On Monday, the 2016 Michelin guide to France was released. The guide rouge, as it is known to the French, is generally considered the country’s gastronomic bible, its foremost arbiter of fine dining. But this year what would ordinarily have been a festive occasion—at least for those restaurants keeping or gaining stars—was overshadowed by terrible news out of Switzerland: Benoît Violier, the French-born chef of Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Ville, which boasts Michelin’s highest rating, three stars, died over the weekend in an apparent suicide. He was forty-four and left a wife and young son. The funeral was today, with fifteen hundred mourners in attendance.
The l’Hôtel de Ville, located in the town of Crissier, near Lausanne, is probably Switzerland’s most acclaimed restaurant, but also one with a star-crossed recent history. It was previously owned by Frédy Girardet, a brilliant chef who was at the vanguard of the nouvelle-cuisine movement, in the nineteen-seventies. When Girardet retired, in 1996, he sold the restaurant to Philippe Rochat, his longtime protégé. Rochat was married to the Swiss distance runner Franziska Rochat-Moser, who won the New York City Marathon, in 1997. Five years later, she was killed in an avalanche. Last summer, Rochat, who had turned over the kitchen, in 2012, to Violier, fell ill while cycling and died. And now this.
Pierre-Marcel Favre, a Swiss editor who worked with Violier on a thousand-page opus on game birds that the chef authored, told the French daily Libération that Violier’s suicide was a total shock to friends and colleagues. It has been suggested that perhaps Violier’s grief over Rochat’s death, and also the death, last year, of his father, led him to take his own life. But most of the speculation has centered on the stresses of his work, and the possibility that Violier may have buckled under the pressure of trying to maintain his restaurant’s lofty standards.
Violier’s suicide invites comparison to that of Bernard Loiseau, the celebrated French chef who killed himself in 2003. At the time, there were rumors that Loiseau’s restaurant, La Côte d’Or, located in Saulieu, a village in Burgundy, was in danger of losing its third star, and it was widely believed that the possibility of a demotion drove Loiseau to suicide. In the wake of Loiseau’s death, Michelin denied that it had warned the fifty-two-year-old chef that his third star was in jeopardy. That claim was not exactly true: a few years ago, in the course of researching a book about French food culture, I obtained the minutes of a meeting that Michelin officials had with Loiseau, in the fall of 2002. They told him that they were concerned about the quality of his restaurant’s cooking, and the document described Loiseau as “visibly shocked” by their comments. I also obtained a follow-up letter that Loiseau’s wife had sent to Michelin, in which she said that the guide’s warning (the word “warning” was underlined) would be heeded and that her husband would dedicate himself to improving the performance of his kitchen. Instead, he killed himself.
There is no indication that Violier was on shaky ground with Michelin. When the 2016 guide to Switzerland was published, last fall, his restaurant retained its third star, and, in contrast with Loiseau, who was struggling to remain in the spotlight even before Michelin voiced its displeasure with his performance, Violier’s career was ascendant. In December, France’s foreign ministry published a list of the world’s best restaurants, grandly called La Liste and derived from an algorithm dubbed Ciacco, after a gluttonous character in Dante’s Inferno, and Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Ville claimed the top spot. (La Liste is France’s answer to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, an annual ranking founded by the British trade magazine Restaurant. The French started La Liste because they consider the World’s 50 Best to be ethically suspect and also biased, particularly against French restaurants.)
Restaurant de l’Hôtel de Ville is one of three restaurants in Switzerland with three Michelin stars; there are twenty-six in France. As any chef will tell you, the pressure of trying to earn a third star is nothing compared with the burden of trying to keep it; losing a third star can be devastating for a restaurant’s reputation and bottom line. The pressure is particularly severe for chefs working outside of major cities. According to Michelin, a three-star rating means that a restaurant is “worth a special journey”; a two-star rating means it is merely worth a “detour.” A third star brings a steady influx of gastronomic tourists; lose the third star and many fewer people are willing to make the trip. Loiseau, whose restaurant was two and a half hours south of Paris, and twenty-five miles off the nearest highway, was acutely aware of this. It seems that Violier was, too. In an interview with Libération a few days before his death, he alluded to the challenge of having a high-end restaurant in a nondescript suburb of a small city, and cited a quip by Girardet—“people don’t come here for the sea view.” He also said that he worried about being able to continue to attract diners to Crissier and noted that the restaurant’s reservation book amounted to “three months’ grace.”
What will become of Violier’s third star now? In 1990, after the French chef Alain Chapel dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two, Michelin stripped his eponymous restaurant of its third star. The guide’s editorial director at the time, Bernard Naegellen, explained that this was done out of respect for Chapel. To have maintained the third star, he said, would have suggested that Chapel “had counted for nothing in the excellence of his restaurant.” Loiseau’s restaurant, by contrast, kept its third star following his death. It was thought that Michelin, accused of having driven the chef to suicide, didn’t want to compound the public-relations fiasco by demoting his restaurant. However, Jean-Luc Naret, who served as the guide’s editorial director from 2004 to 2010, insisted that wasn’t the case when I interviewed him several years later. “Stars are not as attached to the man,” he told me. “They are attached to the team of the restaurant, and if they continue to do the same job there is no point to take stars away.”
When the 2016 Michelin guide to France was released on Monday, two restaurants lost their third stars. One of them was Loiseau’s.
