Photo by Dave Allen

Mille Fleurs' Martin Woesle: "There’s even a reluctance to wait 15 minutes for a dish."

The 19th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin once noted that it is not the heart or the soul that lies at the root of human happiness and equilibrium, it is the intestine. To the French of that century, it was axiomatic that the English and the Americans, those troubling delinquent Saxons who were so good at railways and telegraphs but so dismal at anything touching the refinements of pleasure, should have been gastronomic barbarians. They had no cultivation or appreciation of the intestine. And a culture that ignored the great digestive cycle that begins with the taste buds and ends with peristalsis could never — to Brillat-Savarin — be anything but antediluvian. The Anglos might have invented telephones and skyscrapers, they might be credited with the creation of the sandwich and Le Worcester sauce, but their palates, their noses... were the sensual equipment of blue-faced Goths.

Meredien's Rene Herbeck: “The essential base of cuisine is the sauce. The sauce is dying. We are living in an age that is profoundly tragic.”

Nick Juran

A century later, nothing has changed. American food may have conquered the Champs-Elys6es in the form of “Le MacDo,” but diner meatloaf and gravy, like their swinish British counterparts, fish and chips and pork pies, remain the universal gastronomical joke. The Anglo-Saxon countries may have luxury French restaurants reeking of faux nobility like all others, but beneath this exalted realm of derivative epicurean fantasy, they have rarely shaken off the legacy of a proletarian diet of torpid starches, crude sweet-and-sour contrasts, and a childish love of stodge. Is this a nostalgia for lost childhood — a yearning for the blissful days of the teat and the plastic spoon? Or is it a bloody-minded refusal to give in to better instincts and the Frogs?

Piret's Mike Almost: “There have been a lot of changes over the last six years, that is, since 1987 when the Mungers sold out."

Paul Stachelek

The dearth of French restaurants in San Diego, or even in Los Angeles, seems to bear out the latter suspicion. The foreign gastronome is always hearing dark remarks about the French “lurking behind their sauces” (one can imagine at once a perfidious Gaul in a string vest, nostrils quivering, leering from behind a Maginot Line of stinking garlic). But several such restaurants do exist. And they do indeed have the air sometimes of Roman garrisons in hostile barbarian territory.

The Meridien Hotel sits on the edge of San Diego Bay, on the Coronado side, its landscaped gardens potted with decorous pools filled with mute swans and teal. Its staggered terraces look out over the downtown towers, which light up at night and make a passing attempt at Manhattan. Many restaurants have taken advantage of this romantic situation, and the Coronado shorefront is littered with great glass cages filled with flickering candles where amorous gastronomes nibble at their red snapper and gumbo while gazing out at millions of lights.

But the Meridien’s restaurant, Le Marius, is different. It is decorated in the country-retro mode that is now de rigueur in certain Parisian places that pretend to luxury — all beige limestone floors, honey-glazed walls, hand-knotted rag rugs, and rustic armoires. It has no windows at all. Diners are obliged either to look at each other or to concentrate on their food, an obligation frequently nauseating in many restaurants but which in a place whose kitchen is supervised from the Meridien HQ in Paris and guided by Jean-Marie Meulien from its parent restaurant. Le Clos Longchamp, is nothing short of obligatory.

The young chef de cuisine here is Rene Herbeck, another immigrant, this time from the Oak Room at the London Meridien. Half Vietnamese, an exile from the war in that country, and an orphan in Paris from 1969. Herbeck was placed by his Parisian orphanage in Jacques Polette’s restaurant in Nice. The Provencal training still shows in the Marius menu, with its onion and tomato soups with black olive cream and John Dorys coated with tapenade. Later, he obeyed the usual wanderlust and itinerant curiosity of the chef; from the days of Alexis Soyer and Ude on, chefs have been professional nomads. And after Monte Carlo, Corsica, Geneva, and London...the gastronomic Wild West.

“Coming to America has been the biggest leap into the unknown of my life. It’s true that in the United States there is not the culture of the Table that you have in Europe. There are no real food shops, as such. And you are playing, as it were, to a particular audience. We’ve had people in this restaurant asking for mashed potato, bacon. I have to come out politely and explain that I don't make school food to order.

