L'Ambroisie, by Bernard Pacaud

"Whither Tartaria?"

It's the question that's haunted at least a few ACX readers, not to mention its writer. But surely everyone has felt its tug when they glance at the clothes of passersby on the street, the megalithic glass blocks or formless blobs surrounding them, the nonrepresentational public art installations you're too "unrefined" to understand. The unkempt politicians, the hypersexed ads, the 140-word discourse. The myriad books and movies that prioritize everything besides fun, meaning, or beauty. A life full of noise and color and interjection but without underlying order or pleasure.

Perhaps I'm the wrong person to talk about this. Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince encounters a "serious" man who spends all his days counting the stars in the sky he "owns" and flatly declares, "he's not a man at all—he's a mushroom!". I am such a mushroom, in my profession and disposition—and without meaning offense, I suspect many ACX readers may share that. I have no artistic (mis)adventures to call my own besides some anime fanfictions and terrible fanart. There are better reviews of this review's subject, particularly Adam Goldberg's and Vedat Milor's. And yet, my regard for L'Ambroisie is such that, like a love letter unbidden, I'll write it anyway.

I. Introduction

First, a quick preface of fine dining for the unfamiliar. Although it can sometimes be "normal food done really well" (particularly in Japan, which has a rather unique formal ecosystem), in many cases it follows certain conventions: tasting menus, fussy presentation, high price tags. There are varying rating systems such as Michelin stars, the World 50 Best and La Liste lists, online platforms like OAD, and local guides like Tabelog, Gault Millau, and Gambero Rosso. The Michelin star scale ranges from 0 to 3, with even 1 being a high honor and a career achievement.

The following is a quick array of what people "typically" think of as fine dining, sampled from my own travels, as a supplant to years of experience:

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From left to right, top to bottom:

• Langoustine and peas at CORE by Clare Smyth (London, UK), 3 stars
• Mackerel and lemon at the Restaurant de l'Hôtel de Ville Crissier (Geneva region, Switzerland), 3 stars
• Toasted nuts and ras-el-hanout at Noor (Cordoba, Spain), 3 stars
• Foie gras and quince at Per Se (New York, USA), 3 stars
• Caviar, shrimp, rockfish gelée at Le Louis XV (Monaco), 3 stars
• Kamasu (barracuda) sushi at Sushi Ginza Onodera (New York, USA), 2 stars

All of them excellent examples of fine dining to my palate and eye.

Au contraire, a selection of places that did not live up to my standards, despite their high regard and reputations in the culinary and critical worlds:

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From left to right, top to bottom:

• Tuna sashimi with caviar, vegetables, and shoyu at L'Oiseau Blanc (Paris, France), 2 stars
• Smoked salmon and wasabi at Le Pré Catelan (Paris, France), 3 stars
• Salad and champagne jelly at Pavillon Ledoyen (Paris, France), 3 stars
• Beef hump with some jjang-like sauce at Mugaritz (San Sebastian region, Spain), 2 stars
• Squab, cheongju, red onion at Atomix (New York, USA), 2 stars
• Buri (yellowtail) sushi at Harutaka (Tokyo, Japan), 3 stars

The keen eye will notice a few commonalities: too many incoherent components to a dish, a clumsy approach to fusion across cultures, and a lack of meticulousness. A further critique on taste would extend to subpar ingredient sourcing, ineffective light (or absent) saucing, poor (or light, or absent) preparation of proteins (again, inspired by Japan and Scandinavia), and a lack of meticulousness (translating to haphazard presentation). This is not a new opinion, albeit a contrarian one.

It is worth noting many of these are very famous and well-regarded, with higher prices, longer waitlists, and more accolades (such as World 50 Best rankings or critical praise) than some of the restaurants in the former category. Pavillon Ledoyen has the second-farthest-in-advance reservation in Paris. Mugaritz and Atomix are mainstays of the World 50 Best list and cultural icons. L'Oiseau Blanc was elevated from 1 to 2 stars after it changed chefs with the current style. For the prudence of my (or my expense account's) funds I often try to avoid places like these, but the omission speaks with more volume. A quick leafing through the pages of the Michelin stars guide in any city across the world will show most starred restaurants are like this nowadays; it is the default. On balance, with each passing year, more restaurants in the first category close to be replaced by those in the second than the other way around.

