The Cook Page 5
He decides to start earlier in the mornings, to prepare for the influx of customers who always turn up between 1:30 and 2:00 p.m.—twenty-five meals served in a frenzy. I ask him if the solitude bothers him, if he might find it easier to deal with the peculiar responsibility of delighting all these strangers were it shared with someone else, and he shakes his head, arguing that he is naturally independent: I’m fine like this, I can chill out, I don’t have anyone yelling at me.
Above all, the day is long, very long. By the time the kitchen has been cleaned, it is 3:00 p.m. and at last Mauro can sit down. Take a break. He eats lunch as calm descends in the passageway, as if the air were suddenly thickening, swelling with silence. The restaurant empties; the commis chef and the dishwasher have now gone. Mauro relaxes, sometimes he falls asleep. Often, he goes back to the market to say hello to a few people, to have a drink with the other artisans, who are similarly haunted by these afternoon hours, these little lulls in their manic days, and then suddenly the afternoon is over: it’s time to get back to the kitchen.
At 6:00 p.m., Mauro starts work again. He’s already running late—he’s always running late: I’ve spent four years racing against time, he tells me, preparing a clementine savarin cake in glass bowls with iced rims, in the middle of a heat wave.
The most difficult moment, curiously, is not the frenzy of the shift itself, but afterward, at night, when everything must be cleaned, put away, the tables set for the next day, that moment when the weight of the day lies heavily, when the stress has wrung you out and you are exhausted, too weak to talk or even look at someone. The commis chef and the dishwasher always finish before Mauro, who whizzes around until midnight at the earliest, when the last customers talk in whispers, order one last coffee as they put on their coats. It’s the hour when Jacques launches into a long discussion with a local couple who are hanging out at the bar, and it’s when Mauro, inscrutable, empties the trash, a signal that he will soon be going up to bed; this is Jacques’s cue to announce in a solemn voice: Ladies and gentlemen, we are closing—there’s school tomorrow, time to go home.
8
Aligre
JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES, CHUCK STEAK
It is eight in the morning, sometimes seven, when Mauro crosses the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Then he is in sight of the Aligre market, carrying his basket or pushing his cart. The day begins; the vendors with stalls in the covered market and those with stands outside hail one another as they unload their goods and the first customers appear—shuffling old ladies who come for a conversation and their daily meat, three ounces of calf’s liver or a chicken breast; busy mothers or fathers who quickly do the shopping on their way to work; and guys such as Mauro, who will serve about fifty meals in a day.
Mauro walks here every day now, come rain or shine, to buy meat, fish, and vegetables. It’s the biggest moment of the day, the instant when the restaurant’s menu is decided, depending on what the young man finds that is good and affordable—Changing the menu daily, that’s the fun part: you invent something new every day, you choose an “ingredient of the moment,” so there’s really no routine, for the customers or for me, Mauro says, chewing on a matchstick while pointing with his eyes at some beautiful creamy white asparagus spears.
As a poor chef with no overdraft protection, constrained by a tight budget and with loans to pay back, Mauro still has to think about keeping his costs down, about haggling over prices. He can’t go wild with his purchases. He has to exercise common sense.
This shopping is, more than anything else, the construction of a network of relationships essential to the smooth running of the restaurant, and from the beginning Mauro sees this daily outing as a form of learning, an endeavor that requires him to take his time, prove his credentials. He explores the perimeter, deciphers the circuits, identifies the different actors and the connections that link the places—who supplies whom—knowing that a restaurant such as La Belle Saison is a niche market of only marginal interest.
So, to begin with, he pays visits. He wanders along each aisle of the market, scans each stand, compares prices, assesses the merchandise, before finally spending time deciding who will supply him with fruit and vegetables—You get a lot more bargaining power when you buy all the vegetables one guy is selling, he tells me as we walk side by side. We push the shopping cart that has replaced the large basket he used to carry, but which became full too quickly, forcing Mauro to make two visits; the cart spares his back while increasing his purchasing capacity and strengthening his abs, shoulders, and arms—in the first days he will grimace with pain when he stretches and I will bring him some Tiger Balm, warning him to be careful: he’s not supposed to cook with it. After a while, he ends up getting along well with a fruit and vegetable vendor who works hand in hand with a guy in Rungis whose task is to find him the best fruit and vegetable producers and to supply him with specific quantities of particular quality—forty-five pounds of new carrots for Mauro, small and preferably pointed, along with those rarer vegetables that he likes to cook with: Jerusalem artichokes, New Zealand spinach.
