The land of foie gras takes to the 3-star hamburger

By Jane Sigal

International Herald Tribune

PARIS: Even if you couldn't be on the Champs-Élysées for Bastille Day on
Monday to watch seven parachutists float down in front of President
Nicolas Sarkozy, you can still celebrate the greatness of France with a
new local tradition.

Eat a hamburger.

Beginning a few years ago but picking up momentum in the past nine
months, hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded the city. Anywhere
tourists are likely to go this summer - in cafés in Saint Germain des
Prés, in fashion-world hangouts, even in restaurants run by three-star
chefs - they are likely to find a juicy beef patty, almost invariably on
a sesame seed bun.

"It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit - the subversive, even,"
said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant in Paris. "Eating with your
hands, it's pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it."

It is a startling turnaround in a country where a chef once sued
McDonald's for $2.7 million in damages over a poster that suggested he
was dreaming of a Big Mac. Hamburgers were everything that French dining
is not: informal, messy, fast and foreign.

But as French chefs have embraced the quintessentially American food,
they have also made it their own, incorporating Gallic flourishes like
cornichons, fleur de sel and fresh thyme. These attempts to translate
the burger, or maybe even improve it, strongly suggest that it is here
to stay.

"It's not just a fad," said Frédérick Grasser-Hermé, who, as consulting
chef at Black Calvados near the Champs-Élysées, developed a burger made
with wagyu beef and seasoned with what she calls a black ketchup of
blackberries and black currants. "It's more than that. The burger has
become gastronomic."

Some of the most celebrated chefs in the city have taken up the
challenge. Yannick Alléno, who earned a third Michelin star in 2007 for
his precise, rarefied cuisine at Le Meurice, serves a thick, succulent
hamburger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. Alléno's baker, Frédéric
Lalos, a winner of one of the country's fiercest cooking competitions,
makes the buns. With smoked bacon, lettuce, dill pickles, mustard,
mayonnaise and fries, the burger at Le Dali costs 35 euros, about $56.

Romain Corbière, the chef at Alain Ducasse's restaurant Le Relais du
Parc, in a Norman-style manor near the Trocadéro, cooks a seasonal
burger a la plancha. This summer Corbière, a veteran of Ducasse's Louis
XV in Monaco, is substituting a shrimp and squid patty for the beef
burger he served in cooler weather.

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon offers Le Burger, actually two small burgers
topped with slabs of foie gras of almost equal size.

The only thing more surprising than the about-face in chefs' attitudes
may be the enthusiasm with which their patrons have devoured these haute
burgers.

"I didn't think we would sell so many," said Sonia Ezgulian, guest chef
at Café Salle Pleyel, which Samuel opened last fall in an airy,
modernist space inside one of the most prestigious concert halls in
Paris.

On some days, as many as a third of her customers order the burger,
which is offered alongside Mediterranean-inspired dishes like sea bass
with fennel confit and pistachios. "Sometimes we say we have no more,"
she said. "It's just too much."

It is not as if hamburgers were unknown in Paris. American restaurants
here like Joe Allen have long served them. Grasser-Hermé ate her first
in 1961 at the American Legion, 11 years before McDonald's unveiled its
golden arches in France. But with few exceptions the local burgers were
flat, overcooked and shunned even by American expatriates.

Other forms of ground or chopped beef have been enjoyed here for years
as well. Butchers sell kilos of ground meat destined to become steak
hché, a pan-seared patty made with lean meat, pressed into an oval, and
served without a bun.

And while steak tartare shows up on practically every brasserie menu,
chefs now recognize that a hamburger is not simply six ounces of chopped
lean beef grilled until crusty.

"No, that would be an error," said Grasser-Hermé.

"A hamburger is the architecture of taste par excellence," she
explained. "The meat needs to be a mix of fatty and lean. Not raw, not
rare. It must be medium rare. At the same time the bread needs to be
smooth, tepid, toasted on the sesame side. I like to brush the soft side
with butter. There needs to be a crispy chiffonade of iceberg lettuce.
Everything plays a role."

In developing the Salle Pleyel burger, Samuel and Ezgulian felt the
weight of tradition. "We're a little terrified of making a mistake,"
said Samuel. "We cling to things like the soft buns, sweet-and-sour
pickles, onions, tomatoes, cheese. We need these guideposts because we
don't have the history, the context. Otherwise, for us, it's not a
burger. It's a hot sandwich."

Yet Ezgulian has taken some liberties. The current version of her burger
is a riff on steak tartare. She's kneaded a mixture of chopped sun-dried
tomatoes and tangy cornichons and capers into the ground meat. Parmesan
shavings stand in for the usual Cheddar.

Céline Parrenin, a co-owner of Coco & Co, a two-level place devoted to
eggs that opened in Saint Germain last year, did not feel any such
compunction when she and her business partner, Franklin Reinhard,
invented the Cocotte Burger. The Cheddar cheeseburger, with pine nuts
and thyme mixed into the meat, sits on a toasted whole-wheat English
muffin pedestal. In a wink at the restaurant's egg theme and recalling
the time-honored steak a cheval, a fried egg is placed on top.

So how did the dripping, juicy hamburger come to be one of the signature
dishes of Paris? For one thing, expatriate French chefs reinventing
American classics in the United States made it safe for their countrymen
to try it back home.

"I didn't have this burger culture," said Samuel. "A hamburger, what's
that? I didn't get it. Then I tasted it at DB Bistro Moderne," she said,
speaking of Daniel Boulud's restaurant in New York.

Corbière grew up with burgers, but he didn't think of putting one on the
Relais du Parc menu until he tasted Laurent Tourondel's Black Angus
burger at BLT Market in New York last October.

Both Tourondel and Boulud laughed when they were told that they had
helped the hamburger conquer Paris.

"I think it's shocking, but at the same time the French are realizing
that a burger is real food, it's good," said Boulud.