Girardet after Girardet

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By Colman Andrews
photograph by Christopher Hirsheimer Source: Saveur
Frédy Girardet is not content. At first, you might think that he would be. He retired two years ago, aged 60, at the top of his game as one of the great chefs of the late 20th century—some would say the greatest. He is rumored to have received over $2 million for his legendary three-star restaurant in the Swiss town of Crissier, just outside Lausanne. He is able today to drive a brand-new black Mercedes-Benz Elegance station wagon and to live in a roomy villa—full of art and furnished in the cool, contemporary style he likes so much—above the wine-producing village of Féchy, overlooking Lake Geneva and the Alps. (“Every day I see a different Mont Blanc,” he says.)      Downhill from his house, the commune has even given Girardet a tiny patch of first-rate vineyard, which annually yields a few hundred bottles of crisp, faintly floral white wine. The vineyard bears a placard with a dedication to the chef that gushes, in part: “Every dish you made became a pleasure for the senses, a reason to love, to discover, to dream. Your concern for perfection animated all your works, and thanks to you the fruits of the earth were married together to offer us one of the most beautiful symphonies, that of the heart….” This is the kind of encomium Girardet inspires.   And yet, he is not content. One problem is that the encomiums are now in the past tense. “Things are not exactly as I would like,” says Girardet in his unmistakable deep voice. “I would like to be more active, to be able to shop still for fish, for vegetables, to taste wine. I would never have sold my restaurant if I’d known it was going to be like this.” Girardet has invited us to visit him at home, along with his (and our) friend Louis-Philippe Bovard, whose family winery, not far away in the lakefront town of Cully, is one of the best and most famous in the canton of Vaud. We drink Girardet’s own féchy now, however, as we sit around a large table on a terrace paved with pale unpolished stone, framed by old catalpa trees, talking with Girardet, his mother, Georgette, and his wife, Muriel—while his amiable airedale, Ben, scurries across the grass. “You know,” says 88-year-old Georgette, highly animated and full of charm, as we sip wine in the twilight, “Frédy’s father was also a very good chef.” Benjamin Girardet cooked for years at the Hôtel Central Bellevue in Lausanne (now gone but once considered among the best tables in town) and then, in 1965, took over the bistro in the town hall in Crissier. “At first,” recalls Georgette, “we served a plat du jour at noon, and turned the place into a café at night. We slept very little….” Frédy, meanwhile, had begun his own culinary apprenticeship, working at a respected Lausanne restaurant called Le Grand Chêne. When his father died suddenly at the age of 56, shortly after assuming the proprietorship of the Crissier bistro, Frédy took his place.   “In 1970 or ’71,” Girardet remembers, “I began making cuisine, not just bistro food, and the place grew little by little. At first, I cooked in a classic style. One must have that. It’s the basis of everything. Then the challenge was to make the food lighter, more composed. I wanted to enjoy what I did, so I tried different things.” This was the era in which, across the border in France, chefs like Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, Louis Outhier, and (slightly later) Joël Robuchon were reinventing French cuisine, and Girardet quietly joined their ranks. (Girardet and Robuchon are great friends; each is said to call the other the best chef in the world.)   In a country known gastronomically mostly for fondue and chocolate, Girardet began serving his customers such delicacies as pot-au-feu of turbot and oysters with basil sauce, lobster with tomato mousseline and caviar gelée, frogs’ legs with radish-stuffed morels, and ballottine of veal kidneys and sweetbreads wrapped in cabbage. His cooking was never exotic for the sake of exoticism, though; it was always grounded in good culinary sense. (I recall, one spring lunchtime, a simple roasted leg of baby lamb coated with fresh herbs and moistened with its own juices, so elementary but so perfect as to be, as the French say, un plat d’anthologie—one for the books.) And his repertoire—the range of his sensible imagination—was immense. He is proud that he always remembered what his regular customers had eaten the last time they were in, so that they were never served the same thing twice. “It’s my temperament,” he explains. “I gave my character to my cuisine. I didn’t just cook for money. I cooked to please the customer.”    