Fighting the ‘Mayle’ factor

Xavier Mathieu may cook like a chef enamored of the luminous color of his native Provence, but he certainly doesn’t dress like one. Outside his kitchen at the Hostellerie Le Phebus, he wears nothing brighter than a gray turtleneck, black jeans and a charcoal sport coat.

The same is true at the panoramic Les Oliviers in nearby Bandol. The dining-room tables, armchairs and staff are sheathed in either white or white-on-white. Owner Jean-Pierre Ghiribelli breaks the monotony not with a lavender shirt or an olive-green sweater but with a monochrome outfit that might suggest he is visiting Los Angeles to audition for a bit part in “Men in Black III.”

Such decolorization amid the color-saturated landscapes painted by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse does not reflect a stab at L.A. cool so much as a desire to be liberated from a peasant past and folkloric fashions of the type so affectionately portrayed in Peter Mayle’s “A Year in Provence.”

A primary goal of most, if not all, of the dozen Provencal chefs participating in Marseille-Provence Week in Los Angeles, which starts Saturday, is to upgrade the image of the region and its finest restaurants from rustic to rarefied, from grand-mere to grande cuisine.

“It’s necessary to make it clear that la cuisine provencale has evolved with the times and the pace of contemporary life,” says Jean-Marc Banzo, the chef at the Michelin two-star Le Clos de la Violette in Aix-en-Provence. “It’s no longer just daube, bouillabaisse and pieds et paquets [packets of mutton tripe braised with sheep’s feet and tomatoes].”

Whether Californians will look favorably on the modernization and ennobling of Provencal cooking--the most like Italian and, with its dependence on olive oil instead of butter and cream, most nutritionally correct of French regional cuisines--remains to be seen.

They may instead be charmed by the very same hackneyed images these chefs shun: bright-colored dresses made from the same patterned muslin used to decorate the lids of jam jars, guys who do nothing all day but play boules and drink pastis, aioli-slathered lunch-a-thons followed by four-hour naps.

Moreover, many L.A. diners will have no objection to being served an authentic daube or bouillabaisse (as they will at La Cachette for a week beginning Sunday) . . . if not the sheep’s tripe and trotters.

Still, the contemporary cuisine envisioned by Banzo and his counterparts is unmistakably Provencal. Although the techniques and compositions are new, the cooking times shorter and the dishes invariably lighter and more elegant, the defining flavors are very much the same.

Mathieu can, for example, melt a scoop of basil-and-olive-oil sorbet into his soupe au pistou without betraying his origins (what it says about his good sense may be another matter).

Banzo speaks of using in new ways a chef’s toolbox whose contents--tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, olives, sweet pepper, lamb, Mediterranean fish, herbes de Provence--have not changed in 100 years.

Rene Berard of the Hostellerie Berard depends upon the same tools, but he cautions restraint, sensitivity and subtlety. “Provencal cuisine is not fistfuls of garlic and heaps of herbes de Provence,” says Berard, a mai^tre cuisinier whose pistachio-encrusted lamb with thyme, savory, garlic and tomato is the model of elegance. “You try to bring the sun to the plate. That’s what’s important.”

Even Edouard Loubet, perhaps the most wildly creative and immodest chef in all of Provence, denies the very possibility of invention.

“You rethink, you remodel, you re-imagine,” says Loubet, whose improbable desserts at the two-star Moulin de Lourmarin include eucalyptus ice cream and a chocolate fantasy garnished with Sichuan pepper and a tobacco leaf. “But you no longer invent anything.”

Part of that rethinking, as elsewhere in the world, entails substituting intensity of flavor for fat. Jean-Andre Charial of the celebrated two-star Oustau de Baumaniere in Les Baux reduces five bottles of wine to less than a single cup for the viscous, mostly butter-free fabulously rich red wine sauce (goo?) he serves with fish.

Loubet replaces heavy sauces with infusions, steeping a single herb, root, leaf, fruit peel or seaweed in the appropriate broth. The sharp yet measured explosions of bitter-saltiness and salty-sweetness in these mixtures enhance the illusion of richness.

He likens this chemistry of contrasts to detonating a bomb in the diner’s mouth. “When you put a little saltiness there, a little sweetness there, a little bitterness there and a little pepperiness there, you create more or less a chemical reaction which makes you salivate and builds an appetite but at the same time is light. You must create a balance in the mouth.”

Central to that balance is the principle of simplicity and purity, with dishes composed of three or, at most, four flavors shown to best advantage.

To this end, these chefs are fanatical about using the freshest, finest possible ingredients. For some, even the incomparable markets of Provence (Apt, the Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Carpentras) are inadequate. Loubet, Berard and Charial each rely on a large variety of produce picked fresh every day from their private gardens.

“The luxury of today is not caviar,” says Charial. “Caviar is a can that can be opened in Chicago or Los Angeles, and voila. But you can’t find anything like the petits pois from my garden in Los Angeles.”

He’ll have to see, won’t he?

Young’s book on the cuisine of Marseille is to be published next year by HarperCollins.

The Provencal chefs, left to right: Christian Etienne, Francis Robin, Xavier Mathieu, Jean-Michel Miguella, Edouard Loubet, Rene Berard, Jean-Marc Banzo, Jean-Paul Lanyou, David Fremondiere and Dominique Frerard.