“It’s also true that it is difficult in America to attract the middle-ground clients...not the rich but the ordinary middle-classes. As soon as a recession arrives, the first thing an American does is cut good restaurants. It’s an absurd economy, because a gourmet meal in the United States costs half what the same thing in France or Britain would cost. You can eat here for $65. How much would a night at Arpege in Paris cost you...or the Lancaster? Of course, there’s nothing anywhere in California that even remotely touches something like Robuchon or Lucas-Carton. But still. $65. Americans think that is hugely expensive, when a Parisian restaurant could easily set you back $120. People here have no idea how cheaply they can live. But then, when you can eat a Mexican meal for $6, and when you consider the snobbery.... People here eat for prestige, not for the food.

“However, despite all this, I still think this is the best place to be. You can do original things here without worrying about people looking over your shoulder. I now do a buffalo with cranberries. Americans love their buffaloes, of course, so we do have complaints. It’s like serving up Bambi with cranberries. But we still do it, and it’s been a success. I wouldn't be cooking buffalo in France, that’s for sure.”

It is not difficult to imagine the tears streaming down the face of some wizened Westerner as he cuts into a buffalo steak under the soft chandeliers of the Marius while remembering that dreadful and moving scene with the buffalo tongues in Dances with Wolves. Nor is it difficult to imagine the exquisitely tormenting turns of etiquette needed to persuade a bullying, obstinate diner hell-bent on a bacon sandwich and mashed potatoes (“Goddam it. I'm the consumer!”) to change his mind and eat instead a plate of roasted lobster flavored with vanilla and sitting on a lovely pile of angel hair pasta.

But Mr. Herbeck is not about to be deflected from his purpose. “What is astonishing about this country is that everything in food is made for you. If you want a mayonnaise, you go to Ralphs and there are 20 mayonnaises. You want a sauce — they have 100 sauces. You don’t have to make anything. The notion of effort and individual creation has disappeared. See how there’s no decent bread or cake except in one or two places — exactly like England. And now they’re designing food for the next generation for the automobile. You heat it up in a dashboard microwave and eat it as you drive. That’s the future.” The young, handsome face assumes for a moment one of those grimaces of chefiy pessimism at the inexorable decline of manners. “That’s the whole system of society now. Eat in the car.”

It is certainly a fact that chefs the world over are in the vanguard of romantic pessimistic thought. More than anyone, they are convinced of the rising tide of nefarious barbarism brought about by the technologizing of daily life. Whenever you ask a chef what he thinks of the world at the present moment, you will get a cosmic shrug, a tilting of the eyebrows, and a long, soughing sigh, as if that is all that needs to be said about the Decline of Manners. Since the golden days of Careme and Brillat-Savarin, it’s been nothing but deterioration, and there is more than a hint of sad resentment at the in-the-car-eating Americans and their idiotic fads. A chef, sounding the general note of elegant doom, recently was heard to say, “The essential base of cuisine is the sauce. The sauce is dying. We are living, therefore, in an age that is profoundly tragic.”

“Basically,” says Herbeck, “the American supermarket is a child's idea of cornucopia. They are wonderful, in their way, but nothing has any taste. People can’t tell the difference between Zacky’s and free-range chicken, except that they probably prefer the former. In London, you know, I used to make a veal with a jus de persil, a parsley sauce, very concentrated, very intense. I served it here and it was sent back. It was too green! It really alarmed them. And it’s out of the question to use kidneys or liver or brains. Offal is...oh la-la |he grimaces violently). However, I’ve brought them ’round to other things, like the buffalo. You see, chefs can educate. Knowledge trickles down from the top.”

The suggestion of priesthood is also the chefs way of acknowledging his mission. And it might be that when Careme redesigned the toque for the venerable chef s head (he claimed that he saw a beautiful woman wearing one at one of Napoleon’s balls at the Tuileries and wanted to copy it), he was also thinking of himself as a priest. Doesn’t the chef in his toque have the air of a white Druid, master of mysterious gastronomic alchemies? Isn’t he really the priest of the Table and its arcane decorum?