Almost alone among the top French and French-style chefs of his era, he eschewed consultancies and commercial endorsements (Bocuse jumping on the open door of his Rosières range to illustrate its strength!). It was said that if Girardet was for some reason unable to be in his kitchen, his restaurant would close for the day; this was perhaps an exaggeration, but not much of one. He was not a TV chef, a society chef, a celebrity chef; he was a chef’s chef, and a diner’s chef. “I served everyone from Nixon to Johnny Weissmuller, from Jacques Brel to Dalí,” he recalls. “Everybody came, from the simplest to the most important—because we were not pretentious. I cooked at Crissier for 31 years. The restaurant was the greatest pleasure of my life.” The last time I’d seen Girardet was at lunch at that restaurant (I still dream about a cold “soup” he served of puréed snow peas en gelée with frogs’ legs and caviar) in September of 1996, a few months before he sold the place. Why did he sell? Perhaps simply because he was 60 and had worked hard in front of a stove for most of his life. (Chefs have a notoriously short life span; consider his father.) One friend of his suggests a more immediate inspiration, however: Girardet was very close to a slightly older chef named Hans Stucki, who ran another of Switzerland’s best and most creative restaurants in the hills above Basel (see Swiss Treats). Six or eight years ago, the story goes, someone offered to buy Stucki’s establishment, and Stucki turned him down. A few years later, he changed his mind—but the potential buyer had disappeared, and he had to soldier on. Girardet, his friend suggests, didn’t want the same thing to happen to him. (Stucki died earlier this year, still cooking at his restaurant; two hours after he heard the news, Girardet says, he was in Basel, helping Stucki’s widow hold the place together.)   Philippe Rochat went to work for Girardet in 1980, when he was 27, and became the chef’s most trusted aide and heir apparent. In 1993 Girardet approached Rochat to ask if he might consider buying the restaurant. In 1996 Rochat found an investor and made Girardet an offer. According to one source, Girardet assumed that he would be welcome to stay on at the restaurant for several years, but Rochat made it clear that he was anxious to be on his own. In any case, on December 1, 1996, title to the restaurant passed to Rochat and his wife, Franzeska Moser (who is a world-class runner, winner of last year’s New York City Marathon). Almost overnight, Girardet disappeared from the restaurant, and he and his wife and mother moved out of their quarters in the same building. (“Rochat,” says Muriel Girardet a bit sadly, “was so nice before.”) Rochat kept Girardet’s name on the restaurant for two years—a source of friction between the chefs—and still works with most of the same staff, and in the same style. “For years, I did the hiring anyway,” says Rochat. The Guide Michelin stripped the place of one of its three stars after Girardet left. Barely a year later, Rochat regained it. “But Girardet is the Pope of Swiss Cuisine,” he says. “It isn’t easy being the successor to the Pope.” Arriving at Girardet’s home in Féchy, we weren’t sure what to expect. Would he serve us a salad and an omelette—an informal supper of the kind so many chefs profess to favor when they’re not in their restaurant kitchens? Would he cook for us at all? (He’d murmured something about a bad back.) It quickly became apparent that he would indeed make dinner for us, and that it would be a dinner of Girardet-style creativity and perfection—as close to a meal at his old restaurant as he could manage at home.   He has two adjacent kitchens. One, opening on to an informal dining room (with views of the mountains through sliding-glass doors), looks so new that it seems unused, almost like a stage set—an immaculate, semicircular black-granite counter, behind which are a small sink, an oven, a ceramic cooktop, and a countertop induction-cooking unit. Through a door behind this kitchen is a combination pantry and prep kitchen, with larger sinks, a dishwasher, an electric slicer, two Microbraun ovens, and three walls of cabinets. Here, helping Girardet prepare the meal, is a young man who refuses to give us his name or to be photographed. (He is obviously skilled in the kitchen; our guess is that he’s moonlighting from a restaurant—perhaps even Girardet’s old one.)   We sit in a dining area at the edge of the adjoining living room, at a table set exactly like the tables at his restaurant, with monogrammed Riedel crystal, gold-banded Cristofle silverware, and Bernardaud Limoges plates bearing his name. We begin with langoustines (the shrimp relative also known as scampi or Dublin Bay prawns) coated with sesame seeds, fried in butter, and served atop a curry-flavored sauce. Accompanying this, we drink Louis-Philippe Bovard’s 1995 Calamin Cuvée Spéciale—a wine made to Girardet’s specifications, crisp and acidic to stand up to rich sauces.   