own tall white hat.
The motley troop flies back toward Bonnin's glorious delicatessen. But not without an obligatory stop at each patisserie on the way. Jean buys one of this and two of that. Back in the cellar there is more champagne, a fine fruity Beaujolais, all the scavenged pastry and an extraordinary twist of yeasty fruit-filled dough to pull and tug at.
All that grim Spartan preparation utterly sabotaged. Perhaps an hour of sleep will produce a hallucination of time passed without food. Perhaps.
Nine o'clock. The dining room is, frankly, quite unmemorable. There are fresh flowers, of course, in silver pitchers, and the giant ironstone service plates that are an expression of the house's generous spirit and happy eccentricity. A fine sharp air of expectancy -- not the electric voltage of formal dining, but something related to it -- is warmed by the resident lack of pretension. Pierre and Jean roam the room, serious now but relaxed…champion athletes running a cinch race. The room is ringed by the transient pilgrims of the palate. They bring their awe with them and it is a divine aphrodisiac, stirring them into a frenzied expectation and desire. In the middle of the room is the apprentice from Monsanto. That morning at market, Pierre spied a fine haunch of kid, perfect for the farewell dinner. "I keep thinking I'm going to wake up and find it’s all a dream," Riordan confides.
Instead of the $13.50 dinner the pilgrims come to worship -- the thrush pâté, scalloped salmon, beef in Beaujolais and marrow, cheese and dessert -- the Troisgros brothers have choreographed an incredible parade of seasonal dishes…"just a little of each, just to taste." I feel uneasy out of my usual brown-sparrow anonymity. But I have paid this homage just three years ago, unknown and unlionized. My taste memory has done handstands over the extraordinary beef and that ethereal sorrel sauce. Troisgros could bring us to our knees with an unyielding fusillade of tastes but they could not fake sheer excellence nor blur that earlier fine memory.
The fattest, tenderest snails, nourished on the leaves of the Burgundy grape, have been sautéed and braised and somewhat blandly sauced in a swirl of herb-scented butter -- a last minute liaison requiring consummate timing, Jean observes. "Shall I tell you the sex life of the snail?" asks Pierre. The next plat interrupts a billowing flaky feuilleté filled with fresh foie gras and tiny batons of poached turnip. A light, almost watery '67 Volnay is served with these and then a mellow Meurseult with the cassolettes of crayfish: tender curled little beasts in a tarragon-spiked broth with fluted rounds of carrot and onion strands. The sorrel-flecked pool gleaming about the paper-thin salmon is supernal, surpassing even rose-prismed memory, though the critical faculty is still clicking, wishing the salmon were more delicate, poached rather than sautéed.
Just in time, then, comes a goblet of bracing tart lemon ice flecked with citrus zest to revive the hyperindulged palate. What sorcery. I find myself confronting red rare slices of charollais beef as if it wre a new day, with fresh reserves of appetite.The charollais. not as tender as the best American steakhouse beef, has a fine aristocratic flavor. It is superb, naked and sublime in a mask heady from the Beaujolais, Fleurie, and with marrow and mousserons, a flat fleshy mushroom of the forest. It is almost masochistic merely to consider the offerings of cheese, but for research -- in curiosity and a fit of self-destruction -- one must taste a few crumbles from that tall tower spotted with rust and green, Fourme d'Ambert, salty, sometimes sharp but tonight, soft, a prepubescent bleu.
From the dessert cart: strawberries in a raspberry purée; a choice of crème fraîche, ever so slightly tart, or Chantilly, sedately sweet; an Everest pouf of floating island, and a tray of petits fours: satanic chocolate truffles, macaroons and the crisp flat cookie called cat's tongue. Before the bracing bitter jolt of espresso chases the gentle buzz of inebriation, champagne corks are popping again, a blanc de blancs brut with the Troisgros label. The last gin rummy game is under way in the middle of the dining room. And there is a fresh new vibration in the house. Papa Troisgros is home from his very first cruise, a Diners Club jaunt to Turkey and Lebanon. Very dapper Papa, ruddy and a rogue, flirtatious behind his lightly tinted shades and ecstatic about…the food on this incredible ship, the Renaissance; the caviar, the real stuff, every night, he marvels, as if homebound he were doomed to exist on saltines and gruel. Perish such grim speculation. And please join Papa for lunch.