Perhaps this is why Americans treat him with such distrust. And that intense green jus de persil might just be something from the outer realms of magic. Not only that, but he is also associated with the other magic wealth and luxury. Visitors to the Meridien, as the brochure says, “find themselves in another world as they stroll through lush gardens. Cascading waterfalls, bubbling streams, and blue lagoons are situated among towering palm trees and brilliant bougainvillea.”

In this fantastical world of flamingos, lagoons, and walk-in aviaries (the bar-headed geese, we are told, have ““been sighted flying over the peaks of Everest”) — the make-believe world of the luxury hotel, with its hierarchies, uniforms, and flights of absurd whimsy — the chef inevitably comes to seem fantastical himself. He is part of a team that counts among its members ‘‘hotel personnel dressed in crisp nautical uniforms designed by Nina Ricci.”

But the Marius, at least, with its warm and beautiful food, its zucchini blossoms filled with asparagus mousse, its quail salads with tapenade dressing, its grapefruit mousses with warm cherries, and its superb Provencal soups creates a world of its own. one in which the courtly anachronism of haute cuisine seems as natural in an American setting as it would in a middle-class suburb of Lyon. And so Ren£ Herbeck has no plans to go back to Paris and hunt Michelin stars with the pack. Having created in Coronado the restaurant of perfect discretion, he is going to stay with the gentle climate and the Imperial palms. “Why not work in California? It’s a carte blanche — you can start from scratch. This is the last culinary frontier in the West. Why leave it for Europe, where there are so many people chasing the same thing? Who knows...there may yet be a real revolution here one day.”

The Food Revolution? For years now we have been hearing brassy fanfare about the American food revolution. This subversive but elegant upheaval was supposed to have transformed not just the American restaurant itself but also the crude supermarket eating habits of the Middle American consumer. In a valiant attempt to defy the mighty convenience mentality, small food producers were supposed to have begun an imitation of the Continental European or Chinese obsession with specialization and quality. And one of the major centers of this underground subversion was San Diego, for here was Piret’s, the West Coast’s Silver Palate. And Piret’s — the restaurant and food emporium set up by George and Piret Munger in 1974, when it was called the Perfect Pan — was California’s gourmet propaganda outfit in the 1970s and “80s.

But the abiding curse of the American gourmet dream has always been the ephemcrality of fads. For Californians, at least, Piret's charcuterie shops, like gourmet chocolate (kept in temperature-controlled trays in exquisite boutiques) and hand-made cheeses were a fad. The fad came and went, and food inertia went its own blithe and hideous way, cosseted by the all-night luxury of Ralphs supermarkets and $6 Mexican banquets. The Anglo-Saxon love of pretty shelves of packaged food — every apple waxed and buffed with chamois, every single poppyseed bagel meticulously wrapped in a delicate skin of cling film — seems utterly unassailable.

And the Food Revolution? The food revolution might well have gone the way of the dodo. For the dodo, one feels, like the gourmet, was one of Nature’s aristocrats. And like the dodo and the aristocrat, the American gourmet sometimes feels as if he is a queer, feathered thing of the past, at best, alive in a world of mellow uniformity.

Piret’s today has discarded its charcuterie counters and reverted to being a refined French bistro. There are two of them, one of them in Encinitas and the other in La Jolla Village, that wondrous piece of shopping mall blockhaus that looms over Interstate 5, not far from the terrible Mormon Temple.

The La Jolla Village bistro is curiously tucked away on an interior gallery into which not a ray of sunlight ever penetrates. This may seem peculiar in a place like California but the mall designers of a bygone age spoke a truly international language. Inside, though, behind its large glass windows facing quiet shops, Piret’s — with its simple modem forms and rotating artworks on the walls — is clearly the culmination of an entire American generation's attempt to take bistro food out of the waxworks chamber of horrors and place it in, well, ordinary shopping malls, precisely where it is least expected.

