The Cook

by Maylis de Kerangal

  The four and a half hours of the test are incredibly rich and intense: the room is filled with movements and sounds—the lapping of the simmering sauce, the gurgling of the boiling water, the moist breath of the whisk in the cream, the rat-tat-tat of the knife blade chopping turnips, mincing carrots—and the silence is strained with breathing, exclamations, remarks, curses, and those encouraging little phrases you mutter to yourself to stay focused, to hang in there—Come on, that’s it, come on! the young woman with the lopsided French twist exhorts herself in a whisper—so that the overall impression is of frantic agitation. The examiners keep their backs straight and crane their necks to peer at the workstations. From time to time, they question the students: Why aren’t you turning down the heat? Why the Dutch oven rather than the stew pot? How well-done do you want it to be? Mauro gives the right answers, without losing sight of what he’s supposed to be doing. He organizes his time as he breaks down the operations, crossing out each line one by one in his notebook, but somehow forgets to add flour to the sauce, which is too liquid on the spoon and messes up the presentation of his zabaione, damaging the raspberries so that their delicate shape is lost, their flesh torn, the cream stained with pink smears—Damn, it looks like a fucking fruit puree! When the time comes, he presents his dishes to the judges, who examine them before tasting them. Mauro waits impatiently, feeling wiped out and pessimistic. A beam of sunlight illuminates the freshly cleaned room; everything sparkles and shines. He is accepted.

  6

  A portrait

  I want to describe this young man who is always hungry, who always wants to eat something, something good. This young man who is so determined and untamed. I sit on the terrace of a café in the eleventh arrondissement, facing the intersection, so I can watch him arrive. He bursts into sight on his bike, no helmet, his butt raised above the seat. The bike shudders as he brakes; he puts a foot on the ground and lifts up the frame, leaning it against the crash barrier that protects this stretch of Boulevard Voltaire, and quickly secures the lock. He does everything quickly, his gestures precise, inch perfect, as if choreographed.

  In all honesty, he doesn’t look the part. His entire being contradicts the cliché of the young chef who has passed his CAP: the white apron, pink cheeks, bushy hair cut short at the back and sides; the portly, jovial type. Nor does he fit with the stereotype of the trendy young urbanite who’s all the rage in the fooding scene. He is lean, wiry, his triceps twitching—you need muscles in this business: cooking is athletic; it requires endurance, sprinting power, hurdling agility. What strikes you about him is his singular aura: the lightness and precision of his movements, the intense calm that makes him seem almost wise. He’s fairly tall, with slender legs, narrow hips, and a flat chest, not an ounce of fat on him (just because he’s young?); he has broad shoulders, it’s true, but in profile he’s like a stick figure. His face, too, is slim, with thin lips and soft, medium-length chestnut hair, round metal-framed glasses (a pseudo-intellectual? a young Trotskyite?) that give his eyes a gentle look. His skin is dark, his voice even. He has none of the expansive largesse characteristic of gastronomes—the wide smile, the laid-back hospitality, those people whose tongues love to taste and to talk, those show-offs with their smooth spiel, their gift of gab, their poetic speeches. He has none of their authoritarian presence, either, their tendency to rant, to bark orders. He is youthful, calm, saturnine, furtive. A cat. A Perrier with a slice of lemon. But what I need to describe are his hands. They work, work all the time; they are high-caliber tools, sensitive instruments that create, touch, test—sensors. The fingers in particular are impressive: elongated and powerful like the fingers of a pianist capable of reaching three octaves for the right note, capable of unfolding in three movements, of dislocating themselves, capable of combining several gestures at once. A worker’s hands and an artist’s hands. Unusual hands.

  7

  La Belle Saison

  GNOCCHI IN BUTTER AND SAGE

  Four hundred thirty square feet carved in an old passageway in Faubourg Saint-Antoine: La Belle Saison consists of a single room, with a bar and regulation bathrooms. Mauro stands on the threshold, stamping his sneakers. His gaze slowly sweeps across the interior, the exposed beams and the tiled floor, the chairs stacked upside down on the tables. He assesses the place and nods, then turns back to Jacques, who is chatting with the owner: It works for me! Mauro’s voice echoes in the passageway.

