Bingeing with Paul Bocuse

After finishing my exams, I was ready to collapse into my sweet, soft bed and cough for the duration of the weekend. But my parents were visiting, and we had planned a trip to Lyon to visit our former exchange student, Sophie. I hadn’t seen her since I was in fifth grade, and I was excited to meet her husband Michel and her children.

Here are some of my Sophie memories:

1) She introduced our family to crème fraiche, and would cook us French dishes that we would bestow with creative names like “Poulet a la Sophie”. When her stylish mother Francoise came for a visit, they made us Ile Flottante.

2) Sophie and I would play a Sega game called Teddy Boy endlessly, and occasionally hold Monopoly tournaments with my cousin Renny, whom she may or may not have been dating. I was too young to know the difference. Sometimes when she would lose at Teddy Boy, she would direct a stream of French invective at our television that seemed to go on for five minutes. She would never tell me what she was saying, despite much begging and pleading on my part.

3) Sophie was sophisticated and elegant. She was a bit older than the other kids at our high school, and wore shoes with square toes, something that seemed very exotic for our part of the world in 1987.

4) Because Sophie was sophisticated and elegant, I think she was fairly bored with American high school life. I remember that she used to go downtown with my cousin to bars and nightclubs on the weekends and come home in the wee hours of the morning, which made my mom nervous. Even at age 10, I knew Sophie was cool.

Since moving here, I’ve thought a lot about what it might be like as a European exchange student in America. I have heard from friends here that our giant, moist blueberry muffins, our twenty-four-hour services and our gargantuan, sparkling supermarkets are particularly endearing. But America is so spread out; there is so much space, and maybe less emphasis on family and community than in many European countries. Perhaps it can feel like a really lonely place. I wonder what it must have been like for Sophie back then.

When we finally reunited, she had hardly changed. I hope I have, because the last time she saw me I had a poodle perm, braces and acid wash jeans. Mon dieu. We had a lovely lunch at her flat – roast duck, potatoes, salad, cheeses, bread, and sliced pineapple for dessert. This was quite enough to keep me stuffed for the rest of the day, but we were instructed not to fill up because we would be dining that evening at Paul Bocuse’s restaurant, L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges.

Sophie coordinates events for Pignol, a famous patisserie in Lyon. She knows Paul Bocuse himself through her job as well as through her family, so she was able to reserve a tour through the Bocuse kitchens for us before we sat down to dinner. I was fairly quivering with excitement; as I told my parents earlier, “I don’t care how sick I am; I’ll make it to Bocuse even if they have to wheel me in on a stretcher!” Luckily no such measures were necessary.

This will sound weird, but the restaurant’s exterior reminded me of the façade of an American steakhouse chain. It was painted in all kinds of garish colors, with giant murals and kitschy ceramic animals scattered about. If the exterior was unexpected, the kitchens were in line with what I had imagined: immaculate, moderately sized and filled with copper. Some of the chefs accomodatingly posed with us:


After we were seated, Chef Bocuse came out and made the rounds at our table. He was grandfatherly but pretty serious. He disappeared into the kitchen, but then returned a few moments later and grabbed my arm, instructing me to follow him. I was being offered the chance to have my picture taken solo with The Master himself! It was thrilling, but I was also kind of freaked – and many of the pictures reflect this, showing me with a wobbly smile and a strangely cocked head a la Paris Hilton, as if I couldn’t quite process what was happening: “Is the father of Nouvelle Cuisine really clutching my arm? Please God, don’t let me have a coughing fit right now! Oooh, I hope I get to try some of those tiny pumpkin mousse cups I see on that rack across the room!” I wouldn’t have been more excited if it had been Jude Law next to me.


And then the parade of food began. Complimentary Paul Bocuse Champagne, those delicate cups of pumpkin mousse swirled with whipped cream and a sprinkle of bacon, and appetizers. I had “Dodine de canard a l’ancienne truffee et pistachee et foie gras de canard maison.” A dodine is a kind of terrine – this one had pieces of duck that had been layered with pistachios and truffles. The slice of foie gras was as close to heaven as it gets for me. And there was another surprise – a beautiful, glistening round of celeriac mousse topped with Sauternes gelee and a nice fat slice of truffle.

For me and my crippled French, ordering off menus here always involves a little bit of risk-taking and guesswork. I chose “Filet de boeuf Rossini, sauce Perigueux” as my main dish, but I wasn’t sure what exactly would arrive. I guessed that sauce Perigueux would involve truffles of some sort since Perigord is France’s truffle region, but that was as far as my speculation went.

What did arrive was a gorgeous filet of beef in a pool of rich, truffle-spiked sauce, surrounded by potatoes and cepes and topped with a generous slab of seared foie gras. Whoops. I probably committed an atrocious sin by ordering two dishes involving foie gras, but since nobody seemed to be sneering openly at me, I dug right in. I’m going to get gout from all this foie gras consumption, but that’s another story.

My parents split this fish, encased in a very pretty crust:


Then the cheese tray arrived. I really, really didn’t think I was going to be able to make it. I was stuffed, almost to the point of feeling sick, and I didn’t want to test my limits. But I figured if I was ever going to be able to eat a meal of this magnitude, it would be now, since cooking school has been daily encouraging me to consume more and more massive portions. It’s like my stomach has been going through Olympic training, except that it gets bigger instead of more toned.


My favorite cheese was the Saint Marcellin, which Sophie said is available in Paris but isn’t as good as that which can be found in Lyon. My hunch (call me crazy) is that even the worst Parisian Saint Marcellin is still light-years better than Kraft Cheddar, so I’m willing to take a chance. After the cheese course, we were each presented with a crème brulee.

“Ahh, dessert. A nice, classic crème brulee to finish a wonderful meal,” I thought happily before polishing it off. I leaned back and stretched, wondering idly whether I would suffer from insane indigestion all night now that I had concluded this marathon dining experience.

Then a strange thing happened. All the waiters started rolling up carts around our table and bringing out sweets from the kitchen. Cakes appeared at my elbow: dramatic cakes, topped with long dark chocolate shavings, and charming autumnal ones, topped with cocoa and meringue mushrooms to resemble a forest floor. Giant bowls of exotic fruit salads arrived, and tall parfait glasses filled with crimson fruit and sweet wine sauce were carefully placed in neat rows. Big silver tureens filled with strawberry sorbet and vanilla ice cream were set next to a plate of pretty white puffs that would become Oeufs a la Neige. A platter of Baba au Rhum was accompanied by fig and raspberry tartlets and tiny cups of wild strawberries and raspberries.

Apparently, the crème brulee was an appetizer. We were trapped, completely surrounded by a mammoth assortment of classical French desserts (and complimentary glasses of delicious dessert wine). We were supposed to request whatever we wanted, and as much as we wanted. I think I’ve had dreams like this.

I made do with a tiny slice of the “forest floor cake” (that’s what I call it, at least) and a cup of wild strawberries. “You don’t want anything else? You are sure?” asked the waiter. He seemed disappointed in me. But I couldn’t. I might have exploded all over Paul Bocuse’s pretty dining room in Lyon.


After finishing up and admiring the weird ceramic duck dishes and Bocuse ashtrays in the gift shop(!), we stumbled out into the cool night air. Later, I would toss and turn for a few hours as my body tried to process the enormous amounts of rich food and the evening’s brush with celebrity. As I lay in a half-dreaming state around 4 AM, I distinctly remember thinking, “Only a few more hours until breakfast!” God help me.