Piret’s began at a time when James Beard was the godfather of American cooking and most American housewives (to point to the inevitably sexist fact) were plundering Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Volume I for their bouillabaisse and sole Bercys. Piret Munger herself says, “There is to my mind a logical connection between the women’s movement and the emergence of two-career marriages and recent developments in the culinary world — at least in the marketing segment known as yuppies.” In other words, between 1970 and 1990, the American male, probably sweating with apprehension and shaking his head at this exotic outcome, entered the kitchen for the first time in history. The result? “An extraordinary change.” The male ego. perhaps, devoting all its formidable creative energy to, of all things, food? The thought that digestive processes and massive social changes are two facets of the same convulsion is undeniably too good to resist.

Piret also points to another epoch-making change in the American culinary landscape: the introduction of the Cuisinart food processor in the mid-1970s by Carl Sontheimer, a “brilliant engineer and marketing genius.” With the revolution brought by the Cuisinart (a revolution as great as that created by Alexis Soyer’s invention of the gas oven in the 1860s) came an explosion of the American food media. The pedagogy of food was set to enter a new Golden Age in the land of the Taco Bell 99-cent lunch. And where better to stimulate it than in California, the state with the most varied and opulent raw materials in the Union? The Mungers based themselves in San Diego and joined the crusade.

The problem with food culture in the English-speaking world is that it has to be imposed from the top down. There are no real grass roots. And so fatigue is bound to set in. Mike Almost, articulate and youthful chef at the La Jolla Piret’s, agrees. “There have been a lot of changes over the last six years, that is, since 1987 when the Mungers sold out. There was the gourmet home cooking fad of the ’80s, which fizzled out with the recession, which we had to keep up with, then drop. We had quite a bit of interest then in charcuterie and French salads to go, gourmet classes, the pan shop. etc....in fact, the restaurant was only about a third of our business. Now that’s all gone. Those dual-income California midcHe-class diners? As soon as there’s a recession, out goes the French sausage.”

Piret’s has found that it has had to part company with the immemorial snobbery of the French menu. The Anglophone diner has always loved being tortured by the incomprehensible, and it is possible in New York and London to see stony faces in two-star eating holes squinting in anguish at tooled camelskin menus while their lips murmur silently to themselves the ornate language of the food Druids. Only the ludicrous suburban clod will actually give voice to this anguish and lean over, whispering, “Dear, what exactly are papillons?" to a red-faced spouse. The latter will usually have to make it up.

“But what are they?”

“Well, they’re sort of meat things.”

“But why are they different from other meat things?” “Oh. wait and see. We don’t want to spoil the surprise, do we?”

And God help him if he is asked to explain paupiettes. medaillons. or, more terrifying yet, fleurs. Fleurs! Medals? Butterflies? And paupi...well, is it eyelids? The English sometimes condescendingly written underneath these paragraphs of floral French (reading like cryptic sexual messages sent between frustrated 18th-century aristocrats) is usually brutally simple by comparison. It is like reading an early medieval menu from 11th century England — French for the aristos, Anglo-Saxon for the hoi polloi. "Fruits” may sound prettier than "today’s fruit,” but Porc farci aux prunes is a universe away from “Pork stuffed with prunes.” And as for fleurs...who is going to say he ate a zucchini flower for lunch?

But California is down to earth. No one in San Diego is going to start bantering about paupiettes.

“As you see, we now have a very simple menu printed on blue card and all in English. We have sandwiches, as you can see. We have a Munger’s meat loaf, and we do a Piret’s Reuben on rye. We do a California chicken-and-spinach salad with cilantro and cashews. In other words, we don’t refuse to do American food. We just do it well.”

Sinking his teeth into this light, fresh, and intelligent food, into the green favas from Chino’s farm in warm vinaigrette; the salmon fillet with medaillons of sun-dried tomatoes, pine nuts, basil, and garlic; the feta tarte Provencal: and chocolate mousse in its little lake of raspberry sabaglon. the foreign gastronome is surprised at the food’s lack of irritating self-promotion. And the meatloaf. sad darling of the hinterland’s diners, comes decked out in a bordelaise sauce and caramelized onions, reinvented, brazen, and fabulous — the apotheosis of underworld Yankee stodge.

