Back Forty: Where no pleasure is too small to be considered

Back Forty will bring you periodic reviews, interviews, and reporter insights about the stories they wrote. We hope you enjoy it as a companion to our content on TheFERN.org and our Ag Insider policy news site. You can subscribe to the newsletter below.

By Jane Black

About three hours and 15 minutes into Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, chef Michel Troisgros contemplates a plate of kidneys.

The sauce is, perhaps, trop piquant. Perhaps the sriracha is overwhelming the passionfruit glaze. And does the plate look a bit empty? Maybe there should be six, instead of five, kidneys per order. Should the chefs consider adding a vegetable? Some white asparagus would do nicely, but how should they be cut and arranged? If they are too long or too thick, they might be awkward for a diner to lift to his mouth. Has the maître d’ had any negative feedback? And on it goes for eight minutes and 30 seconds. That’s 15 seconds longer than it takes Tom Cruise, in Mission Impossible, to break into the inner sanctums of CIA headquarters, hover in midair over a mainframe, and steal a list of the agency’s covert operatives.

Then again, perhaps that’s an appropriate amount of time to debate the merits of a dish that’s part of a meal that costs 360 euros per person, and quite a bit more with a good bottle of Bordeaux. It’s also exactly what you would expect from the director Frederick Wiseman. The filmmaker, who turns 94 this month, has made 44 long-form documentaries on institutions such as mental hospitals, high school, boxing gyms, racetracks, and the New York Public Library. Many, like Menus-Plaisirs, run as long as four hours. Whatever the subject, Wiseman’s documentaries contain no narration, no talking-head interviews. The camera observes; the viewer draws his own conclusions—whether about the state’s abhorrent treatment of the mentally ill or how to perfectly dress a plate of kidneys.

In the culinary world, there are few institutions as revered as the Troisgros family. Their restaurant, in the Loire village of Ouches, is officially called Les Bois sans Feuilles, but it is known to fans, and really anyone with a minor interest in the culinary arts, simply as Troisgros. The restaurant opened in the 1930s. In 1968, then led by brothers Jean and Pierre Troisgros, it won three Michelin stars. Pierre’s son Michel, that fastidious taster of kidneys, and his son César have retained that highest of French honors for more than half a century.

Troisgros is renowned not only for its stars but as the birthplace, in the 1960s, of the nouvelle cuisine movement, which also included chefs Alain Chapel, Paul Bocuse, and other stars of the culinary pantheon. Nouvelle cuisine prized simplicity and invention; it jettisoned the classical French approach, with its reliance on butter and cream, in favor of lighter and brighter flavors. A case in point was the Troisgros brothers’ saumon á l’oseille, a simple fillet of salmon served in a bright sorrel sauce, though Julia Child fans may better remember her rhapsody over Bocuse’s “lighter than air” sea bass baked in pastry in the HBO series Julia.

Americans of a certain age may have less fond memories of nouvelle cuisine than Julia. In America, in the hands of middling chefs, dishes were often caricatures of the founders’ intentions. In 1979, New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton remembered “dreadful combinations,” such as lobster with melon and berries, and “blueberries adrift in a bright pink sea of cream and pureed beets.”

As you would expect, Wiseman spends a good deal of time in the kitchen, and watching the extravagant prep feels almost meditative. Racks of lamb are trimmed. Snap, snap, snap. A marinade is stirred. Whisk, whisk, whisk. Veal brains are blanched—improperly, which prompts Michel to march one cook to the restaurant’s library to review what Larousse and Escoffier have to say about correctly emptying a brain’s blood vessels. And despite the nouvelle cuisine commandment to minimize butter, butter is everywhere.

Outside the restaurant’s walls, young chefs gather elderflowers from a nearby pasture. Michel, César, and Leo, who is chef at the family’s more casual offshoot, La Colline du Colombier, visit vineyards and greenhouses. At a cattle operation, a handsome farmer tells Michel that managed grazing frees him from the whims of the soybean market and is helping to return the landscape to prairie. The pair watches as a herd of white Charolais excitedly moves from a well-grazed field to a greener one, with a new “buffet” of grasses. People should buy beef as they do wine, the farmer argues – that is, knowing the producer and respecting his practices. (It sounds less earnest in French.)

If this all sounds precious, maybe it is. But it doesn’t feel that way. This is not food TV á l’Americain, full of brutality, reverence, or both. Which is a relief. Images of slow-motion flames licking the sides of a prime rib (Chef’s Table)or the bellowing of foul-mouthed, pot-throwing chefs (The Bear) tell you little about working in a restaurant of this caliber. Wiseman’s style of simply observing—the personalities, the ingredients, the techniques, the extravagant effort that goes into every aspect of a meal at Troisgros—lets the viewer decide whether it’s aspirational or absurd. My guess is that most viewers dedicating four hours to the documentary will find it appetizing indeed.

Four hours, of course, is a long time. I watched Menus-Plaisirs over three evenings and, even then, I sometimes thought: Okay, enough. Still, cutting deeply would likely have removed some of my favorite scenes, some of which take place in the dining room. It’s a side of the restaurant world that gets far less attention than it should, since inept service can ruin a meal as surely as an over-reduced sauce can. There was something beautiful about watching a server iron tablecloths or tweak the angle of a knife by millimeters to get it just so. And there was something ugly about watching a table of American businessmen pull out their phones to snap photos before taking a bite.

By the time the credits rolled, I felt almost as if I’d been to Troisgros. I understood and appreciated its rigorous, if occasionally farcical, ethosin a way that I haven’t after eating at similar destination restaurants. Les Bois sans Feuilles is an institution, in the same way that city hall or the New York Public Library is, with its own personality and quirks—its own culture—fueling it. In the weeks after I watched the film, I found myself idly googling flights to Paris and train schedules to Ouches. It wasn’t simply about wanting to taste the crème caramel that the chef worried might not shimmer in the fading evening light of the dining room. Rather, I wanted to be part, even for one evening, of a place where no pleasure is too small to consider.