Daniel’s assistant sommelier, Christine Collado, remembers how “Daniel came in and he said, ‘I’m disappointed, too, but we all have to do service tonight. “We cried for one day-24 hours,” Siue recalls. His staff felt the loss was like taking a star away from God. As in a dégradation militaire-the ritual of having your sword broken and insignia ripped from your uniform-Boulud faced his team. pre-service meeting, in order of rank, from floor captain to assistant captain to food runner to busser. The day after Boulud received the bad news, Pierre Siue, his dapper general manager, gathered the troops in the gleaming kitchen, where they assembled for the daily (except Sunday) 5:05 P.M. When Daniel Boulud’s flagship restaurant, Daniel, on East 65th Street in Manhattan, had one of its three Michelin stars chopped off last year, the news stunned the culinary world. It’s like losing a girlfriend.” He still can’t talk about it and wouldn’t do so for Vanity Fair. Even though he had previously sold the restaurant, he told the Daily Mail it was “a very emotional thing for any chef. When Gordon Ramsay’s Manhattan restaurant, the London, lost its two-star Michelin rating, in 2013, chef Ramsay wept. The involuntary loss of a star is indeed a bitter pill. He started as head of sales for Michelin’s motorcycle-tire division-motorcycling being another of his passions. He fell in love with France on a high-school trip when he was 16 years old and now lives in Paris with his French wife and 6-year-old son. It’s recognition.” Ellis, a 57-year-old American, supervises all editorial content for the guide as well as the awarding of stars. “It’s not like an Oscar-it’s not a physical thing. “Stars are not given to a chef,” the international director of the Michelin guides, Michael Ellis, is quick to explain. “There was gossip that he was going to lose his star, and I think he was devastated by the idea of that. True, there were other factors-he suffered from depression, was overworked, and was mired in debt-but in point of fact he had actually told Jacques Lameloise, then chef-owner of the three-star Maison Lameloise, “If I lose a star, I’ll kill myself.” Loiseau “was so scared of Michelin,” says Daniel Boulud, a good friend of Loiseau’s who is now the celebrated chef-owner of Daniel in Manhattan. The pressure of maintaining Michelin three-star status (their highest rating) and the possibility that he might lose it were blamed by some for Loiseau’s suicide. In 2003, the renowned, 52-year-old French chef Bernard Loiseau, then one of the most famous chefs in France and an inspiration for the chef Auguste Gusteau in the Pixar film Ratatouille, shot himself in the mouth with a hunting rifle amid speculation that the Michelin restaurant guide was about to pull his restaurant’s third star.
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