Page 139 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace

Fig. 3 Fig. 4

warmer and a bain-marie to maintain temperature and a large from Monaco to the Grand in Lucerne, then on to the Savoy in the heart – the so-called Hotel de Luxe, with its odious commercialism, its towns. The restaurants of the deluxe hotels became symbols of
tip-up cover to prevent the meat from drying out), the carving London, the Ritz in Paris and the Carlton in London, he helped to ostentation, its bazaar-style architecture with colonnades on the sixth floor. everything that was wrong with the catering industry, places for
table came to symbolise the dining rooms of the great restaurants, spread the new gastronomic trend through the luxury sector. The The Hôtel de Luxe where they try to replace the real with the phoney and food lovers to avoid. In the 1960s and 70s anyone wanting to
especially those in deluxe hotels. In addition, it was nearly always standard of food became crucial to a hotel’s reputation. The same butter with margarine, where unnamed sauces stand in their multicoloured eat well did not go to a top-class hotel but to some little place
engraved with the restaurant’s coat of arms and, when not in use also applied to shipping companies at the turn of the twentieth bottles waiting to be spread over inglorious ratatouilles. mentioned by the new restaurant guides.
to serve guests, would stand in all its glory by the entrance. The century. Here, too, it was Auguste Escoffier who paved the way, But it has not! Chance, the secular version of Providence, has enabled While nouvelle cuisine first emerged in the 1960s, the magazine
head waiter would wheel it to the appropriate table and carve in planning the kitchens and determining the menus to be served on the home of the divine Rabelais to remain a food-lover’s paradise! The which became the manifesto for the new style of cooking was
28
front of the guests. board the ships of the Hamburg-America Line. The Beau-Rivage souls of Grandgousier, Gargantua and Pantagruel, those superhuman eaters launched by Gault and Millau in 1973. However, it was not until
The carving table became such a potent symbol of the hotel Palace’s menu for 25 February 1875 is an excellent illustration. It and drinkers, are still very much present in the land that inspired the the 1980s, when numerous changes of ownership took place and
to which it belonged that many survived the ravages of time. Even displays all the typical characteristics of nineteenth-century fine magnificent epic of joy, health and enjoyment of life. It is as though the large international hotel chains were formed, that things started to
when no longer serviceable they were not discarded but, at worst, dining: soup and vol-au-vent, followed by fish and various meat towers of Abbey of Thélème still cast their benevolent shadow across this improve. The increasing influence of the restaurant guides and the
were kept in a cellar or a shed, lovingly watched over by successive dishes, grilled, roasted, with sauce, white meat, red meat and game harmonious landscape where, as in no other place on earth, men recognised desire to make the best and most profitable use of often expensive
members of staff who remained firmly attached to an object which, (see p. 145). And to finish, a selection of desserts, probably in the and savoured life’s pleasures.’ 26 premises led the owners of luxury hotels to hire young chefs
in their view, embodied the excellence of the restaurant. tradition of Carême and Urbain-Dubois. And that was only at the beginning of the 1920s. It was true with the proviso that they raised the standard of the restaurants to
Another item which often appeared alongside the carving As 1914 approached, deluxe hotels had fully adopted the that the cuisine of the luxury hotels had sunk into a certain routine, compete with the best in the business. This often involved a dual
table in the dining room and rapidly acquired almost equal status transformations in cuisine and table service and were able to offer becoming repetitive, stodgy and second-rate. Decorous, formal process. Alongside a ‘gastronomic’ restaurant, competing in the race
was the duck press, made famous by the recipe for canard au sang, an increasingly demanding international clientele the very best of service in the dining room became more important than the work for Michelin stars and Gault Millau toques with faultless service and
or pressed duck, invented by Frédéric Delair, at La Tour d’Argent the nineteenth-century bourgeois lifestyle. of the kitchen, as though the head waiters were taking some kind cuisine, there was often a more affordable, brasserie-style restaurant.