Excellence in fine dining is alive and well when sought carefully, as clear from the first category of examples. Unlike architecture or even contemporary art, it is first and foremost a commercial consumer endeavor, and the paying customer base here being much larger makes it that much more difficult to gaslight it. At the same time, chefs are no stranger to trends, often pioneered by competent, creative, iconoclastic chefs who then disseminate them to less capable hands. Picasso was transgressive, but he also knew how to paint and broke convention against a backdrop of those conventions existing at the time. Novelty wears off quickly, as anyone trying to copy a Rothko will soon discover. So it goes with chefs like the Adría brothers (molecular gastronomy, Asian fusion) and René Redzepi (new Scandinavian) and Joel Robuchon (one of the original Frenchmen to do Asian fusion) as they pass on their findings to the industry. Especially when they can be exploited for cost or labor savings. And so goes not just white ironed tablecloths and baroque palatial interiors, but preparation-intensive sauces, eye-pleasing presentations, and time-consuming protein-cooking techniques. Japan's mastery in sourcing, ingredient preparation, and color aesthetics becomes raw "cooking" and careless presentation. Scandinavia's foraged herbs and fermentation become an indiscriminate hammer in search of nail, bland or absent sauces, and more careless presentation. In the mystery of Tartaria, modernity slouches towards minimalism and coldness as much due to cost as trendiness, both fingers of Moloch, and cuisine is no exception. And so suffers taste for the tongue, beauty for the eyes, and ornamentation for both senses.

II. L'Ambroisie

This was all but a hypothesis to me until I went to L'Ambroisie.

L'Ambroisie opened in 1981 under chef Bernard Pacaud and has kept 3 Michelin stars since 1988, the longest extant in Paris.

When he opened it, Mr. Pacaud had intended it as a casual affair, almost a bistro: pot-au-feu weekday specials in the beginning, as he recalls in one interview. Mr. Pacaud himself grew up an orphan, working in the kitchens of La Mère Brazier in Lyon at 15. Madame Brazier was the first chef (not just woman) to win 3 stars for 2 restaurants, a fact sadly erased in most press when Mr. Ducasse repeated the feat 65 years later. She insisted on inspecting the nails of her chickens and nearly resisted a city inspector's demand to connect her restaurant to the electricity and gas mains rather than use wood-fired stoves and ovens. Mr. Pacaud inherited this Luddism, famously having no modern machines in his kitchen besides a blender and a fridge in a manner akin to an edomae sushi chef. The restaurant's age, spirit, and eccentric atavism incubated something extraordinary.

I had eaten many fine meals before L'Ambroisie, and have since. Not to crassly weight critics' awards like so, but this includes 117 Michelin star restaurants, 30 3-star restaurants, and 14 World 50 Best restaurants. And L'Ambroisie is my very favorite among them all. Before going, I had ideas of excellence, yes, but I could never have imagined something better was possible. If ever there were a 4th Michelin star, as flippant as it is to say, L'Ambroisie would be my nomination.

To put this in context, while it is not in want of recognition, it is not a particularly fashionable choice. It is relatively easy to make a reservation, it is not on many of the newfangled award lists, and I was the youngest person in the dining room by many years (or decades) on my visits. It is a divisive restaurant, with many calling it dated or boring, as any look at the reviews will inform.

Michelin is relatively tight lipped on its criteria, so people often ask me for my view on the meanings of the stars. My personal opinion is the first star is for excellence in execution, the second is for establishing a distinct personality, and the third is for bringing something unique into this world ("worth a special journey", in Michelin's own abstract tire-sale-promoting parlance, as opposed to a stop or detour). And I feel it is safe to say nobody else in the entire world does what L'Ambroisie does, at the level it does.