Noon, still somewhat rocky. But can it be? The mere act of descending the stairs seems to revive the appetite. In the family alcove off the main dining room, the patriarch holds court. The 1970 Burgundies were delivered yesterday. Now, he announces, we will have the first taste: "Are they cool?" he asks the captain as the Chambolle-Musingy is decorked, and then a Bonnes-Mares. What do you think? There is no question. The Bonnes-Mares has class and a style its poor relative lacks. Papa sips. "This wine rains kisses in your mouth," he cries, throwing his arms into the air with the delirious joy of first love.
The traditionalist resists: "But it’s so young. Wouldn't it be better to let it age a bit?"
"Absolument non. Wait…wait for what? Do you wait to eat an old radish?" He grins. "Wine, like radishes and women, is best young."
Last week's radish wilts visibly. She has pinned her hopes on the wise and compelling theory that great women, like great wines, improve with age.
A gallant gentleman advances that very principle. But Papa is distracted. He is falling in love with an oblong of tissue-paper-delicate pastry billowing high and not quite hiding bright green asparagus tips. "It is a nouveau plat," Papa observes. "With a nouveau plat -- a new dish -- you must cross yourself and make a wish."
Nowhere have I tasted a feuilleté like that of the Troisgros. At the Pot au Feu in Paris where the chef Guérard was once a pâtissier, the feuilleté speaks of richest butter. Here the message is air, air somehow spun into gossamer that crinkles and melts. The sauce is faintly tart, liquid silk, elusive: just butter, cream, a dash of lemon and minced foie gras, Jean explains. Jean's wife Maria arrives to taste. Pierre wants a sliver too. Papa wants more. But now there is a giant aluminum cauldron with two young bass in a steaming clove-and-coriander-scented bath, perfumed with olive oil and flecked with a parsley rain.
"Serve all those vegetables. All of them," Papa commands the captain. "All, the carrots, the onions…all. There is a parade of tasters to sample this stunning celebration of bass. Papa is pointedly sipping his adolescent red Burgundies. "I never drink white wine with fish," he explains. "I save white wine for cheese. Montrachet for the cheese of the cow. Little white wines for goat. Don't write that down. They will say Troisgros is crazy. But it is not the reds that are too strong for fish. It is the whites. Try it blindfolded. You will see."
Suddenly both Pierre and Jean and Jean's Maria are back for a tiny joint of the chicken in tomato-scented vinegar sauce, served with the Troisgros' hashed browns sautéed with a clove of garlic -- "garlic en chemise," papa explains, "an unpeeled clove, a hint." Plates are whisked away and replaced, but Papa is not at all pleased with the cheese. He frowns and scolds, and explains: "When it is the time of the red fruit, it is not the time for the cheese." Remember that next time you bite into a cherry or roll a raspberry across your tongue. The new France is into supermarkets. Old France does not fight the seasons. Each has its soul stirring bounty. This year the Troisgros brothers are offering reverence to the seasons -- four seven-course menus at $20. Summer languors over melon au vieu porto, foie gras sauté Périgourdine, crayfish in cassolette, charollais beef au Fleurie with marrow, string-bean salad in cream. Autumn brings crayfish-tail salad, a hot tourte à la Forézienne, scallops, partridge à la bourbonnaise, spinach and the cheese of Auvergne. Brace for winter with mousse of thrush and country bread, a ragout of fresh truffles, escalope of trout, woodcock, dandelions.
About now the senses blur. But I remember even so a transcendent pont neuf -- not the usual tartlet but a giant puff pastry pizza filled with frangipane, pastry cream fortified with crushed macaroons. And at Papa's urging, "the very best marriage of desserts," giant California prunes drowned in crème fraiche, the closest the French come to sour cream. Chocolate truffles again, and more champagne. Instructions to find the Paris-bound Autoroute. Backing the car out of the courtyard. Papa promising another rendezvous soon, wicked, seductive. Jean and Pierre waving goodbye. Pierre's Olympe out in the street directing traffic. Then just as we are about to pull away, the frères Troisgros running after with something in a paper wrap.
"Fresh marcigny cheese. It just arrived. You must eat it tonight." A moist dripping bundle of creamy soft goat cheese.
Olympe signals. All traffic snarls. The car lurches forward. In my head umbrellas unfurl, roses twirl, red-eyed pups nibble almond tart, snails are munching away and Papa is savoring his Bonnes-Mares.
All is balmy in Troisgros country.
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