If faddism is the curse of American food, then so is it also the bane of eating everywhere. The ascetic tortures of Nouvelle Cuisine have only given way to other, more chauvinistic modes: Cuisine Retro and Cuisine de ma grand-mere — each nation now seems lo be groping its way back to its peasantish, grandmotherly roots. The French have gone back to the countryside and memories of childhood. The British have, as always, copied them while pretending to do something original and are proclaiming the glories of gourmet steak and kidney pies and ginger puddings. The Americans have followed suit and gone back to meatloafs, pumpkin bread, and apple pies.

In each case, nostalgia looms large, a nostalgia often fed by myth. For while a Frenchman can actually remember rural and grandmotherly food of a high order, the Briton and the American often have to invent tradition where none exists. How badly, exactly, did your grandmother cook? In Britain the question is definitely embarrassing. And all those “traditional," “national" dishes of incomparable splendor and brilliance, so fiendishly swamped by treacherous Froggy sauces? Who has ever eaten a fresh Kentish cob-nut salad with basilicum dressing? Not the swains of old, for sure. But at least at Piret’s you can eat meatloaf and walnut wheat bread in the serene knowledge that you are doing nothing wrong. Since food is the great consoler, the greatest, most subtle bond with the past, a nation is ultimately doomed to eat its own food sooner or later. And from beginning to end, you can read the menu too.

The urban landscapes of Southern California are dominated by the neons of fast food. They have entered so deeply into the way Americans conceive of their cities that the idea of negotiating a San Diego or Los Angeles freeway without their constant, comforting presence is virtually unthinkable. Nowhere Is the prestige of junk food so great. And nowhere is restaurant food so linked to the snobbery of class, if we except Britain itself. And as in Britain, the ultimate food snobbery lies with the French, towards whom Anglo-Saxons have always felt a gratifying and groveling mixture of suspicion and inferiority.

But now the empire of convenience food is set to scale new heights of terrible brilliance. In ten years, it is possible that the entire fast-food industry will have been transformed by the advent of car food. If restaurant culture is indissolubly tied to the Table, to conversation, flirtation, and the pleasures of sharing (and thus to a fundamental lesson in civility and grace), then the car offers something else altogether: solitude, endless scenery, curious fantasies. The Southern Californian spends hours every day in a car. And the only thing that has hitherto been lacking in this private mobile universe has been food.

Fortunately for our hordes of satisfied but hungry freeway commuters, this problem has now finally been solved. Billions of dollars have been invested to find a system that will permit car manufacturers to install mini self-service restaurants in their products. The driver will buy his microwavable enchiladas suizas at a gas station, insert it into the unit built into where his glove compartment used to be. and by the time he is once more in motion, he will be eating hot from the oven with a plastic fork, oblivious to the tiresome inconveniences and delays of those strange establishments of past centuries known as...and he will have to pause to find the word — was it inns, hostelries, or ristorantes?

Of course, there are admittedly serious drawbacks to this master plan. In the first place, the vast increase in freeway accidents will have to be rationalized to excuse the food companies. But far more importantly, there will be no snobbery. There will be nowhere to show off. There will be no one in front of whom you can demonstrate your insufferable expertise in Napa Valley wines. There will be no dressing up for the waiters who always obsequiously compliment you on your latest Nicole Fahri dress. Let us face facts: the master plan is doomed.

No one should know this better than the people who run the Mille Fleurs restaurant in Rancho Santa Fe. For some time now, this has been one of the most glamorous restaurants between Los Angeles and the Mexican border.

The restaurant is not even immediately visible. The low Spanish building surrounded by real estate offices makes no effort to advertise itself. Mille Fleurs has a loyal and very wealthy clientele that already knows where it is. Inside, though, it positively swarms with self-confidence. Frenchmen with magnificent heads of hair cluster around the entrance and the nearby bar waiting to greet the Mr. and Mrs. Pringles and the local nabobs in for their grilled opaka paka with a few adroit flatteries. The elderly lady, for example, in her lame toque and peach Dior body suit... “A winning combination, Madame, a winning combination!"