III. Amuse-bouche

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A meal here always begins with a kugelhopf, a sort of bundt-cake-shaped savory bun, proffered directly by the waiter into your hand to dissuade the Instagrammer. On my first visit in the summer of 2022, it was Comté cheese with tomato and olive. On my second in spring of 2025, it was black truffle and cheese. Herein lies the first rule of L'Ambroise: seasonality. So often a cynical excuse by other restaurants to all serve peas in the summer or squash in the autumn in army-like unison, here it is a religion, an excuse for indulgence, a necessity to only serve ingredients at their absolute prime to create the best dishes possible. L'Ambroisie has a few menu seasons throughout the year: the summer, ceps (porcini mushrooms) in the early autumn, white truffles (tuber magnatum) in the late autumn and early winter, Périgord black truffles (tuber melanosporum) in the late winter and early spring, and morel mushrooms in the spring. Yes, there is a strong focus on expensive, luxury fungus in the timing here. Luxury ingredients are not treated with either avoidant shame or obligatory afterthought here like they often are elsewhere.

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The amuses on my first visit were more typical, if a little indulgent by other restaurants' standards: comte with pepper, leeks and caviar, and a fennel and currant tart. That indulgence presages the generosity to come later. Working in such a small space, each amuse is stripped down to a few basic components that allows each, particularly the vegetables, to shine with all the expectation of summer. Leeks in particular are a classic French ingredient and the unadorned concept, seasoned with salty caviar, results in a better execution than other interpretations of this dish I've had elsewhere.

The amuse on my second visit is more like a small dish in its own right, something that reminds me of Amador in Vienna (another fine restaurant worth its own review…). It allows a more complete expression of a chef's thought, although obviously more expensive for a restaurant to do, a running theme in this place. Although I’ve been to several of the most highly-regarded restaurants in Italy, this incidental dish is the single best pasta I’ve ever had, which is quite an obscene opinion to have about a French restaurant (my second-favorite pasta dish is also French, the spaghetti gratin at Le Cinq, but that is another blasphemy for another time).

It is a ricotta-stuffed ravioli in a sauce of cheese and lemon, with cut (not shaved) matchsticks of black truffle. The handmade pasta dough is a perfect, chewy al dente. The acidity of the lemon controls the heaviness of the thick cheese sauce. That the sauce is thick and in a quantity to submerge the bottom of the bowl like a small soup is notable unto itself, in an age of light oil- or soy-based sauces. And then the truffles: I have had many other black truffles at other places, and now I wonder if they were all fake. Poor quality or out-of-season ones taste as unpleasant as eating wet dirt, which is why L’Ambroisie refuses to serve them outside their proper time. When high quality they have a pungent, earthy aroma that’s hard to describe, although I will say that fake truffle oil is derived from gasoline (another substance with lots of volatile organic compounds) to give an idea. White truffles have an extra savory garlicky aftertaste, which is part of why I often prefer them, which black truffles mostly lack.

Herein lies another quality of L’Ambroisie: obsessive attention to ingredient quality and selection. There are restaurants dedicated to this, but many of them are located on coasts or countrysides with their own farms and fishermen (or are in Japan, which has the world’s most well developed seafood logistics for obvious reasons, and is entirely a narrow island). L’Ambroisie is mostly unique for achieving these heights in the middle of a city, a landlocked one at that.

I had a wonderful white truffle pasta dish at Piazza Duomo in Alba, original home of the white truffle. I applauded its genius in serving cheese-stuffed ravioli with absolutely no sauce where others might try, knowing it would smother the truffles. L’Ambroisie does not care. Somehow they found black truffles so strong, they could survive the coating of thick cheese sauce and contribute aroma and flavor anyway. The matchstick cutting (as opposed to traditional slices) of the truffles lends an element of texture and thus flavor, crumbling apart in your mouth, while maximizing surface area to propagate aromas.

And we haven’t even started yet.

IV. Appetizers

The first thing one notices about the menu at L’Ambroisie is it is only available in French, and the service will roundly mock you for requesting one in English. The second is that is a la carte only rather than preset tasting menu or at least pre-fixe, the fine dining equivalent in antiquated oddity of showing up to a first date in a powdered wig or dress corset. Mr. Pacaud’s Luddism and his resistance to compromise, his absolute artisan’s resistance to trends or polite cultural correctness, strikes again even before ordering. The service’s imperious suggestions on which courses go, or do not go, together is another manifestation. This sort of inflexibility is more the kind one encounters in Japanese craftsmen than a European restaurant.

