Roux Brothers YouTube Link
Some years back, for a family birthday, we all went to La Grenouille, one of the last New York French restaurant lions. One enters the restaurant to be greeted by a smiling Frenchman decked out in a tux, who leads you into the dining room. It’s like stepping into a French fancy fantasy: riots of fresh flowers; bright murals; shimmering flatware, glittering jewels; gentle conversation; the light clinking of forks on plates.
Such is the shtick of the grand French restaurant: the illusion of stepping into a world of sheer opulence set off from the urban jungle by a heavy curtain and a doorman.
Today’s restaurateur goes for just the opposite effect. He showcases the bar, which in turn encourages noise and crowds. Sound systems pump music, waiters dress like diners. And the food is simpler: no radishes cut like flowers or items stuffed with other stuff and rolled in more stuff; or scallops halved and stacked between mousses. Often there’s even an open kitchen (scandalous), which depending on the place seems gleaming and silent or manic and burning hot. More, not less connection to the diner, is the illusion. Not so in La Grenouille, a temple where artful plates descend magically before you.
Today, rustic is chic. Our favorite restaurant is, in fact, quite rustic, down to the wood beams, tattered cookbooks, and exposed brick decorated with rusty farm kitchen tools. During a meal elsewhere, as I raised my head from a bowl of malfatti with mushrooms, I observed similar tools hanging from an adjacent wall, I pictured a vanload of chefs scooting towards a tag sale in search of faux farm treasures. Save for the bonnets and the butter churning, we might as well be dining in Colonial Williamsburg.
Yet, things haven’t changed too much. Yes, restaurants aren’t cloistered fantasies, but they’ve just flowed with the times. Yesterday’s muraled dreamhouse is today’s urban barn.
I’d rather not wear bell-bottoms or a top hat, and I’ll take my favorite salad of roasted pear, rocket, and a small dollop of whipped Roquefort over your Dover sole in cream sauce. But there’s something singularly compelling about the unabashed purity of French food, of which the Roux brothers are master practitioners.
Though retired from their 3 Michelin star restaurants, Le Gavroche and The Waterside Inn, the brothers can be seen on You Tube in their BBC cooking show. Filmed in the late 1980s, the show would be considered revolutionary today for its purely educational raison d’être. It runs a finite 13 weeks, each episode covering an aspect of French cooking: three days on pastry and brioche; three on meat; three on vegetables and so on.
Albert, squat and fat, Michel, tall and sort of lean, split up into their separate stations, demo a dish, and then wander across the clean white kitchen to mock each other’s technique.
“I find it very difficult to work with you,” Michel says, pawing at Albert’s short crust pastry dough. “Please return to your side. Shall I get the bicycle pump?”
One gets the sense that Michel, who avers limply a mission to help “the housewife”, dragged a reluctant Albert into doing the show. Nevertheless, they are humorous and enjoy the camera.
Both dismiss their viewer as little more than a simple-minded consumer, feeding the family on adulterated supermarket products. Lacking both taste and taste buds, they are a hopeless lot.
“No, no. That will not do,” Albert snorts, as the two brothers pick apart the wrapping on commercial stock flavorings. “Look at this. Spices, coloring, that is just absolutely wrong.” Michel throws some support for a “quick” stock of bones simmered inside pressure cooker with the classic bouquet garni (parsley, thyme, peppercorns wrapped in a leek.) But Albert will have none of it.
“Of course you know there are no shortcuts,” says Albert. He commences to turn out the flawless French scramble i.e. smooth, curdless, almost soupy eggs, a delivery system for cream and butter, stirred endlessly over a double boiler set over ever so gently simmering water.
For their shellfish chapter, Albert returns to his side of the set, steaming a potful of mussels. He strains and reduces the broth, whisking in more cream for the sauce, meanwhile arranging the mussels on the half shell around a plate. Sauce is spooned over, chives sprinkled, and the dish is done. Until Michel barges in from off camera.
“Albert, what are you doing? That is not how maman would have done it. That is for the restaurant.”
“Yes, but it is the only way, of course.”
“But this is for the family, a nice pot of mussels…” a lame nod to the viewer before moving on to a fancy preparation of his own. The two clink glasses of wine. “Happy cooking,” and on to the next show.
Their skill is unmistakable and unattainable, unless you happen to be a 12-year-old French kid ready to spend decades peeling and filleting from dawn till dusk. But such is the value of the Roux show. Practice makes perfect, and this is what can be done with food. Ingredients should be respected rather than abused by a half-assed tv cook.
The dishes-tomato roses, daisies made from concentric circles of salmon and whitefish, puff pastry canapés in the shape of a duck, sole smothered in cream, turned vegetables-are hopelessly dated. Poached eggs in an avocado shell napped with freshly made mayonnaise is slightly repelling and probably unfamiliar to anyone but a French senior citizen. Bechamel courses through their veins.
But they cook the finest food of their day, the way it was meant to be cooked, and they believe religiously in the dishes. This is how they were taught and this is how you should eat.
Every once in a while it’s nice to reflect on the first guy who dunked a basketball or perfected the 3-4 defense or fine-tuned the art of bunting. Or, a la the Roux brothers, rolled out the perfect omelet with a sprig of chervil, or deboned a baby chicken to be stuffed with chicken mousse. A glass of wine, a bowl of beef consommé, tuxedos, silver service, riotous flowers. Now I’m in the mood to go back to La Grenouille. Sort of.