in Paris in 1890. Very soon, the press featured in the catalogues of revenge on the chefs. Deluxe hotels were once more brought back to the position they
23
of catering suppliers. Among them were France’s two leading DECLINE, STANDARDISATION AND REVIVAL It is revealing that in 1947 the finest restaurants in Paris did had occupied in the days of Auguste Escoffier at the end of the
industrial silversmiths, Christofle and Ercuis, who sold duck Immediately after the First World War the middle-class way not include any belonging to a deluxe hotel. ‘There were four of nineteenth century. To coincide with the return of the chef and
presses to customers worldwide . These spectacular examples of of life went into a sharp decline. Food was less plentiful, table them in the middle of the 1950s, masters of their trade and able to make the consequent return to gastronomy in its truest sense, hotels
24
the silversmith’s craft (almost always bearing the restaurant’s coat etiquette became simpler. The most obvious symbol of change the small but fortunate section of the population that frequented them usually invested in a complete renovation of their dining rooms
of arms) were also its trademark and a symbol of the quality of was the gradual disappearance of the centrepiece. This was also jump for joy. They were Le Grand Véfour, Lasserre, La Tour d’Argent and returning them to all their former glory. Somewhat surprisingly,
its cuisine. the main reason why such objects were no longer found in hotel Maxim’s. There was none better. One entered these places with the swagger with nouvelle cuisine, which meant food came ready arranged on
These two crucial elements in the history and personality storerooms. of an Austrian baron before re-emerging, the mind glowing from Mouton- the plate, came the revival of a certain tradition of service. Nearly
of the deluxe hotel can also be found at the Beau-Rivage Palace Nevertheless, deluxe hotels were all alike, all of them bound to Rothschild, the head buzzing with confused dreams of a future to be built all gourmet restaurants rescued ancient pieces of silverware, trays
where the splendid English-style carving table and the duck press a slowly stagnating tradition. In his violent attack on luxury hotels on knowledge just acquired. […] In those days Raymond Oliver was a used since the hotel’s early days, plates, dishes and tea services
are still on show today in the dining room. in the edition of La France Gastronomique devoted to the Touraine kind of commander-in-chief of kitchens serving under the French tricolour; dating from the opening years, from storerooms and cellars. These
The importance given by the luxury hotel business to a style region, Maurice Edmond Sailland, writing under his pen name a future Bocuse or Senderens’, wrote Le Monde. Not a single hotel were put on show in glass cases, so forging a link between the new
27
of service reminiscent of the splendours of the royal courts went Curnonsky, spoke volumes: ‘The Touraine is, of course, tourist country. in the list. approach and the origins and traditions of the establishment. The
29
hand in hand with a new focus on the quality of the cuisine. The Every year a cosmopolitan cavalcade of bouncing buses and roaring motor This state of affairs continued for many years and nouvelle cuisine most spectacular comeback was that of the carving table which
career of Auguste Escoffier provides the perfect example. He cars spills across this incomparable “national park” where the world’s most – in the phrase first coined by journalists Henri Gault and Christian reappeared everywhere. Restored and resilvered, carving tables
25
first went to work at Monaco’s Grand Hotel in 1884, where he beautiful chateaus are reflected in the calm, slow-flowing water of that most Millau – was the work of independent chefs who, like André Pic, were either adapted for use in the presentation of new dishes and
met Charles Ritz and began a career mostly spent in the hotel regal of rivers, the Cher. The peaceful and, it must be said, profitable invasion Fernand Point and other great names of the early nineteenth and recipes, or simply displayed for decorative purposes. In much the
trade. As he moved through a succession of deluxe establishments, could have unleashed in Central France this malady that strikes terror in twentieth centuries, were based in often unspectacular provincial same way that people who have won medals wear them on their

Waiting staff on the terrace in front of the Savoy Room. Tables arranged on the terrace.
Anonymous photograph, c.1920. Anonymous photograph, August 1917.

138 139