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The appetizer on my first visit was a classic of the house: Feuillantine de langoustines aux graines de sésame, sauce au curry. The menus change with the seasons but the langoustines, the caviar sea bass, and the chocolate tart never leave, a compromise between novelty and familiarity for different kinds of regular customers. Some other items rotate but stay the same across years. The menu allows for novel items, but some kinds of perfection require yearslong consistent practice and improvement, or in some cases just cannot be improved from a place of perfection.

The langoustines ruin all other langoustines for me. They are to other 3-star restaurants’ preparations what those are to those of ordinary restaurants. A knife is unnecessary; a fork will do. Crustaceans, chiefly langoustines, impart a subtle sweetness in skilled hands, but here they whisper a new flavor from this quality taken to new heights: a sort of innate milkiness from the juices. They are of unusual, plump size and come in four to other restaurants’ typical one. Even at L’Ambroisie’s rarefied prices I have to wonder if they break even on ingredient costs on this dish, when other places would be happy to charge as much for a single tail. I have had sublime shrimps at other places (Le Petit Nice by Gérald Passedat in Marseille, Sukiyabashi Jiro by Jiro Ono in Tokyo) with the assistance of their guts and brains, but in tail flesh alone L’Ambroisie is unparalleled.

The curry sauce is addictive with a hint of spice. It is unapologetic in its classic thickness and quantity, pooling the entire dish. There is enough to coat every bite and its consistency is capable of coating things at all, both increasingly uncommon traits.

The unassuming element that most impresses me though, is the spinach under the langoustine. It is a revelation, like Christian Le Squer’s spring peas, or Enrico Crippa’s 21, 31, 41, 51 salad, or Fumio Kondo’s tempura onion. As a hater of vegetables and an unfortunate genetic super-taster who detects even slight bitterness in leafy greens as intolerable (even at many elite places) and struggles to eat them to this day, these specimens were cooked in a way that yielded only a creamy flavor, no bitterness. Spinach like this could turn me into Popeye. I often judge the mettle of a top restaurant not by how it prepares my favorites, but by how it prepares my bêtes noires, and in this respect L’Ambroisie was an astounding success from the first bites

On my second visit, I took full advantage of the truffle season to order: Velouté de topinambour en île flottante à la truffe.

An île flottante in its original form is a French dessert of meringue (egg whites and sugar) in a pool of cream or custard, here repurposed as a savory dish of egg in sauce. A playful twist on a French classic. The whole egg itself is immaculately poached, bursting with runny yolk upon cutting. Yet herein lies a mystery: a layered coating of truffle purée on the inside of the egg white. How did it end up there? For a kitchen with no machines and rooted only in traditional techniques, I had more fun pondering this than some of the stale “surprises” issued forth by ones specializing in molecular gastronomy and avant-garde cuisine. A restaurant that chooses to stay faithful to the past need not be stuck in it and sometimes offers more intellectual content than those that try to manufacture it via novelty. Sometimes the “new” can come from just flavors and cooking techniques, rather than chemistry, cultural fusions, or weird ingredients. It may be the world’s most inflated egg price, but I’ll gladly pay for the labor and the inspiration.

The truffles, here sliced but thickly, again ignore the usual downfall of getting drowned in sauce via their sheer strength and quantity, acting not as garnish but co-ingredient.

The velouté of Jerusalem artichoke, while perfect as accompanying sauce, is almost better enjoyed as a milky soup when left over in such quantity after the eggs and truffles are consumed, especially with traces of both (particularly yolk). Here one should note that velouté is one of the six mother sauces of French cuisine (béchamel, espagnole, tomato, velouté, hollandaise, mayonnaise) codified by French cuisine pioneer Escoffier in the early 1900s, many of them prepared with fats or butters. Velouté in particular uses the thickener roux, made of flour and fat. Other classic French sauces use bases of creams, butters, and wines. While these are still in use, many places have either forsaken or lightened these sauces, or reduced the quantity given, primarily due to the preponderance of trendy Japanese and Scandinavian influences, but also for health reasons as people have shied away from animal fats. Another reason is that these sauces are quite difficult and time-consuming to make, often requiring many hours of prep. L’Ambroisie’s dedication to these delicious old-fashioned sauces despite all the factors otherwise is one of their unique assets.

