Paul Bocuse was a whimsical provocateur who brought glamour to the backroom job of chef and promoted his unique style of cooking with publicity stunts, such as posing nude at the time of his 60th birthday for Lui, a kind of French Playboy. Yet he was also highly serious in his self-proclaimed mission to restore French cooking to its true traditions by rescuing it from the jaded classicism of haute cuisine.
The pleasures of the table and the bedroom were never far apart. “Food and sex have much in common,” he said. “We consummate a union, we devour each other’s eyes, we hunger for one other.” The two essential needs of mankind, he added, are to eat and to reproduce, and both require him to “passer à la casserole”, which translates literally as using a saucepan, but also refers to a woman’s first sexual experience.
Possibly his greatest achievement, after being a remarkably creative cook, was to encourage a new generation of patron-chefs. Hitherto, the chef had often been a mere employee, but Bocuse encouraged the best younger ones to open their own establishments. He also inspired a sense of fraternity. La bande à Bocuse, his jolly group of chums, ran joint ventures and pooled their creativity: Bocuse’s menu credited a score of dishes to his friends.
With his flair for public relations, Bocuse became as much a national celebrity as any actor or musician. In 1975 he went to the Élysée Palace to prepare and eat a special meal with President Giscard d’Estaing, inventing a truffle soup for the occasion. When the heads of the G7 held their summit in France in 1989 Bocuse created a dish of Bresse chicken stuffed with truffles.
Over the years he became adviser to Air France, was consultant to the ministry of tourism and co-founded restaurants at Epcot and Disneyland Paris. He ran gastronomic cruises, helped to launch a company marketing beaujolais, opened a cookery school in Japan and would fly to America to cook banquets for high fees. He might be in Singapore one week, Munich the next; “the Kissinger of cuisine” he was called. Some felt that he was now too much the showman, not enough the dedicated chef. He argued that his travels were valuable for France: as a keen patriot he saw himself as an ambassador for French gastronomy.
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Known as “l’empereur de la cuisine française”, Bocuse was a tall, burly man with a powerful presence, a quickfire intelligence and a lovable generosity. He enjoyed making outrageously conceited remarks, with a merry twinkle of self-mockery. He was the prototype of the Rabelaisian individualist and life-lover, with many interests, not least his unique collection of 19th-century barrel-organs. He was also a master at the ritual among the Lyons chefs of playing practical jokes; he might send a gift of flowers wrapped round the rotting entrails of a hare, or import striptease girls into a smart Paris party. For all his maverick personality, he was a perfectionist in the kitchen, a man of huge energy who slept four hours a night. He would rise at 5am to visit the Lyons markets where he did most of the buying himself, despite having a staff of 50.
Bocuse’s cookbook La Cuisine du Marché sold more than a million copies. With his peers he imaginatively revived and reinvented haute cuisine, which had grown stale. Yet as he punningly pointed out, this was “pas une révolution, mais une restauration”: he and his friends were above all renewing links with the simple purity of the pre-Escoffier tradition. Indeed, towards the end of his career he moved away from innovation for its own sake and put more stress on the honest bourgeois and peasant dishes of France, such as such as pot-au-feu. Furthermore, he was scornful of nouvelle cuisine’s many modish imitators who gave it a bad name by letting the licence to invent lead to monstrous absurdities. “A sorbet with camembert? Disgusting!” he spat.
Paul François Pierre Bocuse was born in 1926 at Collonges-au-Mont-d’Or, just north of Lyons, where since 1765 his family had run a modest auberge beside the Saône river. During the war he worked in the slaughterhouse of a Vichy-run youth camp before being conscripted into the Free French forces, where he was wounded in the chest by gunfire. He also witnessed the killing of a dozen Germans, an event that he recalled with horror.
He spent six years at La Pyramide restaurant in Vienne, serving as an apprentice to Fernand Point, the originator of “la nouvelle cuisine”. After his father’s death in 1959 Bocuse set about turning the family auberge into a luxury showplace of the new cooking, spurning rich sauces and relying on fresh, high-quality ingredients cooked rapidly in their own juices, often with a bold blending of flavours. He quickly succeeded, winning his first Michelin star in 1961; by 1965 he had three.
His luxurious restaurant remained a family concern, with his wife of about 70 years Raymonde (née Duvert) and daughter, Françoise, managing the finances and front-of-house. Not one to be restrained by the details of a nuptial contract, Bocuse also had two mistresses, Raymone Carlut, with whom he had a son, Jérôme, who is a chef, and Patricia Zizza. “I adore women and we live too long these days to spend a whole life with only one,” he explained. “I work as if I will live to be 100, and I enjoy life as if the next day will be my last.”
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He recalled an American writer who interviewed him for her magazine: “I told her, ‘The day you put me on your cover, I’ll take you beneath my covers’. A few weeks later, I made the front and, true enough, kept my promise.” A triple-heart bypass operation slowed him down, although he still insisted it was a matter of how many times a day, rather than a month, he could make love. “It’s all a matter of how smoothly the restaurants are running,” he said.
Bocuse, whose kitchen staff and waiters were all male, was widely considered to be a “phallocrat”, which the French translate as “male chauvinist pig”. He derisively crossed swords with the star female chefs of other restaurants, believing that a woman’s place was in the office and not at the stove.
In 1989 the influential Gault Millau guide demoted his restaurant from 19 points to 17, alleging that his many absences had affected its quality. Bocuse hit back, saying that Christian Millau, the guide’s co-owner, knew little about food and would bring his terrier on inspection visits. “He feeds my food to this dog, who tastes, then wags its tail,” he said. “The rating I get depends on how many times it wags.”
Paul Bocuse, chef, was born on February 11, 1926. He died from the effects of Parkinson’s disease on January 20, 2018, aged 91