The Perfectionist by Rudolph Chelminski

Author:Rudolph Chelminski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

“Okay, guys, let’s go—we’re the best. We’re going to knock them on their asses tonight!”

It was with variations on this theme—exhortations as passionate as a college football coach before a big game—that Bernard began the service each day, lunch and dinner, during the high season of the warm months, when the roads were clogged with travelers and the Côte d’Or’s dining areas filled to near overflowing. Every kitchen worker, from Patrick Bertron, his newly promoted second, all the way down to the lowliest commis and apprenti, had the same three-star goal etched into his brain, because Bernard never let them forget it. His disconcerting inability to hide anything was paralleled and balanced by a constant process of consultation. His practice of asking everyone’s opinion on everything, right down to that of the dishwasher, would probably have resulted in a chaos of undisciplined jabbering under a different kind of boss, but with Bernard it meant a permanent dialogue. By its simple human contact, this dialogue built the ideal kind of synergy that professors with retroprojected charts try to teach in business schools; everyone around Bernard felt implicated in the life and the success of the Côte d’Or. Over the years, the staff’s complicity with Bernard developed into a bond that was as much personal as it was professional.

Pierre Loiseau recalled an evening in the eighties when he dropped by Saulieu unannounced. Bernard hustled him into the kitchen like a master of ceremonies, spread his arms, and announced: “Les gars—mon père!”—hey, guys—meet my father. “Bon soir, monsieur,” they all shouted in return, as courteous as all French young men and women have always been taught to be. The father was touched by the son’s gesture, but more significant for the Côte d’Or was the demonstration for the personnel that they were important enough to be introduced to the boss’s close family. Gestures of this sort were never known to Bernard’s guests, but they, too, formed a part of le style Loiseau. Where the Troisgros brothers continued the trade’s ancient tradition in commanding through terror, Bernard invited his underlings into the family and even his own life. He didn’t know how to do it any other way.

“I was surprised,” Verger said with unfeigned admiration many years later. “He didn’t do it like any of the other chefs, but he turned out to be an excellent leader of men.”

During the service, Bernard conducted his orchestra from the traditional position of the Chef: standing at the passe—the stainless steel platform where he received waiters’ order chits, and where the freshly prepared plates were set down beneath his eyes for a final once-over before being confided to the waiters again for delivery. It was there that he was at his most impossibly and tyrannically perfectionistic because if there is anything that sends a great chef into transports of Homeric indignation, it is the sight of an imperfection or disharmony so infinitesimally slight as to have escaped the attention of all his colleagues down the line, those

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