V. Mains

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My main on my first visit was another classic of the house: Escalopines de bar à l’émince d’artichaut, caviar kristal. It is of course a royal dish when it arrives at your table. It cured my caviar cravings for at least 1-2 years, by my estimation, and may very well be more than many people eat in their whole lifetimes.

I admit I did not understand this dish at first, but thankfully I was given the opportunity to arrive at it due to the large, a la carte portion. One must dispense with their usual timidity with caviar and heap it on the spoon. Here it is not a garnish, but an ingredient of the dish. Salt is for commoners when one can season with caviar. Consumed in the proper quantity in each bite, one realizes this is a simulacrum of the sea bass swimming in seawater, enveloped by gentle, nutty saltiness. It is a unique sensation of caviar I have not experienced anywhere else in the world, powered by the sheer indulgence of it.

Every other element of the dish deserves note. The seabass is cooked in a way I cannot figure out to have the firmness and juiciness of chicken, when bad seabass can so often be flaky and dry. The artichoke is savory, almost reminiscent of bread except in texture, another stellar example of care for vegetables. The nage sauce (meaning “in the swim”, poached with the seafood, fittingly enough for the impression of the dish) is made with white wine and again shamelessly thickened with butter. This sauce is another proud celebration of classic French technique and ingredients. And most importantly, as hinted above, each and every element combines its different notes of savory into one harmony.

There is one more surprise as you work your way through the seabass fillets: more caviar buried underneath, hidden within the ring of artichokes, to continue proper enjoyment of the dish. Money is not a priority for Mr. Pacaud, and while he puts great care into the presentation of his dishes, it is not the priority for him either. He is a true artist. His only aim is to give you the best meal he can, which happens to be the best meal in the world. It is the twilight-blue painted ceiling of the Scrovegni chapel or the gilding of the Basilica di San Marco. This spirit of generosity, of auteurism, of unbounded desire for excellence, permeates the restaurant and everything that comes out of its kitchen.

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My main dish on my second visit, though following a tough act, managed to outdo the first in outrageous luxury: Chausson de truffe fraîche “bel humeur” en hommage à Claude Peyrot.

For months in anticipation, I jokingly referred to it as the “Oreo”, although really it more visually resembles a fried Oreo at a county fair like I visited in my childhood. Two solid chunks of black truffle sandwiching a layer of foie gras, all baked into a puff pastry, sitting on top of a layer of truffle purée. I believe it is the most expensive item on any of L’Ambroisie’s menus. The waiter kindly informed me upon arrival that there were only two available on the day of visit, and beforehand had warned over the phone that availability would depend on the quality and size of the truffles brought in that day. Not a problem though - I had prereserved one months in advance.

I once read of the Jewish concept of Yeridot ha-Dorot: the decay of the generations, as we successively drift away from the original light of God. Tolkien’s legendarium takes a similar view on the declining power of the elves and lifespans of the men of Númenor. This cynical view applied to the culinary arts gained some credence with me after this dish. Notice the humility of master chef Pacaud in sharing the credit for this dish with his mentor Claude Peyrot. Mr. Pacaud labored on this dish starting in his time working at Le Vivarois in Paris under Peyrot over forty years ago and continues to this day. It is a lamp flung by ghosts from the far past into today, predating globalization and social media and young people no longer familiar with home cooking or traditional cuisine. Skills and cuisine can only be transmitted from person to person, generation to generation, and this dish (along with Mère Brazier’s truffle chicken, which being for two people I was regrettably too full to also order) is one of the oldest authentic messages in food form you can consume today. Its greatness is a product of its direct connection to the past and maybe in some sense it never gets better than this. Others talk a lot about old craft skills lost to technology, particularly with AI deskilling looming, and one wonders what metis will be irrecoverably lost once this one-in-a-billion Luddite with an outdated kitchen passes on.

