Sixty top chefs from France and beyond came together on Wednesday to deliver a feast for 650 at the Château de Versailles. The culinary luminaries included top French toques like Michel Troisgros, Michel Rostang, and Hélène Darroze. All worked at their variations on local sea bass, scallops, lobster from Brittany, Challans duck, tender lamb, and nutty morels. Twenty-two sommeliers served 310 bottles of fine wine, including a Cheval Blanc 2004 and a Château d'Yquem 1996. Eight thousand white tulips set the tone on an unseasonably warm April evening outside Paris.
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Billed the Ultimate Dinner Party, the event celebrated UNESCO's decision last fall to name the “Gastronomic meal of the French” to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, alongside such sundry treasures as falconry, Peking opera, North Croatian gingerbread-making, and Turkey's Kırkpınar oil wrestling festival. The gastronomic meal of the French doesn't refer, according to its official application, to any specific recipes–this isn't a prize for best cassoulet. It's an ode to the canon of rituals and significance in French culture of the festive meal passed down through generations, even Sunday lunch at grand-maman's, far from the Michelin-starred tables tourists salivate over.
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The palace of Versailles, itself UNESCO-listed, is considered the birthplace of the modern French meal. “It was especially under King Louis XIV (1643-1715) that a decision was made to invent a great cuisine different from the traditional medieval cuisine and different from that of other countries,” says Jean-Robert Pitte, a gastronomy specialist and former president of the Sorbonne who was among the leaders of the bid for UNESCO recognition. “It was at Versailles that this cuisine was invented, founded on a very sharp reduction in spices; a reduction in acidic and sweet and sour flavors; an increase in fats, butter, cream; much more refined dishes–vegetables, green in particular, white meats, less game,” explains Pitte. “We see cuisine transformed completely in that era. It happened at Versailles, and then it spread through all of high society and then working-class cuisine.”
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The dinner was served in the palace's grand Gallery of Battles, just steps from the Grand Couvert, where Louis XIV would dine as a crowd from his court looked on. The chefs, all listed with the Relais & Châteaux network of luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants, worked in makeshift kitchens set up along a single hallway of the palace, surveyed by lifesize statues of Louis XIV and Co.
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Two U.S.-based chefs made the trip, each to prepare a single dish for only a handful of tables. Daniel Humm of New York's Eleven Madison Park contributed a touch of sweet and savory with his lamb saddle with squash and parsnip purées and green Savoy cabbage, while Jonathan Cartwright of Kennebunkport, Maine's White Barn Inn offered line-caught sea bass and ravioli of Breton lobster, green spring asparagus, cognac butter and Champagne emulsion.
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At €890 ($1,280) a plate, the proceeds were to benefit France's project for a Cité de la Gastronomie, an interactive museum that will showcase fine eating and that was part of France's promise to promote gastronomy in its UNESCO bid. At the chefs' request, some proceeds will also go to Japanese restaurateurs who fell victim to the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Japanese chefs Kiyomi Mikuni and Hiroshi Yamaguchi each presented dishes at Versailles.
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy was a big proponent of France's application to UNESCO. Chefs gathered before the event at the Elysée Palace for a photo with Sarkozy, but instead posed with the Elysée's chefs when Sarkozy couldn't make it. (In fairness, the French leader does have a couple of fresh troop deployments in African civil wars to tend to, although one chef joked the photo would have been bad form on the day the government rebuffed an opposition proposal to raise the sales tax for restaurant meals.)
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The move to classify the French gastronomic meal a UNESCO treasure was viewed with some skepticism abroad. But chefs and other proponents of the bid say this isn't an instance of French arrogance. Michel Troisgros, the youngest in his family's line of Michelin-starred chefs, was quick to point out that UNESCO also honored traditional Mexican cuisine in its latest batch of celebrated intangibles and hopes other countries apply. “This recognition of France will have value only if very quickly UNESCO recognizes all the countries in the world. For me, every cuisine deserves recognition, even that of Burkina Faso, of Mali, of Laos, where I have traveled,” says Troisgros. “Every country has its ritual.”
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And there is no shortage of foreigners who feel the French deserve it. Jonathan Cartwright of The White Barn Inn in Kennebunkport, Maine, calls the UNESCO classification “a little tip of the hat.” “When we think of doing grand meals, we really do think of experiences that we've had in France, most certainly. And this one is a superb example of that. Who could bring in so many chefs together from so many nationalities and do it in such a grand setting as in Versailles in France,” says Cartwright. “It is a real pastime for the French; it always has been for centuries,” he says. “Even a simple farmhouse meal is done with a sort of ceremony in France in the times that I've had it. They have captured the essence of good living and they really do that with cuisine.”
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Frightened by the encroachment of le sandwich and le fast-food, French gastronomes saw the need for action. France's application to UNESCO cited polls claiming that 95.2 percent of French people in 2009 considered the gastronomic meal part of their cultural heritage and identity, and 98.7 percent want to safeguard it and pass it down to the next generation. But many, like everywhere else, feel they just don't always have the time to put an effort into eating well. Was protecting the lifestyle urgent? “Important things are always urgent,” says Jean-Robert Pitte, with French flair.
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