  * * *

  Ten months have passed since Mauro started at Le Villon. It’s the longest he’s held any job, and the partnership he forms with Pierre, the chef, is now well established. The two men understand each other intuitively—they’re on the same wavelength—and eventually the young man is so competent at dealing with orders to suppliers, paying bills, and hiring dishwashers that he is given extra responsibilities, such as creating cold starters for the summer menu or choosing new plates for the restaurant. When Pierre is away, Mauro takes over without any decrease in quality. This starts to happen more and more often beginning in the spring of 2007: Pierre has fallen in love with a winemaker from Corbières who came to the restaurant to sell her wine. Now, whenever he can, he rushes off to join her in the hills where she lives, often spending half the week there, leaving Mauro to run Le Villon. The workload becomes untenable in June, though, with Mauro’s exams approaching.

  One Monday morning, Pierre pops in briefly to tell Mauro that he has decided to sell Le Villon and go live in Corbières. Mauro nods, stunned. It’s all over within a week. There’s no long goodbye.

  The new owner is a handsome young man of thirty, cheerful and smart, who wants to create a restaurant that fits with the way the neighborhood is evolving: a stylish, pleasant place that will offer light meals in a cool minimalist decor—pale wood tables, inexpensive Eames-style chairs, and Japanese paper lamps, where people will eat soups, salads, bagels, quiches, pies, and the kinds of desserts that are popular with Brooklyn hipsters (carrot cakes, cheesecakes, cupcakes, doughnuts, brownies). Mauro listens to the new owner rave about this banal future, but Mauro is not convinced. He doesn’t want to work in one of those places where the menu never changes, where there’s no room for innovation; he doesn’t want to work in one of these new tearooms for cool urban twentysomethings. He decides to wait, sees a few friends, and in June he obtains his CAP and his master’s in economics. He knows that his profile is unusual, eye-catching.

  * * *

  Outside in the passageway, the December sunlight paints sharp shadows on the cobblestones. While Mauro looks around inside, his father, Jacques, chats with the owner, a tired old Lebanese man who recounts the place’s history. It’s been a focal point of the neighborhood for a long time. In 2001, when he bought it, it was an upmarket bar run by local personalities, with a small, high-quality restaurant, a good wine list, and cheeses and charcuterie imported directly from the producers. But everyone in the area still remembered La Belle Saison as a family restaurant where generations of local craftsmen went to eat, a lair of pleasure seekers that had up to ten different kinds of andouillettes on the menu; everyone talked about the tables set with checked tablecloths, the burlap curtains with red tiebacks, the reproductions hung on the stone walls—the still lifes in particular: the return from the hunt in the marshes, shellfish with a carafe of sparkling wine, a surreal Arcimboldo-style fruit basket—along with the certificate of good and loyal service awarded by the Association of Connoisseurs of Authentic Andouillette, displayed in a gilt frame next to a ham hanging from a nail. At one time, this local institution was serving a hundred covers per day—two seatings at lunch, two at dinner. Everything had gone well until the owners lost a lawsuit against their neighbors and were forced to get rid of the upstairs kitchen and somehow squeeze one onto the staircase. Without a real kitchen, and lacking resources, the restaurant was transformed into a high-end bar, and soon after that—hankering after a retirement of growing vegetables in Quercy after forty years in the restaurant business, twenty of them at La Belle Sais
on—the couple sold.

  The current owner had just married a much younger woman and wanted to give her the bar as a gift. Together, for seven years, they had run La Belle Saison with the same clientele, who came for the labneh and baba ghanoush, the hummus and tabbouleh, and all sorts of grilled kebabs and meat-stuffed pastries of Lebanese cuisine. Today, the business is on its last legs, Jacques quickly realizes: there is still the problem of the kitchen on the stairs, and the owner is quite old. Running a restaurant demands an energy that he no longer has; he, too, would like to retire now.