As for the dish itself, the description is quite simple: it is waterboarding with truffle, like a BDSM Guantanamo for the 1%. The aroma of truffle is so overwhelming it clogs your nostrils and the back of your throat and almost stops you from breathing. Between the absurd quality and quantity of truffle, it feels like eating a dangerous lump of something chemical. I expected an unusual amount of truffle but nothing could prepare me for this dish once I cut open the pastry. The texture, unlike the crumbliness of truffle I expected, was more like the firmness of a cooked mushroom, and the quantity was such that it contributed flavor (a slight final taste of completely unsweet/bitter dark chocolate) in addition to aroma. Not cooking truffle is a cardinal rule of truffles, but Mr. Pacaud does not care because he stands above such rules. That it does not lose aroma, but rather bottles it up in the baked pastry to pleasantly obnoxious levels, is an impressive technical achievement and attention to detail that could have been only perfected over the course of years, maybe decades. The hot fatty oiliness of the foie gras and the buttery pastry add pleasant complementary sensations, but admittedly these are almost footnotes in the dish.

VI. Desserts

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At other restaurants, the decline or removal of pastry chefs and concomitant loss of great desserts is yet another concession to capitalist reality. L’Ambroisie’s dessert menu at first glance looks like another victim, with its deceptively simple and staunchly traditional desserts. Take for example its Tarte fine sablée au cacao amer, glace à la vanille Bourbon, possibly the stupidest-looking dessert ever at a 3-star restaurant. A slice of chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, seriously? The kind you’d find at Applebee’s or Red Lobster?

L’Ambroisie may not be my literal favorite dessert section in the world, just because Jordi Roca at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain is such a madman. But it is one of my favorites, and that deceiving chocolate tart deserves all of its 3 stars.

The top is dusted with chocolate, the bottom a thick crust. But the middle, an ethereal chocolate sabayon, is so light as to be made of air. It has none of the density and little of the moisture of a normal cake. It compacts into nothing as you chew. It is neither cloyingly sweet nor plainly bitter, as perfectly calibrated as chocolate can be. The accompanying vanilla ice cream has such a deep vanilla flavor it feels like a platonic ideal, unmatched anywhere else. Much like the egg, this dish goes to show that with a little bit of inspiration in the idea and a lot of perspiration in the execution, the most mundane premise can be elevated to not just greatness, but even distinctiveness.

I am not a cheese expert, deferring to the affineur for his recommendations, but the cheese selection here is probably the finest I've ever had. I still chase after the choice of comté cheese, continuing the theme of the kitchen's discerning eye for ingredients.

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The meal ends similar to how it began, with a small selection of petit fours. On my first visit it was a selection of treats (canele, caramelized sugar and vanilla, and strawberry tart), on my second, a bowl of citrusy madeleines. Mr. Pacaud's daughter having taken over the pastry section on my second visit, it seems she has taken it in an even more traditional direction, one which I approve of and indicates it's in good hands (as opposed to his wayward son, who has opened and closed many other restaurant ventures and whom his own father deemed more of a businessman than an artist).

VII. Other Comments

The service here has quite a formidable - as in, unfriendly - reputation, although I've had nothing but positive experiences. Perhaps it depends on votre capacité à parler, ou au moins à lire, le français, or which wine you order. On my second visit their gregariousness even made me feel like an invited guest at a particularly wealthy friend's house party, laughing and participating in antics and jokes.

It helps that the restaurant is richly decorated, consistent with its spirit. There are white tablecloths and chandeliers. An Aubusson tapestry presides over the room. Though Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persians, beheaded humans and maimed horses and all, might seem an odd choice for a dinner backdrop, it's pleasing to the eye and yet another celebration of aesthetic beauty and human accomplishment. In the context of deracinated plain white or "Japandi" (Japanese+Scandinavian minimalist design) or exposed brick dining rooms that could be anywhere in the world and so common these days, it may even have an air of defiance. Though the space is more intimate, for me it compares with some of my grandest Parisian palaces Le Cinq or Le Pré Catelan, or even more opulent options like that of Le Louis XV in Monaco, or the 14th-century Genoan palazzo with original Renaissance frescoes by Bernardo Strozzi that hosts The Cook al Cavo. Unfortunately dining rooms like this seem on the downswing, even when people clearly prefer them, as in all other arts and spaces. The sad modernist renovation of Espadon at the Ritz Paris is a testament to that; best enjoy them while you can. Even L'Ambroisie itself has sold the tapestries in some of its other rooms, the ones that played backdrop to summits with Obama and Clinton, and replaced them with gaudy geometric patterns in a concession to modernity for reasons unknown to me, although they have thankfully preserved the first room.

