Can there be such a thing as a perfect restaurant? La Ferme de Mon Père, the theatre of gastronomy of Marc Veyrat in Megeve in the Haute Savoie, France, has just been awarded 20 out of 20 points by one of the key guides in France, GaultMillau. It complements the three stars awarded by the other gastro-guide heavy hitter, Michelin. Michelin also awarded its maximum of three stars to Veyrat's other restaurant, L'Auberge de l'Eridan at Annecy. However, only one restaurant is open at a time, so that Veyrat does not have to split himself between the two.
Naturally, these accolades have made Veyrat, not for the first time, a talking point in the gastronomic firmament. But it's worth remembering that the GaultMillau has a reputation for controversy and hype. Started by a couple of journalists, its first great coup was the promotion of cuisine nouvelle - it even invented the phrase - and the generation of French chefs associated with it: Michel Guerard, Paul Bocuse, Roger Verge, Les Frere Troisgros, Louis Outhier and others. The buzz about Veyrat may not match that, but it should help to sell a lot of copies of the guide.
Veyrat, 52, has come a long way since being expelled from school for setting fire to a teacher. In 1999, having achieved stellar fame at L'Auberge de l'Eridan, he built La Ferme de Mon Père at a cost of 20m francs as a homage to his father, who had never been able to afford a farmhouse of his own. Modelled on a traditional Savoyard farmhouse, it is made entirely of wood, down to the batons securing the massive beams. It is decorated with antique agricultural equipment, and with live farm animals - sheep, pigs and cattle are on show in their clean and tidy byres through the dining room's glass floor panels and windows. It is not unlike dining in a living agriculture museum, with next week's lunch munching placidly a few feet away.
But if the setting is rural and traditional, the food is anything but. Dishes such as langoustines pelures de pamplemousse confites, semoule virtuelle de eucalyptus (langoustines with confit grapefruit peel and virtual eucalyptus semolina), légumes oublier d'hier, d'aujourd'hui et de demain cuits dans une terre d'argile (yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's vegetables cooked in a clay pot), grenouilles caramelisées, réglisses sauvage, salade étranges, vinaigrette d'orange (caramelised frogs, wild liquorice, strange salad and orange vinaigrette) bear witness to a style of cooking almost as original as the language of the menus.
Veyrat has taken the region's culinary traditions, its esoteric herbs, wild salads, fruits, roots and nuts, and applied the most recherché techniques and technology of the modern batterie de cuisine to produce flavours that are by turns tantalising, exciting, startling, beautiful and plain bonkers. Unquestionably, it is just about the most individual and original cooking in France.
More questionable, however, is the experience of actually eating the dishes. From the moment you are served your amuse bouches - typically five or six separate tiny dishes - and are instructed in precisely what order to eat them, you are an extra in an extravagant production, the object of which is the glorification of the genius of Veyrat, rather than some boring, old-hat notion of dining out as a social pleasure.
Serious waiters dressed as serious waiters and serious waitresses dressed as pixie versions of Little Red Riding Hood deliver your dishes with solemn instructions on the manner of consumption: you must dig your spoon right down to the bottom of this bowl of soup so as to appreciate the subtle changes in texture. You must eat this first, this second, and this third - no dish seems to consist of less than three separate taste sensations - in order to experience the full spectrum of flavours and textures.
And woe betide the unwary diner who in a fit of absent-minded wonder troughs the frites realisées sans l'huile (fat-free chips) before the filet de boeuf des Alpes ou d'ailleurs de chez Monsieur Jargot, jus de pommes vertes acides (fillet of Alpine beef or elsewhere from Monsieur Jargot with sharp, green apple juice).
Veyrat clomps around the dining room in his rustic boots and trademark broad-brimmed black hat keeping a watchful eye on the drama unfolding at each table, and he is not above instructing some La Ferme de Mon Père neophyte or admonishing some slipshod consumer on the error of their eating. This is perfect if you want to abrogate all responsibility for how you eat what you eat to someone else. It can be less than perfect if you feel that, actually, you are at La Ferme to have a good time.
And then there is the small matter of cost. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the food pages of various British papers about the prices charged by Sketch, currently claiming the top slot for the most expensive restaurant in London. First courses at Sketch, which carries the banner of triple Michelin-star Pierre Gagnaire although he is not personally in the kitchen, can set the serious eater back anything up to £48, and main courses up to £75. You can end up with a bill of £140 before you set eyes on the handwritten wine list, on which there is only one wine for less than £30.
Whatever outrage this might provoke, it is the merest bagatelle compared to La Ferme de Mon Père. There the 14-course menu sonate will hit the credit card for 270 euros (£170), including VAT. The 16-course menu symphonie settles for 350 euros (£238), and there is no choice in the matter: you have to eat one or the other. To give some idea how this stacks up, a recent table of three faced a total bill, including drinks, of 1,265 euros (£860).
These prices provoke all kinds of ludicrous comparisons. Can a Van Gogh really be worth £50m? Rio Ferdinand £28m? A night at the opera £150? They are simply not comparable. In reality, if you wonder at the price of a meal at La Ferme de Mon Père, you can't afford to go there. You will spend too much time worrying whether or not you're getting £238 worth of joy and gastronomic wonder.
Such miserly considerations do not cloud the judgment of guide inspectors; their expenses are covered by their employers. However, It might be worth bearing in mind that my friend, who was faced with the 1,265 euro bill, who is wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice and even greedier than I am, was seriously questioning whether he would ever go to La Ferme de Mon Père or L'Auberge de l'Eridan again. It would seem the price of perfection may be too high for many.
