His friend is surprised: What’s your problem? There’s serious dough to be made here, and the job’s a lot cooler than it was in France, right? Mauro remains silent. He looks around: the pace is unflagging, but not frantic, thanks to the cheap, abundant labor force, who dilute the workload—Imagine: ten guys to peel three carrots!—and there is no management through pressure; in fact, a quiet calm reigns in the kitchen, the kind of calm that, if it cracks like a dry shell, if it breaks, gives rise to scenes of extraordinary violence: the meticulous commis chef slowly stuffing ravioli with ginger-glazed pork suddenly pulling a sharp knife in the middle of the kitchen and stabbing another man in the carotid artery while everyone else stands paralyzed in the steam rising from pans of broth. It’s true that Mauro has an enviable position here: the restaurant needs him, a young French chef, for its corporate image. But he instinctively wishes to distance himself from something in these kitchens: something fastidious, something artificially enhanced, phony. You can see it in the gym-sculpted bodies of the cooks around him. A distorted view of beauty. So he leaves. He quits once again and continues his journey. Next stop: Burma.
He travels as a backpacker, adjusting his itinerary day by day, no longer looking for work, sleeping in people’s homes. He discovers a secret, fiery, slow-moving country. Mauro strays as far from the beaten path as possible, staying in remote villages. The countryside is pleasant, a range of intense greens, his every step accompanied by a continual murmur. He takes the time to observe the movements of people preparing meals, in houses, in taverns. Here he will find what he came for: this street cuisine, this simple, popular cuisine distributed in bowls and tasted while one is sitting on little benches, those cooking pots bubbling with turmeric broths, all those fried dishes, those pickled vegetables, that cilantro-scented rice, those salads of tamarind leaves, of tea leaves, those dazzling fruits. He is amazed to discover these strange flavors that mix together deep in his memory, these aromas that he can’t identify, these tastes that give him back his capacity for surprise.
I receive a postcard from him just before Christmas. A few words come back to me now: ngapi, balachaung, ginger.
11
Fooding
PORK RINDS, GREEN FAVA BEANS, PIGEONS
Mauro wanders. He’s looking for something. Waiting patiently. I lose track of him for a few weeks, then he resurfaces, and each time we see each other he is in a different job, a different position at a different restaurant, as if he plans to learn everything, to experience every position there is.
I hear a rumor that he’s a butcher’s boy in Vanves, apprenticed to a man who is proud of his art; that he’s learning to bone carcasses, to carve meat correctly, to prepare the different cuts; that he’s learning to gut and clean poultry, rushing all day long between the cold room and the store, accompanying his boss to Rungis some nights—standing at the bar with the other butchers at five in the morning, drinking coffee and eating pork rinds on toast—and that he is learning the names and uses of the different blades with the seriousness of a Japanese samurai.
I locate him a few months later, working as a line cook in a three-star restaurant in the seventh arrondissement, hired by a big star chef. Under pressure, adrenaline pumping, he finds the experience interesting. He cooks vegetables grown especially for the restaurant in kitchen gardens in Sarthe or Eure, but he is definitely not a fan of the tension that reigns in the kitchen, nor of the fifteen hundred euros per month that he earns for his seventy-hour weeks. He lasts six weeks and then splits.
The following year, Mauro works regularly as the assistant chef in La Comète, a fashionable restaurant near the Paris Bourse. This time, he stays longer. The place is a rising star in the world of fooding: the chef is young and media friendly, and he worked in a famous restaurant after graduating from culinary school; the cuisine is in vogue, with its Scandinavian influences and its ingredients sourced from handpicked small organic producers. Seventy covers, twice a day. The concept of La Comète inverts the classic restaurant model: there is no fixed menu, and the dishes are directly inspired by the available ingredients: the three-course lunch menu is 45 euros; the six-course carte blanche menu is 75 euros; the same six-course menu is available in the evenings for 140 euros, with wine included. The interior architecture is open plan, with no separation between the kitchen and the dining room: a way of making the invisible visible—turning the cooks’ work into choreography, a theatrical performance. A way of sharing what they do. The atmosphere is relaxed, a pared-down elegance composed of neutral colors and high-quality materials.