The perfect execution of cooked proteins, meticulous discrimination of ingredients, and beautiful radial plating are the text, uncommon enough in other restaurants for reasons of skill or choice. The deliberately rich and thick, "outdated", absolutely delicious sauces are the subtext. That Mr. Pacaud still uses butter and cream and fat and wine and the true spirit of France when many others at his level eschew or reduce them for the sake of fashion or health, shows a cantankerous commitment to the diner's pure joy and nothing else. He is the brave soul who tells the world it's wrong, and in my view, he is right.

VIII. The Future

Mr. Pacaud is retiring: the last I spoke with him, in July of this year. What happens when this last of the Mohicans hangs his apron?

Preferences can be gaslit, mimetic, or falsified, but they cannot be eradicated. Plenitude in Paris, the latest restaurant by Arnaud Donckele of La Vague d'Or in St Tropez, has as its conceit a central focus on complex yet classically based sauces, and the longest waitlist in Paris by far. A personally funded project of the CEO of LVMH, it perhaps shines a light on a path for other very rich individuals who bemoan the current state of art and wish to reassert taste: the ancient model of patronage (and hopefully done better than other attempts). Juan Amador at Amador in Vienna once dabbled in molecular gastronomy in his youth before coming to the same realization and retracing back to the fundamentals of cuisine, including real sauces, to amazing results. Armenian immigrant Karen Torosyan has set up shop at Bozar in Brussels, resurrecting the art of pastry pates and pithiviers with a historical reenactor's passion, and gaining recognition for it.

If all goes to plan Mr. Pacaud's successor will be his longtime sous chef, the Japanese Chikara Yoshitomi. Though I love Japanese cuisine and rank it among the best in the world, I've spent a good deal of time here bashing its malign influence and clumsy fusion with European cuisines. So it is perhaps surprising that I find this development unsurprising and perhaps not unwelcome. Mr. Pacaud reminds me more of sushi chef Jiro Ono than any Frenchman, the latter a 99-year-old famous for his clinging to komezu vinegar and fax machine reservations long after the world abandoned both. A prior attempt to hand L'Ambroisie off to a Frenchman imploded when the latter refused to stoop to helping clean the kitchen as head chef, in Pacaud's words - unusual in a French brigade, where the head chef often isn't even present, but par for the course in a sushi-ya.

The Japanese seem to love French cuisine more than the French do: a quick search for baked pithiviers of the kind I ate here more readily yields places in Tokyo (Ginza Oishi, Chez Inno, Sezanne, etc.) than in Europe, and several of Pacaud's former employees have opened in the city (Cote d'Or, Est). L'Ambroisie itself, famously publicity-shy, featured in a Japanese drama named "La Grande Maison Tokyo". I laughed once when, sitting at an anime cafe festooned with Love Live characters on all the walls, I suddenly thought of the Aubusson tapestry and the Genoan Strozzi frescoes. Stationed in a completely different time period and aimed at a completely different audience, nay, socioeconomic class, nevertheless the essence of that irrepressible, unembarrassed urge to express beauty for its own sake and bring visual joy to people was there.

Not to labor the point, but I also see hope in Italy's fine dining scene, their regard for pasta like the Japanese regard for sushi. Tartaria disappears in all countries (as a quick glance at endless concrete box sprawl on your next trip to Japan will suffice to say), but at different rates in different places. Some people would do well to remember that cultures are worth preserving, that tradition does not mean staleness and novelty does not mean progress. Others should remember that a certain openness to talent and consumption is sometimes needed to preserve those parochial cultures, rather than destroying them - sometimes the cosplaying tourists and the starry-eyed newcomers are more enamored of it than the jaded locals.

The goddess of cancer destroys Tartaria and consumes everything. Where might the goddess of everything else eat? Perhaps at a place whose name means "food for the gods".