  Jacques calculates: the money at his disposal; the interest rate that the banks would agree to; the amount he could ask for from certain investors among his friends. The figures flash past. We should do it, eh? What do you think—shall we go for it? Mauro looks at his father, astonished by what is happening, the two of them standing side by side outside the front door of La Belle Saison, stunned that this idea, first mentioned three weeks earlier, in the kitchen of Mauro’s parents’ house, is now becoming a reality. That evening, in Aulnay, he’d cooked us a dish of cannelloni in cuttlefish ink, stuffed with ricotta, and dwelled on the thought: Now, I’d like to open my own place! We’d patronizingly warned him—It’s tough, you know, running a restaurant, you’re only twenty-four, you should enjoy your youth while you have it—and then Jacques had suddenly appeared and announced: That’s a great idea, Mauro, let’s do it together! At fifty-five, Jacques is energetic, garrulous, passionate about learning new things, and available—having just decided to quit his job as director of a computer science school. He has the time and the desire to create something. He raised his glass in a circle to toast this rush of enthusiasm, and I raised mine, too, looking at Mauro, who folded his napkin without any visible emotion.

  * * *

  Mauro stands outside La Belle Saison. He smiles. In a few days, he and Jacques will return to shake on the deal with the owner, go back into the restaurant, and open a cold, sparkling Anjou or, better yet, that old Château Kefraya from the Beqaa plain that they serve on important occasions. But for now, the young cook watches his father gather information, thinks to himself that this is a feasible project, not some outlandish fantasy, knows that he will have to work from dawn to dusk, and that even with the two of them, it will be a tall order. In the months after this, father and son get on with the serious task of financing the project. The banks are reluctant: the restaurant business is rarely profitable, more often a money pit, and the partnership leading the project does not look solid—all the same, let’s examine it: The cook is young and unknown, he’s worked professionally for less than a year, has no experience as a head chef, no knowledge of the culture of the profession; the father, meanwhile, knows nothing about the business. On top of that, the project requires a certain level of investment at the outset: the place is in decline, and they’ll have to reinvigorate it—and that takes time.

  Then there’s the renovation. The kitchen is no good, and Jacques and Mauro are already planning to smash the wall of the staircase, move the toilets, and create a sort of micro-kitchen with four stove-top burners and an oven, a small work surface, and a mini-fridge. They will also fix up the little apartment above the restaurant, where Mauro will live. In the end it goes through: the financing is put in place, and in June 2008, Jacques and Mauro sign the deal for 150,000 euros. Just in time: one month later, the beginnings of the crisis appear—the big economic crisis of 2008.

  The day before the opening, Mauro solemnly invites me into La Belle Saison. We walk through the room, which seems to be holding its breath, and enter the tiny kitchen, where every inch of space has been assigned a specific use. He slides open drawers and cupboards, runs water from the faucets. I ask him if he knows what he’s getting into; he looks me over and retorts: I don’t think about it, I just do it.

  June 18: the day of the opening. La Belle Saison is packed, the thirty-five seats accommodating a few extra people if they squeeze in a little. His friends are all there: the whole gang from Aulnay ordering bottle after bottle, the family, and the neighbors they met during the renovation. In his miniature kitchen, Mauro works flat out, everything so close by that he barely has to twist his torso, just reach out with an arm now and then to grab the ingredients and prepare the dishes. On the lunch menu, he offers a starter at six euros, entrées for between ten and twelve, a dessert for eight or nine. In the evenings, the restaurant serves crostini made with ingredients left over from lunch, which make delicate, original appetizers combining bell peppers and anchovies, pear and Roquefort, Brocciu and smoked tuna. Jacques, working the room, has found a platform for his cordiality, for the inexhaustible interest he takes in other people; as jovial as Mauro is silent, as attentive to his fellow diners as Mauro is to titillating their taste buds in the secrecy of his little kitchen, they make a unique duo who occasionally help out the resourceful, multilingual waitress—a friend who needs some extra cash. At La Belle Saison, it is always la belle saison—so Jacques announces to anyone who asks for details about the dishes when they order them.

