Having lunch at a Michelin three-star restaurant not long ago—a Michelin three-star restaurant in New York City, admittedly, but a Michelin three-star restaurant nonetheless—I was served a featureless little round of beef, the kind you get in Business Class, slathered with liquefied foie gras and topped with a big fluff of rhubarb mousse. I gave it three stars, all right: one for silly, one for ugly, one for pretty much inedible. Oh, well. At least it wasn't boring. I find a lot of fancy French food boring these days. Menus are as predictable as was the old soupe à l'oignon⁄coq au vin variety. This time the clichés are fish tartare, "gazpacho" with shellfish, foie gras with tropical fruit… And, by the way, is there a law that the final savory course of every French tasting menu (when it's not beef with rhubarb foam) must be either lamb or squab? It's enough to make you want to order in.

That's what I was thinking, anyway, when I sat down to another three-star lunch recently, this one on the far side of the Atlantic, not in France, exactly, but in French-speaking (and French-eating) Switzerland. But this time, when the food started appearing on the table, I wasn't bored at all. Far from it. I was dazzled. I fell in love with French cooking again.

There was a small ceramic bowl of jellied chayote consommé concealing minuscule orbs of foie gras, with a thick cream of celery beneath and crunchy shreds of raw chayote and a scattering of sea salt on top. There were meltingly tender, subtly flavored baby scallops from Brittany, almost raw, wrapped in a film of spinach, topped with a bit of osetra caviar and surrounded by a lightly creamy sauce of sea urchin—a sauce so delicate that the unmistakable flavor of that sea creature was expressed as a haunting accent instead of some overpowering take-your-iodine pronouncement. There was an Asian-inflected but unmistakably French preparation of glistening white barbue (brill) stuffed with a "chutney" of mango, pineapple, and ginger, decorated with carrot pearls, and moistened with an acidulated carrot sauce flavored with lime juice and more ginger. There was one wonderment after another.

The skill with which the flavors and textures of this food were posed in harmonious contrast to one another was nothing short of masterly. The ingredients themselves sang with freshness and flavor. The finished works were elegant but vivid, subtle and forthright at the same time. This was some of the best food, in any genre, that I'd had in years—the kind of food that reminds people why French cooking had such a high reputation to begin with. I have no hesitation in calling the man responsible for this cuisine a great chef, a true culinary giant. But even if you follow fine French cooking closely, even if you're a regular chez Ducasse and Robuchon, it is quite possible that you've never heard of him. And it is almost certain that you haven't been to his restaurant, at least not in its current incarnation.

The chef in question is Philippe Rochat, and his eponymous restaurant occupies the attractive old Hôtel de Ville (Town Hall) in Crissier, a suburb of Lausanne, in the canton of Vaud. If the location sounds familiar, it's because the site is hallowed ground in sophisticated culinary circles: it was once the purview of Fredy Girardet, who for almost two decades was widely considered to be the best chef in the world. His admirers called him "le pape", the pope—not the king, with that term's implications of temporal grandeur and hauteur, but the pope, the spiritual leader, the enlightened man, above mere earthly things. Indeed, Girardet was a consummate technician with a generous heart and a pure spirit that seemed to suffuse his always surprising, always perfectly crafted food. He was, to put it mildly, a tough act to follow.

The man who has done just that was born in 1953 in Le Sentier, in the Joux valley, about 20 miles west of Lausanne, to a Swiss father and an Italian mother. "I liked to eat," says Rochat, "and I was fascinated from the age of nine by the way the raw materials in the kitchen smelled and felt." At 15, he went off to apprentice at a small restaurant in Romont, in the canton of Fribourg, and after that worked at two top-rated hotels in Zurich. "You have to remember," he says, "that there weren't very many grand restaurants in those days, so beyond some place like La Pyramide in Vienne or the Tour d'Argent in Paris, the serious kitchens were in the big luxury hotels. Then, in the early 1970s, people started talking about Bocuse, Troisgros—a new philosophy of cuisine. This was interesting to me, and when I heard about Girardet, who had begun doing the same things here in Switzerland, I asked him for a job." Rochat signed on with the legendary chef in the summer of 1980. By 1989 he had become Girardet's second in command.

The story of how he came to buy the restaurant from his mentor—ten years ago this December—and of Girardet's subsequent disappointment with the sale has been told in these pages before (see SAVEUR, September⁄October 1998). Today Rochat says only that the transition was very difficult at first. Michelin took away one of the restaurant's three stars, and business plummeted by at least 25 percent. Rochat persevered, though, and with a young French chef named Benoît Violier assuming the role he had played to Girardet, and with his own wife, Franziska Rochat-Moser, helping to run the place, he won back both the star and the fugitive business within the year. (Rochat-Moser, who was a celebrated athlete—she won the 1997 New York Marathon—died tragically in 2002 after being swept down a mountainside by an avalanche while ski-trekking.)