Edition: U.S. / Global


Published: August 5, 1987

FOR Gilbert LeCoze, chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin, New York's finest seafood restaurant, returning home to this small fishing village on Brittany's south coast has become a sentimental journey. He visits his father, Gabriel (his mother died a little over a year ago), with whom he can gather fresh fish and shellfish, and savor both food and family.

At one time Port Navalo was the last place the younger LeCoze wanted to be. It has taken years and distance for the father-son relationship to mellow. It is a loving relationship grounded in mutual respect. But even now it has an edge. ''I worked for 15 years training your palate,'' the father insisted recently as the two shared a reunion lunch. ''I taught you everything you know.'' They were disputing the ripeness of a Camembert the father had selected and the condition of a bottle of wine opened by his son.

''Papa, you haven't learned anything about taste in 75 years,'' came the reply.

The conversation was set against a familiar backdrop: the two men busy forcing open the dark shells of freshly dug palourde clams to suck out the meat, cracking the claws of ruddy araignee crabs, and lifting the delicate flesh of a poached bar (a kind of saltwater bass) from the bone, leaving a mountain of shells and carapaces picked clean. The LeCoze family is so passionate about seafood that their pet spaniel is named Langoustine.

The younger LeCoze acknowledges his debt to his father and to the years spent at his side in the Hotel de Rhuys, a small hotel and restaurant the family still owns but no longer operates in Port Navalo.

The town, at the tip of the Rhuys peninsula, overlooks the Gulf of Morbihan on one side and the Atlantic on the other. After showing a visitor the hotel, Mr. LeCoze pointed to a small fishing boat in the harbor. ''I used to fish from one just like that,'' he said, recalling another childhood scene and pleasure.

His father has turned away from the sea, settling a mile inland from the hotel and tending his roses rather than scanning the horizon for fishing boats. But in his kitchen and at his table, everything must still pass muster. The critical eye and obsession with quality apply not just to the seafood he was preparing with his son, but to the lightly salted farmhouse butter, the crusty bread, the fragrant herbs and lettuces, the squabs raised by a local farmer, the cherries and strawberries served for dessert. Indeed, dessert became the focus of a discussion over the relative merits of Plougastel and Colpo strawberries: the juicier, sweeter Colpos, less widely sold, won hands down.

The younger LeCoze remembered many disputes about food between a teen-ager forming his tastes and an authoritarian adult, both searching for the best. The son worked with his father, who was the chef, in the rustic, stone-walled kitchen and dining room from the time he was 13. It was the start of his career and his sole training ground.

He says his father never influenced his decision to become a chef:

''That would have been impossible!'' Still, the son reflects the father's high standards and feel for seafood, and has enhanced them with his own considerable talent.

At 21, after completing his national service in the Navy, Mr. LeCoze left for Paris; his father did not approve. ''Just imagine what would have happened to me if I had stayed in Port Navalo, in the shadow of that man,'' the younger man said. For four years he worked loading crates at Les Halles, tending bar and busing tables. With money from friends and a benevolent uncle, he and his sister, Maguy, opened a small restaurant in 1972 called Le Bernardin after the abbey next door on the Quai de la Tournelle.

It was quickly and wildly successful, and in 1980 they moved and expanded it. It earned two Michelin stars. Then, a year and a half ago, they opened a New York branch; they closed the Paris restaurant in April. The portrait of the man in the orange tunic that hangs in the bar in the New York restaurant is of their maternal grandfather, a fisherman.

Whenever Mr. LeCoze is in Brittany he visits his friend Gilles Guillevic, who cultivates and harvests oysters, crabs and other shellfish, and used to supply Le Bernardin in Paris. The talk is of the local seafood supply, lobster prices, Belon oyster harvests, algae threats and of the welcomed resurgence in Brittany of small, independent fishermen. Mr. Guillevic is not optimistic about the future of oystering in the Gulf of Morbihan and the surrounding sea. When a parasite hit in 1974, he explained, production of Breton flat oysters such as Belons dropped to 800 tons a year from 15,000 tons. Today production is still at that same low level.

Mr. LeCoze, who serves only American seafood in his restaurant, is so convinced that flat oysters, or Belons, cultivated in Maine are superior to their French counterparts that he wants Mr. Guillevic to visit the United States and see how they are raised. His father has already tasted the oysters.

Gabriel LeCoze went to New York City last fall to see what his children had wrought. It was his first visit to the city since 1937, when he crossed the Atlantic as a maitre d'hotel on a French passenger liner. ''I offered my father a plate of oysters in the restaurant and he refused them,'' Gilbert LeCoze recalled. ''He said he had not come to the United States to eat oysters.'' Eventually his father succumbed, ''to do me a favor,'' the younger Mr. LeCoze said. ''After that, he had them every day for lunch and dinner.''