Tarkington

Sure, outdoor cafes, a hundred years ago.

First off, the point about the Costes had nothing to do with them as people; its just that there are now an awful lot of their restaurants and not one of them is any more exciting than a cold grilled American cheese sandwich. Their “badness” is the same as Jean-Paul Bucher’s (another very nice guy), whose Flo Group sucked the life out of most of the very best brasseries in Paris. To continue the Korova dirge, the guys behind it were Herbert Boukobza, a professional restaurateur, who cooked up the concept, and Jean-Luc Delarue, a TV talk show host, who put up the bucks. Boukobza’s idea was to have a more or less plain vanilla menu kicked up with one or two wacky dishes (the phrase French style white trash cooking was used) more to get a laugh than to be really eaten. Anyway, what happened was that “fooding” had come and gone (the original Bon, Man Ray, Budda Bar, and all those awful places) and seemed to have been reincarnated in a new, exciting concept that was going to make a meaningful contribution. After all, Ducasse was making a big splash with his Spoons, promoting a messages that three-star cooking was a drone and that for food to be really, really good it had to be “ludic” (game/play-like) on top of its gourmet qualities. The critics decided this was definitely going to be the new thing – gastronomy you could chuckle over. It was all too easy to see points of comparison between Korova and Spoon. (Korova’s ketchup ice cream did look a awful lot like Spoon’s Malabar ice cream.) In actual fact Boukobza had no interest in doing a cheap version of Spoon, he just wanted a starlet-filled late-night place and was doing what came natural to him. I did a piece in March for a big American glossy on this exciting, new fun food trend and naturally interviewed Patrice Hardy, Korova’s chef. It was weird. Here I was trying to figure out how this totally French chef knew anything about white trash cooking while Hardy, a very competent, unsmiling, hard working guy, was trying to tell me how well crafted his food really was. The story was pretty clear, Hardy was doing your basic Paris bistro menu with dogged devotion while Boukobza would run into the kitchen every now and than yelling things like, “Hey kids, today we’re going to do camembert ice cream!” By the time Herme’s stand opened up, it was already all over – the place was officially on the skids. Being seen there was the kiss of death. The fun food concept had died too. Ducasse was concentrating on the Epicerie and Au Lyonnais and saying that, yes, there would be other Spoons but completely, completely different from the old ones.

My own theory is more mundane and is rooted in the belief that only Michelin stars justify big bucks. This feeling has been intensified by a very pronounced return to traditional cooking here. Against that background, I actually liked Korova. I thought it was great place to go to around 11 PM after the movies or whatever. The chicken coke was a bit much but not all that surprizing. It sort of tasted like a balsamic sauce. It was OK - just a little heavy late at night. At any rate, the current mood here is that the Coste are bad guys, Spoon is suspect, and the rage is traditional "lite" (for example Ducasse's Aux Lyonnais) or "upgraded regional" (eg. Helene Darroze).

There is an old saw that cooking in France swings between "terroir" and "epice" and after a five year infatution with "world food" (Spoon, Korova, et al) the French have returned to terroir with a vengance. y, None of the hot new "foreign" spots in Paris is thriving. Korova and Nobu are closed, Market is in serious trouble, and Ducasse seems to have moved away from the Spoon concept. His latest is Aux Lyonnais, a sort of Ducasse spin on traditional Lyon cooking. These restaurants got hit with a double whammy. For one, the French will pay 200 Euros a pop for Michelin stars but not for the sight of a starlet's legs. For another, they are in the grips of a comfort food revival that has put the biggest premium on pot of few since the Mere Brezier.

Basically what happened was something like this. The main investor in the the Korova/Nobu disaster was a French TV personality of the name of Delarue. He was the original main backer of Korova and then the leader of the Nobu group - essentially the same gang of TV personalities. When Korova (the Chicken Coke place) started to sink, they added an Herme stand in the restaurant and got some press out of it. No one really knows how much of the balance sheet Herme picked up. In August, Korova was placed under the control of the bankrupcy court and then, two weeks later, Nobu. The press reported that Delarue's exposure was four million euros (how he got in that deep, no one knows). The debt of the other shareholders was not reported. The hot question is how deeply Herme is involved. French bankrupcy proceedings are very complex and take years. The current consensus is that (a)Delarue will take the financial hit (b) Herme will excape unscathed, and © the kicky food trend in Paris (despite the dixit of Food Arts and the New York Times) was a wet firecracker, as the French say.

Unfortunately, it's a bit worse than that. Herme got drafted into Korva when it started flagging over the summer. The same backers - mostly TV people over here - were into both Korova and Nobu. Both restaurants were bankrupted at the end of August with a startling amount of debt. Unfortunately, Herme went with them. There is an open question as to the exent of the guarantees he put up to get in the venture. My sense is that it is still in litigation, but that Herme will get dragged through the bankrupcy court.