Still going strong at 94, documentarian Frederick Wiseman brings his now over-refined fly-on-the wall approach to Michel Troisgros’s perennial three-star Michelin restaurant, an unexpectedly informal, unexpected modern establishment in the French countryside near Roanne. Structured around two food services, lunch & dinner, we spend the bulk of our time (a rather too generous four hours) in the hushed, clinically clean kitchen, and then on the restaurant floor where chef & staff turn maddeningly loquacious. ‘Michel, I love your stories and philosophizing, but my food is getting cold!’) In between Ozu-like ‘pillow shots’* of an idyllic countryside, we stop at a farmer’s market and many local sources (goat ranch, farms, vineyards, honey station, cheese ‘caves’ (these masters of maturation the most obsessed), while Michel tours and son César starts officially taking the reins at the restaurant/inn. And while a few plates have that fussy haute cuisine look (one tasting menu offers a single asparagus stalk as a course; quite a large stalk, but still . . . ), most look devastatingly yummy. (Who had the balls to bid for ‘craft services?’) At times, Wiseman’s refusal to interject program info self-defeats (like a waiter who won’t explain a dish), but the sheer level of craft & detail that goes into these dishes comes across as something heroic.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The restaurant’s Zen-like calm mirrored in Wiseman’s use of those Yasujirô Ozu influenced static landscape ‘pillow shots’ in-between sequences.
LINK: HURRY! Free on PBS internet sites thru April 20th. https://www.pbs.org/video/menus-plaisirs-les-troisgros-rbfnou/
ATTENTON MUST BE PAID: Hard to believe how many of the guests demand food substitutions or have allergy issues that put much of the menu off-limits. You wonder why they bother to go and pay 3-star Michelin prices. Yikes! Better the cheese loving customer who has the cheese monger serve up six different varieties. Mmm, cheese.
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