The next course—accompanied by Bovard’s classic 1995 Médinette Dézaley—is flavorful wild Scottish salmon filets, roasted in butter in a very slow oven, then served warm over an emulsion of fennel surrounded by extra-virgin Provençal olive oil with dill and tiny flecks of tomato and peeled red bell pepper. “The only way to eat salmon is warm,” announces Girardet—adding that he refuses to even consider serving salmon that is not line-caught. “I pay over $50 a kilo for whole wild Scottish salmon,” he says, “while I could buy filets of farm-raised salmon from Chile or someplace for $10 a kilo. But the farm-raised salmon have no flavor at all!”   Then comes an extraordinary presentation of young pigeon—the boneless breast stuffed with foie gras and truffles and encased in a crust of parsley and more truffles (finely chopped); the leg, also boned, stuffed with pistachios and the liver and heart of the bird. On the side are snow peas and spaghetti-thin haricots verts sautéed in butter. Girardet eats his own food with great gusto. (As he polishes off the pigeon, he looks at his mother affectionately and asks, “Was it good, maman?” “Yes!” she replies with a big smile. “I ate it all!”) With the pigeon is a 1981 Bovard Dézaley Rouge from Girardet’s private stock, surprisingly rich and powerful, lightly smoky, and just beginning to hint of its age.   Dessert is a restaurant-style assortment: a classic pithiviers (a rich, cream-filled, puff-pastry tart), marinated strawberries with vanilla ice cream, and a local traditional specialty, a very thin tarte à la crème vaudoise. “It’s a tarte à la maman!” announces Georgette Girardet gleefully. “Did you make it?” I ask. “Oh, no,” she answers. Muriel adds with a smile, “You know, it isn’t easy living with a chef. You don’t have the right to do very much in the kitchen, except arrange the flowers.” The next day, we join Girardet and another top local chef, Adolf Blokbergen of the Auberge du Raisin in Cully (see Swiss Treats), on the terrace in front of Louis-Philippe Bovard’s winery, for a tasting of his 1997 vintages. A great wine lover, proud that his was the first serious restaurant to compile a list of the best Swiss producers (as well as many of the top French vintners), Girardet considers each wine seriously, making brief, smart comments. As he samples a vividly fragrant new sauvignon blanc from the village of Villette (“Grapefruit in the nose,” he observes, “and a hint of bitterness on the palate”), Girardet says to Bovard, “You’re lucky to have the ability to do this.” “You’re lucky in your abilities, too,” Bovard replies. “No,” says Girardet. “My talent is to be a chef, and I can’t be a chef anymore because I am at home. Of course, I make something to eat, but it’s not my cooking. I have no assistants, no stocks and sauces. Last night was a special occasion. We had most of the work done in advance. We can’t do that every day.”   The discussion continues at lunch at Le Pont de Brent, near Montreux—Switzerland’s other three-star restaurant (besides Rochat’s post-Girardet establishment)—where the chef is French-born Gérard Rabaey. (Rabaey, who has lived and cooked in Switzerland for 25 years and counts Girardet as both friend and inspiration, says, “Everyone in Switzerland has profited from Girardet.” Girardet in turn calls Rabaey the best chef in the country.) “I was a chef for 45 years,” says the Pope as we finish with a superb savarin of cherries and pistachio ice cream. “Now, after a year and a half, I haven’t yet found a direction. To stop, after so long, has not been easy. But I would like to do something.”   Surely, I suggest, he must be deluged with consultancy offers from American or Japanese investors. “The trouble,” he replies, “is that such partners invest just to make money. They don’t understand the restaurant business.” But, he adds, he would love to work on a project in America. “I find an enormous number of people there who care little about food, but at the same time, some of the great connoisseurs of the world are Americans. I could not live in New York, but I could do something for Americans who appreciate the finest quality—maybe a culinary school on the highest level, or something with Joël Robuchon. But I never consulted when I ran my restaurant, and I never had experiences in other countries. My professional conscience didn’t let me. I’ve never had anyone offer me lots of money….” Then he waves his hand. “But that’s not important,” he says. “What’s important is the future.”    

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #37