When chef Bernard Loiseau bought the restaurant-hotel La Cote d’Or in Burgundy, he vowed to make it a gastronomic paradise. More than a decade later, his famed restaurant has become one of the fewer than 20 restaurants that the Michelin Guide recommends with three stars. The guide’s secret surveillance and standards of perfection denied its highest ratings to most of the 10,772 restaurants and hotels it listed in 1992, with only 19 awarded its coveted three stars. How this perfection-mad chef set out to win his stars is described by Fortune correspondent Echikson, who spent a year in Loiseau’s kitchen and on buying trips with his staff. The book is not so much about food as about “a country trying to maintain and improve upon its traditions” in a time of global homogenization that, some fear, may mean the end of the great French cuisine. Echikson details the tireless searches through the Burgundian countryside for perfect native cheeses, breads, wines, snails, jams and vegetables, and such critical decisions as whether to use Greek frogs’ legs or Spanish tomatoes.
Librería del balcón 