Alexandre Dumaine: The Forgotten King of French Cooking

Ask most people to name the great French chefs of the twentieth century and you'll get a familiar handful — Escoffier, maybe Bocuse, perhaps Fernand Point. Almost nobody, outside the small world of serious culinary history, will say Alexandre Dumaine. And yet for thirty unbroken years, from 1935 to 1964, Dumaine held three Michelin stars at his restaurant, La Côte d'Or, in the small Burgundian town of Saulieu — a run matched by almost nobody of his era. The food writer Naomi Barry, in Gourmet magazine, described the place as having almost the character of a national shrine. Kings ate there. So did Hemingway, Chaplin, Édith Piaf, and Salvador Dalí. It was, by the reckoning of many of Dumaine's own contemporaries, the finest table in France. This episode of Fabulously Delicious sets out to correct one of the quieter injustices in the history of French food.

Dumaine's beginnings gave no hint of what was to come. He was born in 1895 in Digoin, a modest, working-class pottery town in Burgundy with no particular culinary reputation and no family connection to restaurants. What he did have was Burgundy itself — one of the great food and wine landscapes of France — and, once it was focused, an extraordinary determination. At twelve he began the classic French apprenticeship: the Hôtel de la Poste in Paray-le-Monial, then the Carltons of Vichy and Cannes, then Paris, where he trained under two of the finest chefs in the city at the Café de Paris. By the time he left the capital he had both the technical foundation and the guiding philosophy — sauces made light, ingredients of the finest quality, the cook's job to express the ingredient rather than impose upon it — that would define the rest of his career.

The First World War interrupted everything. Dumaine served as a cook and artilleryman on the Western Front, fought at Verdun, and was decorated with the Croix de Guerre for a citation that read, in essence, that he was always the first to volunteer for the hardest tasks — a detail that says something about the man the restaurant and the stars never quite captured. After the war he married Jeanne, who would become as central to the story of La Côte d'Or as he was. It was Jeanne who ran the front of house, managed the staff, and gave every guest — whether they arrived in a Bentley or a lorry — the sense that the house had been waiting specifically for them. Naomi Barry called her simply the most gracious hostess in the entire hotel world. Behind nearly every great chef of that generation stood a partner managing everything the kitchen could not, and at La Côte d'Or, that partner was Jeanne.

An unexpected decade in Algeria, running hotel kitchens for a French shipping line, sharpened Dumaine into the chef he would become. When he and Jeanne returned to France in the early 1930s, homesick for Burgundy, they settled in Saulieu — a modest market town on the great road south to the Alps — and took over what became La Côte d'Or. Within five years it had its third Michelin star, which it held for the next three decades. The philosophy was consistent throughout: sauces reduced slowly until barely a suggestion of themselves remained, ingredients sourced obsessively — Bresse chicken, sole from Boulogne, shellfish from Roscoff, butter from cows grazed on salt marshes. And the welcome was unconditional. Barry once watched a well-dressed man eating alone, given the same careful attention as everyone else, walk out past the Bentleys and Alfa Romeos in the car park and climb into the cab of an enormous lorry. That, she wrote, was one reason she always loved the place.

When the time came to retire, Dumaine did something few restaurateurs in his position have ever done: he turned down substantial offers from wealthy businessmen and instead spent months quietly watching a young, largely unknown chef work, before selling him the restaurant for a price well below what he could have commanded — and staying on as a consultant through the first seasons to make sure the transition held. He retired to Dinan, the town of his birth, wrote his memoir and cookbook Ma Cuisine, and died in 1974 at seventy-eight. The square outside La Côte d'Or in Saulieu now carries his name. He didn't reinvent French cuisine — by his own quiet philosophy, that was never the point. He preserved it, at the highest level he could manage, for as long as he could, and then found someone worthy of carrying it forward. That, as much as the thirty years of stars, is the story worth telling.

Listen to the full story of Alexandre Dumaine on this week's episode of Fabulously Delicious: The French Food Podcast — available on Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts.