It is like giving up your Nobel, rejecting your Oscar, pushing back on your Pulitzer: Jérôme Brochot, a renowned and refined chef, decided to turn in his Michelin star, reports The New York Times.
He is renouncing the uniquely French distinction that separates his restaurant from thousands of others, the lifetime dream of hundreds. But Mr. Brochot’s decision was not a rash one, born of arrogance, ingratitude or spite. Rather, it was for a prosaic, but still important, reason: he could no longer afford it.
It is a drastic step that says everything about the crushing reality of “the other France” – the provinces where on average more than 10 percent of storefronts are vacant, the old jobs have gone, and the cafés are empty on cold mornings.
Even in a region famed for its culinary traditions, this declining old mining town deep in lower Burgundy could not sustain a one-star Michelin restaurant. Mr. Brochot, a youthful-looking 46, had gambled on high-end cuisine in a working-class town and lost.
In November, the chef wrote to the Guide Michelin, the fat red gastronome’s bible in Paris that bestows the honor, to say he wanted out. He could no longer make ends meet at his bright orange hotel-restaurant Le France, he said. He could no longer pay for the personnel, produce and precision that go into charging one-star prices.
“The economic situation here in the ex-mining basin is a disaster,” Mr. Brochot wrote to Michelin. “What I’m doing today, I’m not doing lightly, but because I have no other choice.”
The phenomenon of turning in one’s stars isn’t unprecedented, but it is rare. A handful of three-star chefs have done so over the years, crushed by the expense and pressures of maintaining their temples of gastronomy.
The most recent was Sebastien Bras in the central town of Laguiole last fall. But it is highly unusual for a more modest one-star, and particularly poignant in a place that has little else going for it.
To step out of Mr. Brochot’s gleaming kitchen and immaculate, angular dining room is to wonder how he got here in the first place. It seems an extravagance in a faded industrial town whose glory days were 100 years ago, like the reproach perpetually thrown at France itself as a country living beyond its means.
The “for sale” signs on the worn pastel storefronts down Mr. Brochot’s street are faded with age. The few people hobbling about in the gloom of a chill December morning are bent over against cold and old age. “There will never be buyers here,” Mr. Brochot said outside a shuttered store that was for sale.
A renowned tea salon, its windows clouded over, has been closed for two years. Residents’ faces are long, sad and unwelcoming. A café owner muttered a warning against citing its name. Under a leafless tree by the old industrial canal, a mournful 1905 monument pays tribute to the hundreds who died in the local mines over the decades.
Unemployment is 21 percent in Montceau, according to the government’s statistics, more than twice the national average. But the coup de grâce for Mr. Brochot was the shuttering of four businesses in quick succession.