Insatiable (37 page)

46

M
EMORIES OF
M
AGUY AND
G
ILBERT
L
ECOZE

M
AGUY LECOZE WAS A SAUCY, FLIRTATIOUS SYLPH IN A FUTURISTIC
jumpsuit, with a shiny Dutch bob and thick black bangs drifting into dark-kohled eyes above a turned-up nose, and Cupid’s bow lips so red and perfect, they might have been painted on with enamel. (Years later, after she and her brother Gilbert had captured New York, she confided to a fashion magazine that it took her twenty minutes every day to paint those lips.)

But this was the first time I saw her, fussing playfully over the Parisian regulars who’d brought me to the original little cubby (yes, cubby) Le Bernardin on the Left Bank in the spring of 1977, a few years after its launch. So she might have been just thirty-two, and Gilbert, the handsome swashbuckler in blue jeans and a fishmonger’s apron, too shy to come out of the kitchen at first, was just thirty-one. He had a thick shock of shiny brown hair, significant sideburns, and mustache below his straight pointed nose, which he would twitch like a truffle dog in the heat of the hunt. For me, it was instant infatuation. I had a crush on them both, and on the stunning simplicity of the seafood, as well. Tiny gray shrimp nesting in a crock, delicate and sweet. Saint Pierre set raw on a plate, then bathed in a coriander-spiked broth before reaching the table opaque and sublime. The baby
bar,
sautéed in butter with cèpes alongside, was a contrasting punctuation in scent and taste and, ever so subtly, in texture. It was refreshingly more naturelle than nouvelle and free of nouvelle pretension.

The two of them as children, born eighteen months apart in Port Navalo, Brittany, were often left in their own small cosmos while Papa and Mama worked. Maguy remembers feeding the infant Gilbert, holding him, once dropping him on his head, tormenting herself, convinced that if he died, she would die, too. A reluctant student, Gilbert did not mind at all rising at 5:00
AM
to join his grandfather and papa on the fishing boat. As soon as they were old enough, Maguy and Gilbert were drafted for chores, long, exhausting hours scouring, scrubbing, destringling haricots verts at the Hôtel du Rhuys, the small inn and restaurant where the family lived upstairs.

With their parents focused on survival, Maguy and Gilbert mothered each other. They became inseparable. “Between us there was no space,” Maguy has written. At eighteen, already a local homme fatal in his skintight jeans, Gilbert went off to military duty in Tahiti. And Maguy left for Monaco and then Paris. Liberated from the military, Gilbert joined her there in 1966, picking up odd jobs as a bartender and in a beauty salon, in clubs and discos. She worked in restaurants and hotels. They danced till dawn. “We were happy,” Maguy recalls. “We had the best life.”

Then at twenty-six, Gilbert seemed driven to find a focus, something of their own. A restaurant seemed to be the only answer. It was all they really knew. They borrowed from everyone to turn a small antiques shop on the Left Bank into Le Bernardin in 1972. The first raves from the Paris critics filled the house. But they were ingenues, over their heads, really, and a couple of scathing notices soon emptied the place. It took three years to find their groove, Gilbert haunting the fish market to learn all he could, Maguy conquering her own shyness. Dancing on the bar in discos surrounded by pals was easy for her, but she always had to steel herself to walk up to a table of strangers in the restaurant. Then one day, the critic from
L’Express
rhapsodized about the turnaround, and suddenly they were pop stars—she dimpled and flirty in her miniskirts and pointy-toed boots, he with his mod mustache, smoldering good looks, and passion for fish and fun.

For me, it was a delicious package, a find for
New York
readers who were discovering in the early seventies the joys of eating their way across France—this adorable brother-and-sister act in an out-of-the-way spot on the quai, and Gilbert’s brilliantly minimalist fricassée of coquillage, the barely cooked salmon with truffles, and his riff on raw fish lightly slicked with olive oil. By 1976, even Michelin had noticed and awarded a star.