Beginning in 2010, Mauro works increasingly often with a new kind of grocery store whose raison d’être is to cut out the middleman between producer and consumer. The result is better prices and a rapid rotation of products, ensuring optimal freshness. Supplies arrive daily, precisely chosen. The products—fruit and vegetables, cheeses, charcuterie, fish and seafood—are collected by the grocer himself during regular trips to selected farms: he goes to Saumont-la-Poterie, in Seine-Maritime, to source the farmhouse Neufchâtel cheese; to Sarzeau, in Morbihan, for the filet mignon of smoked pork; to the La Croix de Pierre butcher, in Rouen, for the boudin blanc; to the Ferme de la Grange orchard, in Jumièges, Seine-Maritime, for Melrose apples and Conference pears; he will even drive all the way to the breeding ponds of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, on the English Channel, for the oysters. When he’s not driving his van, he takes a cart onto a train and rides it to the last stop so he can fetch yogurts made with unpasteurized milk from a particular farm in Eure.
Meat is trickier. You have to join forces with a butcher you trust, team up with a supplier. The first one Mauro starts to work with closes in August, so—lacking funds—he decides to go to the Beauvau market to talk to one of the last few artisan butchers in Paris, a butcher with a stall whose prime rib, rabbit rillettes, and game meat are renowned throughout the capital. The man doesn’t work with restaurants, as the quantities of meat they demand are too high—he refuses to put himself under a client’s thumb and immediately makes clear his desire for independence, his determination to work the way he likes. I don’t need you, you know, he seems to tell Mauro, who remains patient, going back to see him every day, getting to know him, hanging around the stall for a long time in the hope of an audience, a few words, a look of trust. It is like taming a wild animal. Mauro’s stubborn persistence bears fruit: at the end of the summer, the butcher agrees to supply meat to La Belle Saison, an important step that will have implications for the restaurant’s reputation. From this exchange, Mauro gains not only chuck steak that has been matured for seven weeks or fresh sides of veal, but a sort of symbolic anointing.
Lastly, there’s the wine. It’s difficult to come up with even a simple wine list when you have no culture of wine, that special knowledge that, it’s said, takes more than a lifetime to acquire. Thankfully, in the daily socializing that often forms the first network of relationships in a neighborhood, Mauro will meet two guardian angels: Michel, owner of the Envolée wine bar, whose menu offers a good selection, and Fabrice, a sommelier from Bristol who works there. Together, they organize blind tastings one Friday every month—They’re my education, Mauro says as he beckons me closer so I can see in daylight the color of a Loire wine that he is turning slowly in a glass. Fabrice helps him choose the wines for his cellar. For Mauro, this is the moment to acknowledge that he is half-Italian: the wines of La Belle Saison will be organic, by small producers from his mother’s homeland.
The question of supplies—a key one for any restaurant—is gradually fine-tuned. The trick is to combine freshness and reasonable prices with the available storage capacity—which, in the case of La Belle Saison, is extremely limited, with the mini-fridge already filled with all the dairy products. Annoyed by any wasted food, Mauro now works hard to find the exact quantities he needs. He tweaks the amount, tweaks it again, tweaks it until it’s almost perfect, the evening tapas providing a tasty solution for the lunch leftovers. In this way, he does the shopping for only three meals, and no matter what, he is in the kitchen by ten o’clock.
9
Fatigue
After that, I didn’t see him for four years. Or rather, I didn’t see him the way we used to see each other before La Belle Saison: no boat trips on the shimmering waters of the Lac Daumesnil, no nocturnal cinema in Bastille, no swimming in the pool at Buttes-Chaumont, no lazing in the park, no evenings spent sprawled on a couch listening to music at his place or mine. If I wanted to have a moment alone with him, the only way was to turn up at the restaurant at the end of the dinner shift, between midnight and one, when the last clients were standing on the doorstep, congratulating him—It’s art, Mauro! Lucullus Mauro! We’ll come back every week, Mauro!—though without convincing him to leave his kitchen and chat with them; no, all he did was stick his head out and, wiping his hands on his apron, look at them, nodding with his chin while his lips articulated an inaudible Thanks. The dishwasher finished up, the commis chef put on his leather jacket, Jacques tidied the bar, Mauro poured himself a coffee and finally offered me a flat cheek: How are you? So I would sit on one of the stools and start to tell him; Mauro would ask for news about certain people, the gang of six and Mia, his ex-girlfriend—when I talked to him about Mia, something still seemed to light up in his eyes—but other than that, he spoke little, just monosyllables and half smiles, and after ten minutes he would turn on the computer to place orders at the grocery store on Rue de Charonne, clicking on multicolored files, typing in quantities of Gariguette strawberries or red kuri squash, so my words drowned slowly in the bluish light of the screen, until finally I would fall silent. One night, I ended up telling him softly: Okay, you’re not listening, I’m going to leave, but he shuddered, as if shocked by an electric current, and put a hand on my arm and said loudly: Stop—I’m shattered, can’t you see?
He calls me back six months later, one day in June 2012: We’re selling. I’m dumbstruck: Shit, I thought it was going really well—“the rising star in eastern Paris,” “a quirky cuisine far from the usual gastronomic poseurs,” “instant, perfect, essential cooking”—and then I heard him laugh. Don’t worry, it is going really well—too well, in fact. His voice sounds clear, less muffled than in my memory. He suggests we meet up, and one hour later we are sitting face-to-face in a bar in Butte-aux-Cailles, where I remind him that the last time I saw him during daylight hours was on New Year’s Day three years ago: I was looking after a funny dog, which I walked as best I could near the Bastille. Mauro’s not exactly glowing with health, admittedly, and the whites of his eyes are a little yellow, but all the same he is no longer the pale, paper-skinned ghoul who has spent half of the last three years on his feet inside a forty-foot-square cubbyhole. So, tell me. A Perrier with a slice of lemon. I’m quitting. I’ve had enough. I’m beat. Bushed. Spent. Dog tired. Worn-out. Shattered. Drained. Exhausted. Out on my feet. Totally burned out. Listen, I’m fucked. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’m dead.
I’m dead.
Fatigue. For four years, he’s been tired. His back, his neck, his joints. Everything aches, all the time. He’s forgotten how it feels to be healthy; no longer knows what it’s like to live inside a well-rested, pain-free, unstressed body; he’s forgotten how it feels to be cheerful, to have free time, to live life with a hint of uncertainty. He tells me about his days spent chained to the daily running of the restaurant, to the control of the regular operations, to the perfection of a methodology capable of improving the meals he cooks; he describes the mental fatigue that mounts surreptitiously as his solitude intensifies, the solitude he feels with Jacques, with the commis chef and the dishwasher, that unshareable solitude of the boss, the chef.
I can tell he’s getting carried away now; his flow of words accelerates, he bangs the table with his index finger as he describes the rhythm of work, the unflagging tempo that devours the morning, devours the evening—That’s the hardest thing: no evenings off, you know what I mean? I haven’t had an evening off in four years!—leaving just a few meager hours in the afternoon, a dead time that you could do something good with, but alone, because at that time of day everyone else is working, so you go upstairs to take a nap and you come back down when it’s time to start work again, and on Sundays you sleep in, you stay in bed much too late, you just lie there, feeling groggy, because you’re way too exhausted to do anything much with your time, so you hardly even leave the neighborhood, and little by little the boundaries of your life shrink: the neighborhood, the passageway, La Belle Saison, the micro-kitchen where he keeps banging into things, until finally his entire life is reduced to the surface of that countertop. I saw again Mauro’s studio apartment above La Belle Saison, the low-ceilinged room where he’d thrown a large mattress on the floor, where his clothes piled up, where the computer sat on top of a stack of unopened boxes of books; I saw again the orange sodium light that filtered through the permanently drawn curtains. Mauro lived in his workplace—I realized this suddenly—and what had, to begin with, seemed so practical—this little apartment, a convenience that would spare him so much time wasted on transport, yeah, he was so lucky—this little room had ultimately deprived him of any way of decompressing, had robbed him of a buffer between his workplace and his home, had stolen from him those tiny cracks, those hazy intervals, that can open up cavities of daydreams in the hardened concrete time of each day.
