No recipe for life

In this country those who can, cook; those who can't become telly chefs - numbingly vacuous light entertainers, giftless vaudevillians. In France it is different. The great chefs form a sort of priestly caste, a hermetic order. They are serious men who profess a craft which is revered, which is central to the country's culture and self-esteem.

A couple of years ago I watched a telly programme in which Joel Robuchon, the highest of all priests in the Nineties, demonstrated step by step how to make zwiebelkuche, the onion tart of Alsace. No larky gimmicks, no lame jokes, no characterful banter - a simple half-hour lesson. Pedagogy rather than spurious "fun".

Robuchon famously bailed out of the race for stars and the onerous status that they confer: his new restaurant, which he calls L'Atelier, the studio, is artily experimental. The subject of this odd, garrulous quasi-biography, Bernard Loiseau, also bailed out of that race - he shot himself. Why? Because a guide book demoted him.

That might seem incredible to an Anglo-Saxon. It takes an empathetic leap to begin to come to terms with both the mentality of France's supreme craftsmen (they are all men) and to understand their relationship with the major guides and reviewers.

Loiseau was typical of his caste in that all he knew was cooking. One suspects a form of elective autism: he was gauche, a cracker-barrel philosopher, a sexual naif, a man who forgot to get a life. Like his few peers he was driven, manically. Like his peers, he denatured craft by attempting to elevate it to the state of art.

At this level of cooking, novelty is essayed for its own sake. The high priests ignore, if they ever knew (and it is improbable), Gore Vidal's defining precept that "craft should always be the same, art should always be different". Like, say, soccer players who can do everything with a ball and who are, hence, incomplete persons, French chefs belong to a straitened micro- society which is formidably hierarchical.

It is worth distinguishing chefs from cooks. The two restaurants I most adore as both punter and sometime reviewer, Jean- Pierre Xiradakis's La Tupina in Bordeaux and Philippe Regourd's La Taverne in Rodez, are the creations of mere (mere!) cooks, gastronomic ultra-conservatives who revere the ancient recipes of their region and who are fully formed human beings.

Neither aspires to the bizarre circus which was Loiseau's cynosure from the earliest days of his apprenticeships. He was born to petit bourgeois parents in Clermont- Ferrand, a strangely attractive city of black volcanic stone, pierre volvic, which Chelminski signally fails to appreciate, falling back on dismal clichés: " workaday, rather boring".

But then this is a writer who seems to think that France is a "Latin" country - try telling that to the people of Lille or Nantes, Nancy or Lyon. Or to the people of Burgundy, Loiseau's adopted province, where quotidian cooking is of such a standard that the highpriests are obliged to bend over backwards to conjure a cuisine that is "inventive", rootless and chichiteuse in order to preserve their status. Which status is conferred by Michelin, Gault Millau, Bottin, Petitrenaud.

I trust the last one, just about. As for the others: they are simply wrong-headed. They value centrifugalness - loads of unwanted amuse-gueles, serial courses of chocolates and tuiles, half-a-dozen lackies to open a bottle ... Michelin should have stuck to manufacturing tyres - in Clermont-Ferrand. It makes a fine tyre, and the vaguely constructivist factory is an engaging lump of industrial architecture.

But - and of course it denies it - its red guide rewards everything that is wrong about restaurants: fiddly food, Come Dancing décor, smarms giving great forlock. Which comes at a price to the customer and, evidently, to the patron - stressed out, in hock to his neck, desperate.

Loiseau was not the first chef to top himself. I once took my camera and production crew to a restaurant in Ghent, one-star Michelin. The cooking was horrible, desperate to be different. "Why did you bring us here?" The chef died by his own hand a few months later. If you are immune to prose as grossly woeful as three-star cooking, this is one to savour.