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She was right: The renowned chef's specialties hadn't changed an iota in the 12 years since we had first eaten at this, our cult retro restaurant. My mouth watered at the thought of chicken liver terrine with foie gras, pike dumplings, pan-fried frog's legs, veal sweetbreads in a creamy sauce Grand-Mère Ducloux ...

"Only one thing has changed," I remarked, taking a sharp breath. "The prices."

Each delicacy now required the sacrifice of many hundreds of French francs. I estimated the upcoming damage to be on the order of $200. The classic, the unchanging, the steadfastly rich dishes at this archetype of French country establishments, a veritable temple of gastronomy, had substantially outstripped inflation.

Some critics might even claim that the prices were inflated to start with, way back in 1947. The same chef-owner, Jean Ducloux, has been cooking the same food here since then. Actually, most of Ducloux's dishes are much older than that -- from the 19th century or maybe even the Roman Empire.

Ducloux's place is called Greuze, in reference to the French genre and portrait painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805). It is located in Tournus (pronounced "tour-new"), where Greuze was born.

Tournus is a time tunnel of a town on the banks of the Saône River in southern Burgundy. The nearest big city is Lyon, about an hour south. Paris is a million miles to the north, in another universe altogether.

Tournus and Greuze go hand in glove. Everything about them is slow, generous and wonderfully old-fashioned.

On our latest visit we arrived early for lunch and killed time by strolling around this small but ancient town, founded, apparently, by Celtic tribesmen several millennia before the Romans showed up.

Pot-bellied boule players tossed their balls under the shade trees lining the Saône, a torpid river that slogs its way south through Burgundy vineyards and Charolais cattle pastures to Lyon, where it joins the fast-flowing Rhône.

When they weren't nodding off along the embankments, Tournus' intrepid fishermen were wetting lines and leisurely pulling big, bottom-feeding fish out of the river.

Closer to the restaurant, trucks lumbered around the edge of town on the Route Nationale highway. All the trucks seemed to be hauling cases of wine to Paris and Lyon, or loads of milk-white Charolais beef cattle to market. The big, slow, docile beasts stared at us and mooed.

Tournus is mostly medieval. One of its churches -- squat Saint Valerian -- was built between 1008 and 1028. It was de-consecrated some time ago and has been transformed into a fancy antique shop we dared not enter for fear of incurring instant bankruptcy.

Not far from Saint Valerian, a bulging Renaissance building with mullioned windows bore a faded, 19th century advertising slogan that read: "It's the root, and not merely the branches of the sickness, that Soeur Borel tea attacks."

The Greuze Museum, dedicated to the faltering memory of this great native son, has been closed for about 15 years, we learned. In all our many visits to this town we have never been able to see it, though this time when we inquired we were assured that it was scheduled to reopen soon, in a new location. Soon ...

"Some things take a long time to get done in Tournus," admitted the friendly woman at the local tourism office. In her voice I could detect the Saône River lazing by.

There wasn't a great deal to see by way of monuments in town -- other than the 1,000-year-old fortress abbey of Saint Philibert, which makes Saint Valerian seem positively postmodern and would in itself be worthy of a detour to Tournus. This magnificent Romanesque pile, one of the great abbey churches in France, is built of herringbone brick and banded stone, its narthex held aloft by massive brick columns. Its towers are visible from miles around.

We took a turn through Saint Philibert and confirmed our recollections: It's the kind of sanctuary likely to withstand the next Deluge or two. And we were happy not to have the one-franc coin required to switch on the lights in the crypt -- alone, we drank in the moody half-light.

The back wall of Greuze, the restaurant, abuts Tournus' ancient Gallo-Roman citadel, which rings Saint Philibert's abbey. The restaurant's main dining room is actually built against the old city walls, and there's a smaller dining room inside one of the 1,700-year-old towers.

The setting struck me as important, because it reinforced the timeless quality of the Greuze experience. And that's what we had come back for. We wanted the total time-tunnel effect.

Next page | Rich dishes from a sworn enemy of nouvelle cuisine