Lucien Verge
L'Escargot
Chicago IL
While many French restaurants were transformed by the influence of nouvelle cuisine, Lucien Verge’s L’Escargot remained a bastion of the simple, honest food of provincial French cooking.
In fact, customers were so thrilled by his cassoulet that they did not allow him to remove it from the menu, even during the hot summer months. And his desserts, rather than being elaborate constructions, featured the elegant simplicity of fruit — fruit tarts and feathery crepes filled with fresh fruit.
“I call my style of cooking cuisine du terroir,” said Verge, a native of Lyons. “It means cooking of the earth, and, when it appears on the plate it is basic, country cooking.”
It has taken the culinary world 20 years to catch up to his concept of terroir.
But traditional and authentic dishes can also be done with the finest and freshest ingredients, and this was equally important to Verge. When he first moved to Chicago in 1966, he was unable to find French mustard in the markets and had to send to New York — or further abroad — for many of his ingredients. Those he could not locate he would work around, devising new dishes in his traditional idiom.
Again, finest-and-freshest ingredients are an essential in fine cooking in the 21st century.
Verge maintained he did not change, but rather that his customers caught up with him. “I could not get them to try dishes like choucroute with braised cabbage and sausages, or a pot au feu with boiled meats. Now they trust me, and if I go into the dining room and suggest a dish, they’re likely to give it a chance.”
While his style of cooking drew upon his childhood, his training was in the grand tradition. After four years at La Mere Filloux in is native Lyons, starting training when he was 16, Verge moved to the dining rooms of two of Paris’ finest hotels, the Hotel Crillon and the Hotel Plaza Athenee.
“A chef’s trade is not all written in a book, and each place I worked opened up a different part of the repertoire of French cooking,” he said.
The varying size of restaurants also added to his training. While his experience in Lyons — one of the gastronomic centers of France — was in small places, it gave him a large variety of duties; at the Athenee with 43 chefs he learned the structure needed to avoid chaos.
From Paris Verge moved to New York in 1956 to work at Le Veau d’Or, a restaurant known for the same hearty and informal style of cooking he later produced at L’Escargot. Dishes like leg of lamb and roast duckling were favorites, and he learned about American tastes and preferences.
“It was during those years that I really came to understand recipes from my heart and not just my head,” he said. “You cannot just follow a recipe, you have to understand what each ingredient does for it.” This innate feeling for cooking was immediately appreciated when he opened L’Escargot. When the first restaurant was destroyed in a fire in 1979, he and his partner Alan Tutzer immediately opened another location. When the original reopened, Lucien Verge split his time between the two. His was a cuisine that was the base upon which other chefs innovated and built. "I say to myself, 'I do it authentically.'" he said.
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