FOR the past decade and a hall, one restaurant in Dublin has annually set standards of excellence which other restaurants shave striven to emulate. And when they have finally caught up with those standards, it is in vain, because by then the restaurant which set them had proceeded to set even higher ones for itself. Year after year after year of getting better and better and better.
It is something few of us ever manage, the remorseless improvement of standards. It requires discipline and hard work and intellectual effort in anything - but most especially in the difficult and slippery business of restaurants, where the slope downwards towards lesser standards is so inviting and so easy to follow.
Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud has not followed that slope downwards. It has gone in the opposite direction, where it gets more and more difficult as the slope gets steeper. The better; you get, the harder it is for you to keep rising. Only those who are very good and very dedicated manage the feat of continuous ascent.
Reaching for the stars
The most rigorous adjudicators of that ascent are the inspectors from the Michelin guide. Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud this year has achieved the feat of moving those last metres of rockface up from one star to two, by that very ability to get better and better and better each year.
Those few metres of rockface between one star and two could be measured in terms of kilometres. There are several thousand one star restaurants in the world. There are 97 two star. It is very difficult to get that one star, and restaurants all over the world covet it. It is a proof of quality of food and service, decor and elegance; of a regard for food and wine, and a shared respect between restaurant and customer.
But to get that other star requires even greater effort and discipline and application. It means the staff must be constantly alert, polite and, especially in Ireland, friendly.
That was the great failure of RPG in its early days - the staff were austere distant, gallically aloof. Clients felt uneasy, intimidated, almost as if they were being bullied by waiters who were merely following the traditions of classic French restauration.
Patrick in time changed that aspect of the restaurant. His staff became, and remain, friendly and affable, without losing any of their confidence or their Gallic style. Three other aspects were changed by local demand. One was that butter appeared on the tables; this was an irresistible cultural demand. Irish people cannot sit down at a table without butter. The second alteration was the Irish expectation of vegetables with a meal. This is an actual improvement on the more austere French style. The final change was that salt and pepper were put on tables.
Importance of being earnest
This I regret. The food as served needs no further embellishment; and if the seasoning of the dishes by the chefs of RPG does not meet with your approval, might I earnestly suggest that you cat elsewhere?
There are so many fine restaurants in Dublin nowadays that people might easily forget the debt those restaurants owe to RPG. It set standards of excellence which customers came to expect elsewhere; and though they seldom, found such standards, their expectations for both food and service must have impacted on other restaurants.
As, indeed, they have affected RPG itself. Good standards come to be taken to granted, improvements are needed merely to maintain the impression that they are not deteriorating. RPG improved in order to appear to stay the same to improve further required greater effort.
You might, by this time, have got the impression that I like "RPG". Very good. Your perspicacity is amazing. I adore RPG because it takes the business of food and drink very seriously; I would rather dine memorably there twice a year, and pay a lot of money, than eat 20 times in inferior restaurants and not remember a single course.
Which is what normally happens, even in the happy era of raised standards which the example of RPG has helped usher in.
Raising standards has ways been the key to RPG. It is no doubt that philosophy which is now causing Patrick Guilbaud to abandon the service charge and to list in the menu the full price of the meal, service included. This is the way it should be. If we wish to express our gratitude further, we may of course do so; but now - for the first time that I know of in any restaurant in Dublin - you know the cost of what you order without any mental arithmetic. That arithmetic can be a mite complicated when wines, aperitifs, desserts and digestifs have been consumed, and a slightly idiotic grin appears on the diner's face as the third Calvados appears on the table.
Cistin v cuisine
Some people might complain about the Gallic nature of the Michelin guide and the preference it gives to French cuisine. Is this wrong? Michelin is French, its gastronomic culture is French, its judges are French. The standards which we have imported and which have transformed Irish restauration have mostly been French, even when applied to Irish cuisine. The very vocabulary we use is French.
I personally long for the day when my old friends Gerry and Marie Galvin in Drimcong House receive the Michelin star which they no doubt deserve. But in the meantime, let us celebrate the Irish restaurant which has won those two stars; it would not have won them without the increasing expectations of the customers which have driven standards up and up.
RPG deserves its stars thank you Patrick, Guillaume, Catherine, Didier, Laurent, Stephane et Stephane, Anita, Regis, Charles, Christophe et David, and all the others whom have not met but who have scraped and scrubbed and carved and cleaned and served behind the scenes. Congratulations.
And now, without further ado towards the third.