I’m dead. He laughs, leaning back in his chair, in front of me, hands crossed behind his head, eyes closed, dead. And four short words burst out of his mouth: I want a life. I observe him. Nearly thirty. Perhaps he’s tormented by the idea of his youth rushing past him, wearing him down; perhaps he feels he is sacrificing himself to cooking, just as high-level athletes sacrifice themselves to sports—and we will never see it from close enough, that abstinence, that discipline, that suffering, the control of the body and the emotions that animate it, the mental life simmering carefully like milk over a fire, never boiling or spilling over, this order that is imposed on them and that they impose on themselves at twenty years old, this dark heroism straining toward glory. It couldn’t go on like that forever, La Belle Saison. A gnawing logic, the logic of economics, the logic of business, demands, implacably, that you must grow if you do not want to perish; this logic insinuates itself into his life, like a current of cold air at the bottom of the ocean, before finally shattering when it collides with his youth. Recently—but was this because he was tired?—he’d felt that he was struggling to keep reinventing the dishes, varying the compositions using the same piece of meat without altering his methods, and suffering ever more from the restrictions of space—a general sensation of compression, obstacles, endless repetition. So he dropped out of the race; he folded. In doing this, he exploded the structure of time that bound up his existence.
10
Asia
POT-AU-FEU, BROTHS
Two months later, Bangkok is gray, lukewarm, frenetic. Mauro is working in a fashionable Italian restaurant where one of his friends, a chef, called him about a vacant position. Mauro decided he wanted to take off after the closure of La Belle Saison, and he thought that Thailand would be a potential entry point into the discovery of Asian cuisine. The sale of the restaurant brought in 270,000 euros, a capital gain that consoles him a little for the months spent without paying himself a salary; he has a little time to figure things out. For now, he is not working with any local products: access to international cuisine is one of the essential markers of the rich business
class that thrives here. And that’s the milieu in which he’s operating.
He’s initiated into the latest culinary trends, the ones that are all the rage in Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Dubai; he experiments with techniques that, before this, he had never even heard of, among them sous-vide cooking, which owes nothing to the bravura performances of a chef but is based on slow cooking at low temperatures, allowing a better concentration of juices and resulting in a tender consistency of the flesh. They’re crazy about it in these prestige restaurants because it was developed by chemists who determined the precise clotting time; because it is infallible, leaves nothing to chance. Mauro is not particularly excited by all this: he considers this cooking method interesting only for the cheaper cuts of meat. It’s perfect for a pot-au-feu, for example, cooked for forty-eight hours at 175°F, but ridiculous for a fillet of beef. On the other hand, he learns quickly. And starts to get bored.
One day, the boss asks if he’d like to work at another of his restaurants, newly opened in one of the city’s most fashionable areas. The place has a radical concept: ten diners served a ten-course meal, open only in the evenings. The height of exclusivity and intimacy; the ultimate experience. This elitist idea creates a mimetic desire, similar to those provoked by limited editions and rare privileges: people are proud of having dined there; they think about it for a long time in advance, and the endless waiting list never gets any shorter. Mauro imagines it will be an adventure. He works hard, and everyone is impressed by his coolness under pressure, his creativity. But a few weeks later, when the owner tells him about his plan to create a chain of upmarket restaurants aimed at the global business class who travel to various cities on vacation, Mauro shakes his head: he’s not interested. He can’t imagine extending his time in this type of restaurant, has no desire to hang around any longer in this milieu of Thai society. He would like to see something more of Asia than this city, which has changed almost overnight from a paddy field to a luxury air-conditioned mall, this human anthill high on consumption, magnetized by the West.