The cozy dining room is dominated by a roaring fire and is carefully decorated with blue floral tiles. The windows are, of course, not large enough for anyone to peer through, not that there is anyone on the street in Rancho Santa Fe past seven o’clock in the evening. And here the successful lawyers and the Los Angeles tycoons and the retired industrialists who might have once dominated the world rubber band market or patented the definitive milk carton sit happily with their glossy wives in winning combinations eating the superb asparagus soup with poached chicken, the lamb with flageolets, and the chocolate and banana feuillete, which the meticulous German chef Martin Woesle makes for them. A contented purr of exclusion hums through the room. The waiters (can that really be the appropriate term here?) engage in a kind of social flirtation once reserved for obsequious courtiers in lace ruffs.

“We can certainly eat brains in this restaurant.” Woesle explains laconically. “Kidneys, too, no problem. We do well with the kidneys. And the liver and the rabbits. It’s true, though, that even here people eat much quicker than in Europe. There’s even a reluctance sometimes to wait 15 minutes for a dish. I mean, it’s no Denny’s. I don’t have a ten-minute service-or-money-back deadline. The idea of a three-hour meal is not exactly universal. However, we do have loyal clients who do eat brains. They know what they like, and they know where to get it.”

The kitchens at Mille Fleurs are surprisingly small, and Woesle almost apologizes for them. “It’s obvious that for American restaurateurs, or at least those in Southern California, decor and the creation of atmosphere are more important objects of investment than kitchens. At George’s at the Cove in La Jolla, for example, you have a fabulous situation overlooking the Pacific. But the kitchen...he’s a great chef there, but he has the same problem we Mike Almost all have. Look around you. Restaurateurs here probably spend more on a log fire than they do on their kitchens.”

With a wave of the hand. Woesle displays the cramped heat and frenzy of a typical high-powered kitchen almost disappearing under their own weight. The Mexican sous-chefs grin through billows of steam. The incestuous intimacy of the cooking trade reaches into every nook and cranny, and there is no escape. Those chefs who maintain their serene equilibrium in the kitchen are always a saintly miracle; but Woesle himself is one of the anti-prima donnas. He shows me the wine cellar upstairs — the '87 Puligny-Montrachets and rubescent upstate Zinfandels imparting to the room the establishment’s only oasis of calm — and declares that, like Ren£ Herbeck, remigration back to Europe for him is out of the question. But how many restaurants in this virgin Western landscape would be rated at three stars in the eventuality of Monsieurs Michelin wending their way Stateside and imposing some Gallic culinary order upon the natives? “Three stars? Michelin?”

He looks worried, then finally embarrassed. “None. Not one.”

Not one? “I’m afraid not.”

Downstairs the millionaires do not really seem to care whether the Michelin bosses have decreed them to be gourmets or not. The atmosphere has warmed up, and the lawyers are down to their striped silk shirts and gold-clipped braces. The paupiettes, medallions, and fleurs are all there, simple, lucid, and thoughtfully organized. The botrytis-sweet dessert wines are being multiplied by the extraordinary number of “courtiers,” some of whom appear to be sommeliers in disguise, and happy pink flushes have risen to the faces of the honey-blond California wives in their Cartier droplets. Money has come to roost here with its age-old coconspirators, food and wine. And the general glow of a symposium suffuses the room.

Of course, it is not really a symposium. The lawyers are discussing deals; the wives are discussing cordless telephones. No one is really looking much at the food. And the courtiers are dancing about speaking interchangeably in French and English, handsome Latins providing some mobile sexual scenery. But at least in this general combustion of perfumes, alcohol, flowers, and herbish sauces there is a glimmer of happiness. And the pursuit of spontaneous physical happiness, the ultimate desideratum of the long-nosed gourmet, is ideally suited to the deceptively simple temperament of California. Herbeck, Almost, and Woesle are probably right. It may not be the best place in the world to eat brains, but it may well tum out one day to be the best place in the world to cook. And Brillat-Savarin and the cult of the intestine? If we cross our fingers, perhaps Californians, when they are finally sick of prodding and caressing their New Age souls, will tum with a sigh of primitive and orgiastic relief to their intestines.