I want to see my friend at work, so I turn up one morning to attend the shift, the way you might attend a show. The team is young, international, a mix of male and female. The atmosphere in the kitchen is chill, hip, a little bit rock ’n’ roll. Mauro told me about this: the people hired by La Comète had the means to create their own gastronomic culture; they are passionate about cuisine, a far cry from the mass of restaurant workers, who are essentially high school dropouts, kids who had to choose between being a boilermaker, a mechanic, and a cook, and who drifted toward the latter option. Mauro is paid twenty-five hundred euros per month for what are often seventy-hour weeks.
At eight in the morning, when work starts, nine, in addition to the chef, are in the narrow kitchen, divided between four workstations (one on meat, two on fish, three in the pantry, two on patisserie, and Mauro, the assistant chef). No one speaks. Everyone knows what he or she has to do—peel mushrooms and beans, hay-smoke the beef for the carpaccio, boil (but not blanch) the fava beans. At ten o’clock, the tempo accelerates in a way that is barely perceptible. Voices are raised—Have you gutted the fish yet? How’s the turbot? Can you bring me six pounds of cream?—and the cooks chat about the latest news: who’s leaving, who’s just joined, an assistant chef who’s got a chef’s position down south, that brilliant sommelier who’s quitting his job to live in Chile, that new restaurant opening in Ménilmontant—So? What’s it like? They compare jobs, wages, hours, contrast the reputations of different restaurants, different chefs. At eleven, everyone stops: it’s time to clean up. The kitchen is made beautiful again, ready for the lunch shift. The employees assiduously scrub an area of their workstation, leaning over the stove top, stretching an arm across the stainless-steel surface, exposing the top of their underwear and a strip of flesh if possible. Perforated rubber mats are laid out everywhere. After that, the pace accelerates gradually, and when it finally starts, it’s a thing of beauty: rapid and fluid, rhythmic and precise, the plates whisked away one after another with each announcement. The rush starts around one thirty and the intensity goes up a notch; concentration is at its height; this is the moment when the precisely calibrated choreography most impresses the watching diners. When at last it slows down again, it’s nearly three. The dishwashers have cleaned nearly 420 plates because the restaurant was full, and I hear a familiar voice ask out loud: So, what are we going to cook tomorrow?
12
Suckling pig
Mauro quits his job at La Comète at the start of the summer, but goes back to work there occasionally, sometimes replacing the chef when he’s away. In the months that follow, he uses his free time and his freedom of movement to rack up experience: he works briefly as an adviser for a new kind of café chain offering hot and cold meals, and moonlights at ten euros per hour for a friend when she’s preparing to cook for a table of ten in a private restaurant in the Marais for a month, as a way of getting better known. He has something on his mind, I can tell. I ask him about it one summer night as we’re walking down Rue des Envierges toward the Parc de Belleville. I’d like to open another restaurant. I stop dead on the sidewalk. Along the same lines as La Belle Saison? I ask. He shakes his head. Not really. The idea is to create a place that will give back importance to what’s happening in the dining room. A restaurant that will reinvent the notion of the commensal—togetherness around a table. The concept is that the meal will not only express the glorious creativity of one person,
will not only provide an individual sensory experience, but will be about relationships, a possible collective adventure. Like, you want to eat a roast suckling pig, but it’s a meal for four or five people, so you stand up and you ask if anyone would like to share a suckling pig with you. Then you go over to the other person’s table, you talk with him, and that’s how it starts. You see? I see. I smile and pretend to hand him my plate.
ALSO BY MAYLIS DE KERANGAL
The Heart
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels: Je marche sous un ciel de traîne (2000), La vie voyageuse (2003), Corniche Kennedy (2008), and Naissance d’un pont (winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and the Prix Médicis in 2010; published in English as Birth of a Bridge). In 2014, her fifth novel, Réparer les vivants (published in the United States in 2016 as The Heart), received wide acclaim and won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama. She lives in Paris. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Sam Taylor is the author of three novels and has translated more than thirty books from the French, including Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leila Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny, and Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. His translation of Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart won the French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize and the Lewis Galantière Award. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
1. Berlin
2. Aulnay
3. Restaurants
4. Blows
5. CAP
6. A portrait
7. La Belle Saison
8. Aligre
9. Fatigue
10. Asia
11. Fooding
12. Suckling pig
Also by Maylis de Kerangal
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2016 by Raconter la vie
Translation copyright © 2019 by Sam Taylor
All rights reserved
Originally published in French in 2016 by Éditions du Seuil, France, as Un chemin de tables
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2019
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71619-6
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The Cook Page 6
