In Paris, a Critic Criticized
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By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: January 13, 2009
PARIS
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Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times
HE CUTS HIS WAY François Simon, a food critic in Paris, protects his identity.
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Disney/Pixar
DOES HE BLOG? Anton Ego, the food critic in the animated film “Ratatouille,” was supposedly modeled on François Simon of Le Figaro.
WHEN the sommelier in the overpriced Paris restaurant started to refill the glass without asking, François Simon stopped his hand in midair before a drop could fall.
“I like to control the temperature of my wine,” he announced. “In a restaurant, I am horrified by having to obey. I want to be indulged.”
Mr. Simon may be the most feared and most read figure in France’s culinary world, an ordinary looking man with a fountain pen as razor-sharp as a butcher’s slaughter knife.
As food critic for the right-of-center Le Figaro newspaper for more than two decades, he has skinned, sliced, grilled and roasted his subjects, indifferent to the impact of his words on them, but can be thin-skinned when they hit back.
He once described a meal at the restaurant Guy Savoy, a Michelin favorite, as “a three-star crucifixion,” faulting Mr. Savoy for serving his signature artichoke and truffle soup out of season. Marc Veyrat, who enjoys an unheard-of perfect 20-20 score in the Gault-Millau guide, is for him a “clown” and “a fake peasant” with megalomaniacal tendencies.
He has extended his reach with books, a weekly cable television show in which he hides his face and a blog that includes his secret video recordings with a hand-held camera of some of the great and not-so-great tables of France.
Not content simply to pass judgment on others, Mr. Simon claims to be an accomplished cook himself. His blog, in both French and English, boasts that he can cook a chicken 200 ways.
Last month, though, he took a step that few of his colleagues would have dared. He closeted himself in the kitchen of the tiny, mural-tiled bistro Le Cochon à l’Oreille and cooked five nights in a row, each night for 20 or so diners who had won the free meals in a first-come-first-served Internet sign-up.
Mr. Simon’s debut as a chef occurred during the annual “Le Fooding” week, sponsored by a French gastronomic movement that he strongly supports and that promotes an egalitarian, irreverent approach to dining. He announced his kitchen stint on his blog and in his column, and by the time he was ready to cook, much of the French media world had taken note.
The meal was barely adequate, according to five diners one night. The pumpkin soup, seasoned heavily with ginger, vanilla and black sesame oil, was grainy, undercooked and so dense it stood up in stiff peaks.
“I’m disappointed,” said Julie Demarest, an administrator in a water purification company. “It’s thick — like oatmeal. I don’t like it.”
The spiced chicken with pine nuts and golden raisins filled the dinner plate, but was accompanied only by an underdressed green salad. The zabaglione with sake was frothy and thin rather than creamy; the centers of the macaroons were chewy rather than soft. When the maître d’hôtel offered seconds on the dessert, there were few takers.
“Those macaroons — they’re so hard they could choke a Christian,” said Marc Beekenkamp, a Web designer, using an expression that means the dish is hard to digest.
But his colleague and friend, Matthieu Zerafa, came to Mr. Simon’s defense. “Every day he sits in judgment, and now it’s his turn to be judged,” he said. “You have to compliment him on one thing — he has a lot of nerve.”
That point, at least, has never been in dispute. Mr. Simon prides himself on being an outsider and a provocateur. His columns describe not only a restaurant’s food, but also its service, décor and clientele, even down to the movement of the breasts of women around him.
Mr. Simon has created such a buzz around himself that some French reporters called him the model for Anton Ego, the dour, unforgiving food critic in the 2007 animated film “Ratatouille.”
Brad Bird, the film’s director, said through a spokesman that the character was a pastiche derived from many sources. No matter: Mr. Simon was quick to assume Anton Ego’s persona.
“Since ‘Ratatouille,’ it hasn’t stopped: I’ve become the darling of my nephews,” he wrote in his blog, “Simon Says.” He said that he loved it when his friends started calling him Anton Ego, writing: “This low-life Anton is a good guy. He sacrifices his reputation to celebrate the cuisine of a rat.”
Mr. Simon has little use for the Michelin and Gault-Millau grading systems that have created a rigid gastronomic hierarchy and transformed chefs into superstars.
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Basil Katz contributed reporting.
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