The French Confection

Henri Gault and Christian Millau have much in common. Both are 44-year-old Sunday cooks and year-round gourmets--curiously slight of paunch considering their present trade--who once worked as reporters on the now defunct Paris Presse. The solidest bond between the two is the joy they share in debunking the culinary canons of their fellow Frenchmen. They condone serving red wine with fish, accept Israelite gras as only "slightly inferior" to the product of Strasbourg and advise housewives to shorten the cooking hours of those long, loving, simmering stews. They have even dared to question butter's superiority to margarine.

The trumpet for this gastronomic treason is Le Nouveau Guide Gault-Millau, a glossy, 120-odd-page journalistic compendium of recipes, restaurant reviews and guides, plus lengthy culinary debates. The monthly magazine, now four years old, evolved from the two editors' decade-long collaboration on 18 guidebooks to France and beyond. "G. and M." as some call the Paris-based magazine, exerts influence far beyond its 145,000 circulation. Its editors are currently dashing the chauvinistic notion that to be gustatorily gifted is to be French. They regularly grade domestic Chinese, Indian, Indonesian and Vietnamese food.

Whatever the dining spot, Gault and Millau, unlike some other food critics, never accept free meals. Often the pair sup at inexpensive, as yet unestablished restaurants. Le Guide Michelin, the staid bible of French cuisine, generally evaluates only the notable and reserves judgment for three years.

Unlike many of their French newspaper competitors (and like U.S. food critics), Gault and Millau consistently name names. If commenting on Maxim's, they avoid such coy evasions as "a well-known restaurant on the Rue Royale." As a result, they sometimes face the fury of advertisers and libel suits. Of one establishment they recently wrote: "The fish soup was watery, the lobster brochette insipid . . . Only the maitre d'hotel had a smile on his face." The offending Marseille restaurant--appropriately named Le New York --lost not only customers but the libel suit as well. "We established the principle that journalists have a right to criticize restaurants by name just as movie critics and theater reviewers do with film and plays," gloats Co-Editor Millau.

In fact, G. and M. has become so successful that it recently merged with the sophisticated travel monthly Connaissance des Voyages. The change widened the magazine's range, but the tangiest parts of the confection remain the imaginative attacks on taboos. One of the most controversial exposes knocked the venerable theory that wine must be stored horizontally in a temperature-controlled cellar and opened several hours before serving time, the better to "breathe." The skeptical editors exposed cases of a costly Bordeaux to 14 different temperatures and locales, including windows and radiators. They even stashed several cases in the trunk of a car, then bumped all over Paris with their bottles. Weeks later a team of assembled oenophiles drew the corks. They sniffed and sipped their way through bottles that had been jounced and bounced, heated and chilled, opened hours beforehand or just prior to tasting. Their verdict established that wine could be fully enjoyed minutes after decanting and that both jiggling and chilling mattered only slightly, if at all.

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