Bernard Loiseau

In February of 2003, all of France and the culinary community around the world was shocked to learn of the suicide of Bernard Loiseau, chef and owner of the Cote D’Or restaurant at the hotel Relais Bernard Loiseau in Burgundy. At the time, Bernard was perhaps the most famous chef in France and was one of only 25 whose restaurants held the coveted three star rating from the Michelin Guide. In fact, he sat atop one of the most competitive and high-pressure businesses in the world. In The Perfectionist, author Rudolph Chelminski asks the question: “Did France’s obsession with food kill it’s most famous chef?”

Probably not. Bernard was a driven perfectionist. While wildly successful as a chef and hotelier, his business had serious financial problems with millions of dollars in debt incurred to continue improving the property. But it was also known that Bernard suffered from bi-polar disorder or manic-depressive personality disorder. The highs that had always driven him to incredible achievements were followed often by the depths of depression and despair. While France’s obsession with food created the high pressure in which he operated, the causes of his suicide were far more complex.

He was deeply loved and respected in France. His funeral was attended by thousands and by each of the other 24 Michelin three-star chefs in France.

Following his death, the business benefited from an enormous insurance policy on his life which paid off most, if not all of its debts. His wife Dominique took over the management of the company and his primary assistant took over as chef. Today, the restaurant retains its three-star Michelin rating and the hotel is as near to perfection as you can find. We dined twice in the restaurant and were greeted warmly by Dominique, a lovely and charming woman who nightly makes her way through the restaurant to speak with each patron. All of the senior employees in the kitchen and dining room worked for Bernard for many years and remain with the property, loyal to his memory and to Dominique.

Reading The Perfectionist while staying at Bernard’s hotel and chatting with his widow was an amazing experience. If you’re ever over this way, I highly recommend it.

Bonjour from France

Well, let’s just admit at the outset that the lovely Laura Lee and I are wimps when it comes to time-zone adjustment while travelling. Thus, we have learned to always allow ourselves a couple of days to recuperate from the time shift. Wednesday, we left Birmingham at 5:30 p.m. and connected with a flight departing Atlanta (late) at 9 p.m. CDT for Paris. After a huge dinner with wine, etc. on the flight, we began trying to sleep at around midnight CDT. Three hours later, we were awakened with breakfast being served (we just had coffee) and just after 5 a.m. Birmingham time, we arrived in Paris. By 9 a.m. Birmingham time, we had arrived in the tiny Burgundy town of Saulieu. It was 4 p.m. here and we checked into our local hotel having only had a couple of hours sleep and no breakfast yet.

We tried to solve the problem by moving straight into cocktail hour, enjoying wine and cheese on the grounds of the beautiful little hotel Relais Bernard Loiseau. This was followed by dinner at 7:30 p.m. local time and at 10:30 p.m. (still 3:30 in the afternoon back home) we were off to bed. We each took two Benadryl tablets and I slept reasonably well and was up by 7:30 this morning. The lovely Laura Lee tossed and turned much of the night and she is having breakfast now and getting past her grouchiness.

Our hotel is quite famous for its cuisine and its founding chef, Bernard Loiseau. I have been reading a little about his career and his tragic death by suicide three years ago. I plan a little post about him and this spectacular place tomorrow. We have a couple of days just to relax in this beautiful village before embarking on a 5–day bicycle tour of Burgundy. I will report in on the tour and let you know if it is an easier trip than dogsledding in Canada. But what I really want to talk about here is bathrooms.

The French seem to have some inexplicable urge to automate a number of functions in their bathrooms. My daughter Suzanne tells a story of staying in a completely automated hotel in France where there were no visible employees. She checked in by inserting a credit card into some machine that produced a room key. The bathroom was designed to be self-cleaning so that when she entered, it sensed her presence and turned on lights, etc. It was designed so that when she left, the door would lock and the bathroom would clean itself by spraying disinfectant soap everywhere and then rinsing down with hot water. Not knowing this, Suzanne opened the door to get something she had forgotten, and then closed it back. The bathroom, thinking she had left, locked it’s own door and proceeded to spray her down with disinfectant. Suzanne described it as being in a human carwash. She emerged later, completely cleaned and disinfected.

Laura Lee’s great grandfather invented a gadget he called a “rump washer”, something along the lines of a bidet which was still in the bathroom of her house when she was growing up on the family farm in Georgia. Here, our bathroom has some type of device called a “clos o mat” instead of an ordinary toilet. We first noticed that when one sits on it, the bathroom vent fan comes on automatically. But it does much more than that. It serves as a combination toilet and “rump washer”. If you press a start button before sitting on it, you can then press a switch with either elbow which causes a small sprinkler head to emerge in the toilet and spray water up to wash you off. Then, when you let go of this elbow switch, a blower comes on to dry you off. I haven’t actually used this device yet but I did try to figure out the instructions while standing above the toilet and the result was I got sprayed in the face, an instant cure for the grogginess of jet lag. I’ll continue to keep you posted on bathroom automation throughout our trip.

The Trip South

Here’s a map of the route we’ll take to move the boat from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin to Mobile, Alabama. Click on the map to bring up the website where it was created. There you can zoom in or out on any area, see satellite photos and other details of the trip.

Steel Magnolia

We completed the surveys yesterday on the 52’ custom steel trawler in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Accompanied by the lovely Laura Lee, I watched as a surveyor and engine surveyor poked and punched and gave the boat a thorough physical exam. We took her out for a “sea trial” where she was run wide open for a few minutes to look for any engine problems. And, finally, she was hauled out of the water for a view of her ah…figure, below the waterline. She’s quite voluptuous.

Everything seemed to go well and the surveyors had no serious concerns. As Laura Lee says, the boat has been thoroughly “vetted”. We are awaiting results of the oil sample analysis and the actual written surveys, but it appears that we’ll own a new boat within the week.

We have been discussing several alternative names but we keep coming back to “Steel Magnolia”, reflecting the new southern home for this steel vessel. In an amazing coincidence, we found that the current owner, Bob Leitz, had planned on using the same name when he built the boat but changed it to Acadian in honer of the many Acadian workers involved in building the boat. When we found that out, it seemed that “Steel Magnolia” was simply meant to be for this boat.

Starting in mid-October, I hope to be bringing the boat from Sturgeon Bay to Chicago and then down the river system to the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway and on to Mobile, Alabama. There we will pause to have some work done at Dog River Marina, among old friends. I’ll be posting the ship’s log here during the trip.

For those interested in ship’s systems, I’ll be setting up a new section of the blog called “Principal Particulars”, a term I like, used by the naval architects in all the drawings and details for this boat. If you’re not interested in such strange things, just don’t go to that page. For now, I’ll just give the basics:

Principal Particulars

Length, Overall 51’ 11-1/4”
Length on DWL 47’ 5-15/16”
Breadth, Moulded 15’ 3-3/4”
Max Depth, Skeg to Sheer 12’ 11-1/8”
Draft to DWL 5’ 9-5/16”
Displacement 36 Long Tons
Cruising Speed 8 knots
Propulsion 370hp @ 2600 RPM