Because Gilbert was untutored and raw, with no exposure to great kitchens, he had no choice but simplicity, Maguy has written. The idea of raw fish, she says, came from Uncle Corentin, at sea off Brittany, who would take a fresh-caught cod, skin it, and eat it on bread. It was her own obsession for raw tuna that inspired Gilbert’s tuna carpaccio, she suggests. Of course the restaurateur brothers Jean and Paul Minchelli, lauded by the gourmand cognoscenti for their bravado, had been astonishing us at Le Duc with the exquisite raw coquillage, minimally poached langoustines, and oil-slicked raw fish I’d first tasted in 1973. And Maguy’s special friendship with Jean must have given inspiration, and certainly sources, to the novices from Brittany.

But that’s a small historical hiccup. The telling fact, after all, is that ten years after I’d first been so taken with the purity of his food, Gilbert LeCoze’s carpaccios and tartares and smoked salmon rillettes and his daringly just-cooked halibut and rosy salmon with mint at Le Bernardin in New York would forever change the way Americans cooked and ate fish.

Maguy and Gilbert had moved in 1981 to a bigger space on rue Troyon near l’Etoile (where Guy Savoy is now) by the time I returned. Gilbert was infinitely less shy and cooking more confidently than ever. How lucky I was that our publisher, Clay Felker, keeper of the money bags at
New York,
understood that what I ate in France was a predictor of what we’d all be eating very soon in New York. The yearly swing through France was still essential, crucial research.

Now at dinner in the Brittany sky blue nook off the Champs Elysées, I was that writer who had followed the LeCoze star for
New York
’s impressionable readers, the properly smitten Pied Piper whose lyrical waxings had prompted a flow of impressionable mouths from America. Small saucers of new dishes I must taste punctuated the meal. Gilbert urged me to join him after the kitchen closed that night at Castel, the late-night restaurant and disco hangout for chefs and food-world habitués, Gilbert’s usual haunt, where he smoked relentlessly and downed cognac after cognac. And we danced—disco but tight—rubbing into each other, provocative vertical seduction. I remember his lean, muscled body in the skintight polyester print shirt, one button opened, then two, then three, the hair on his chest slightly damp. Suddenly, we were in a taxi, kissing, caressing, zipping, unzipping. The same hand that so nimbly filleted a monkfish undid my bra with a single snap. I hugged myself together to get through the lobby of my hotel.

Inside my room, I had time only to drop my handbag on a chair. He was kissing me, tugging at my clothes, the room so dark that my filmy black underwear was barely perceptible against white skin, the bikini panties a puddle of lace around one ankle. He backed me against the door and fucked me standing up. I sank to the floor. We lay there kissing on a pile of pillows and covers he’d pulled from the bed. I stood up and opened the curtains a few inches so I could look at him in the light from the street and the sky . . . enough light to see that face, that wonderful profile.

We got into bed and shared a slow, romantic, movingly connected making of love. “I need to sleep a little,” he said in French. He had me set my alarm for 4:00
AM.
I was deep in sleep when it woke us. He pulled me close and kissed me, and just when it seemed like we might be leaping off a cliff again, he jumped out of bed. “I can’t be late for the market,” he said.

Gilbert was a wonderful lover. He loved to kiss. Endless wonderful kisses, sexy, teasing, demanding, romantic. When I was with him, he made me feel no other woman existed. He loved skin and breasts and everything two people could do in bed (at least everything that I knew about). He loved women. At the time, I don’t think I imagined the intensity of that lust. I never let myself become jealous at rumors of his womanizing because I never thought of Gilbert as a serious man in my life. He was younger, of course, and clearly needed to run free. (I can hear my beloved therapist say, “You never took him seriously, so of course he didn’t take you seriously.”)

In most of the years when we were opportunistic lovers, I had one or two difficult men in my life back home—funny how I managed so often to fall for men who loved women with such passion that they found it impossible to settle for just one. Anyway, Gilbert was in Paris and our times together were clearly all about heat and lust. Heat, lust, and dancing, my favorite after-dinner pastimes, my only drugs.

At one point, I was forced to acknowledge Gilbert had a steady woman. She would arrive at the restaurant on rue Troyon in the evening and wait for him. And I liked her, too. She worked in a lingerie shop. I remember Maguy taking me there to pick out a shocking pink satin garter belt edged in black lace, a birthday gift from her and Gilbert. (My rigid policy of returning all gifts from food-industry friends or acquaintances did not, in my mind, include lovers.) Gilbert and his woman did not live together. I don’t think Maguy or Gilbert ever actually lived with any of their lovers, at least not in France.

It seemed to me they were too attached to each other and devoted to the restaurant to accommodate the intimacy and demands of living with anyone else. We, their fans and friends, knew this. And Maguy has described that closeness: two French halves of a whole that made a life together. “Gilbert was the most important person in my life, and I in his. We had a bond that was blood . . . and more than blood.”

I mused on the possibility that they were lovers, too, incest being the last taboo in the emancipating seventies. The thought was thrilling. And from the way Maguy embraced me each time we met, rubbing and wiggling against me breasts to breasts, I wondered if one day we might be a threesome. We Americans can be so literal. The French are more artful, sensual, and such flirts. Maguy was clearly shocked when I finally spoke of it. Her hug was just a hug, not an invitation.

On one of my research trips to France, Gilbert agreed I could go to the market at Rungis with him in the early morning. As Maguy tended the last clients, we fled to his place, made love, and dozed off, but not for very long. Instantly, he was awake and we were driving into the blackness of the night. If he was thrilling in bed, I have to say he was almost as sexy in the market. I tried to keep up with him in high heels on the slobbering floor as he stalked the best sea critters, crisscrossing the vast expanse of the chilly market, poking the fish with his finger, sticking his hook into their gills to look them in the eye, challenging each fishmonger to find something even better. We speed-walked by Jean Minchelli, who was shopping for Le Duc, and I waved hello. In that instant, I lost Gilbert. I stopped in a puddle, trying to spot him, leaping aside as carts trundled past, threatening to roll over my toes.

Suddenly, he was back, grinning in triumph. “I was waiting for the
oursins
from Brittany,” he said. The best sea urchins were a prize. “What is here is the shit. Voilà. It’s done.” He’d beaten Le Duc to the best haul by hunting down the truck just as it arrived from Brittany and claiming an entire shipment of sea urchins. What joy. Would we go back to his room to celebrate? I wondered. No. Now he really did need a two-hour sleep before hitting the kitchen.

During late nights at Castel’s or on their globe-trotting tours, many French chefs talked about storming New York. And they would warn one another that New York is quicksand, that the critics are crocodiles, and that American gourmands are piranhas, waiting to devour unwary invaders alive. Gaston Lenôtre, the powerhouse caterer and master pâtissier of Paris, had braved Manhattan but, ultimately, retreated. (“He didn’t do his homework,” one vulture observed, “or he would have known many New Yorkers get married on Sunday.”) New York, not on your life. Japan, surely, said Paul Bocuse. And Disneyland was a pushover. Michelin two-star Michel Rostang and his gang of five chef chums figured Los Angeles would be less thorny than New York, more welcoming. And it was true. Le Colisée limped away from early success on East Fifty-ninth Street, after a dazzling publicity launch, with fish flown in from France and bread FedExed from the masterly baker Lionel Poilâne. Each day, they cut that precious bread thinner. And sometimes it was stale. Le Colisée soon faded away. With Joe Baum running the show at Aurora, the Parisian chef Gérard Pangaud did well, but not for long. Only Antoine Bouterin, a young talent of disarming sweetness from Saint Rémy in Provence, tucked under veteran Georges Briguet’s wing at Le Périgord, took root and bloomed.
*

But cozy as they were with their two stars on rue Troyon, Maguy and Gilbert wanted New York. The city was throbbing with excitement over emerging American chefs when the two of them arrived to case the state of our piscatory world in 1978. It was a time when most Americans knew only knew frozen fish and shrimp cocktail. Sea scallops got doctored on the boat for survival and the roe was tossed overboard. Tuna was canned. Sea creatures arrived at the Fulton Fish Market already postadolescent. All we had to boast of were our clams, oysters, bay scallops, soft-shell crabs, and Maine lobster. The latter, alas, almost always overcooked to cardboard.