  From that first summer on, the restaurant is filled at lunchtime with a clientele of local employees and craftspeople who always take time out from their day to eat a good meal, even if they have to do it quickly, while the evening shift attracts foodies eager to discover new “good little eateries,” the kind of people who travel all over Paris in search of a good meal, arriving in groups of four or five to taste organic wines and elegant tapas. Word of mouth spreads fast, and by September Mauro and Jacques have decided to expand the evening menu to offer something more than just tapas—because the clients, it turns out, want to eat. A good sign. So things are going pretty well.

  Back from the market, Mauro cooks without a break to be ready for noon, when the first customers turn up, empty bellied. What happens during those compressed hours is at once an intense improvisation, a high-flying sensory experience, and a confrontation with matter—natural, animate, extremely reactive matter. When I ask him to explain how he does it, Mauro shrugs, twists his mouth, and strokes his chin: I focus on the ingredients: the idea is to reveal them, to highlight them. Sometimes, it’s when you combine them with other ingredients that they show their true flavor. These alliances, these contrasts, are his recipes: interpretations and reinventions of each vegetable that he brings back from the market. From time to time, he tastes the food the way a diver sounds the depths of the sea, trying to test the limits of what he’s preparing, the potential for expansion, for metamorphosis.

  Nowadays, people talk about that pocket kitchen as if it were some sorcerer’s lair, where Mauro, this self-taught chef from nowhere, brewed his potions; that little box room is mythologized into the beating heart of a magic factory, producing wondrous meals that changed and evolved day after day. Mackerel with fresh raspberries, sea bass with peach, pumpkin risotto, beef braised in a carrot and basil sauce and served on a cabbage leaf, a sweet cake of potatoes with blood-orange sorbet, octopus salad with fresh fennel, rolls of sole and pancetta, monkfish tail with passion fruit, sea bream with spinach, pig’s trotter and salmon-roe salad with fresh white-celery sauce. Some of La Belle Saison’s recipes rapidly become signature dishes—notably the soft, melting gnocchi in butter and sage, or gnocchi with girolle mushrooms, or gnocchi with bacon and peas.

  This inventive, delicate, unpretentious cuisine quickly wins admirers. Mauro’s work is a reminder that, contrary to what many believe, the most gifted and innovative chef is not necessarily the one who transforms the ingredients, but perhaps the one who most intensely restores their flavors.

  Rave reviews appear here and there on blogs written by food enthusiasts with powers of tantalizing description, people whose obsessive attention to detail suggests they live only for mealtimes: all of them salute the singularity of their experience at La Belle Saison. They are surprised, above all, by the chef’s youth—twenty-four: a kid!—but also by his mastery, his sensitivity; what most impresses them is his temperament: savage, secretive, reluctant to e
nter the dining room, shake hands, collect compliments; a temperament that runs counter to the trend in gastronomy—cooking as a televised spectacle, a suspenseful contest, with the chefs transformed into personalities, media icons, faces that sell. Restaurant critics with hard-to-please reputations describe La Belle Saison as the most exciting discovery in years, and Mauro as a chef of great promise; hip bloggers, supposedly food crazy, publish photographs of their plates; the fooding community acknowledges him as one of their own—part of the new generation, the avant-garde.

  In his first year, Mauro does virtually all the cooking himself. It’s hard—physically difficult—for one guy on his own. He gets by with a little help from his family—his mother and his sisters lending a hand during peak time—and on little sleep, when the work he puts in would normally require long, restorative nights of slumber. A dishwasher joins the team, and he does a bit of peeling, but the kitchen is too cramped to allow any further recruitment. When it is expanded in 2009—a sign that something is really happening—Mauro hires a commis chef to assist him in the kitchen; he, too, has a minimum-wage CDI contract, but it really is minimum wage: no overtime—Mauro makes sure of that.