Dirt

by Bill Buford

  I needed to call Jessica.

  In one respect, the timing was positively apposite. I had only recently taken on board that our children needed to attend some kind of preschool in the fall. To be honest, until then, I hadn’t considered, in any kind of specific way, that they needed to be educated. Obviously, I knew that they had to be, eventually, but I hadn’t thought through the logistics. It was the first week of March. I had only just begun trailing at the fish station (following a cook who knows the station so that you can learn the routine). Also I was only now starting to realize how little time I had to find a restaurant in France. Between March and September, I was committed to acquiring whatever basics there were to learn in Richard’s kitchen (if any), and doing a stint somewhere, venue unknown, in Paris: six months. And then, like that, here was Rostang: my opportunity, my passage, my future, my venue.

  In another respect, however, the timing was not so positive. In the arrangement that Jessica and I had established, I needed to be home by Friday evening to take over the care of the children: no matter what. By Friday evening, she would be at one of those I-can’t-do-this-a-second-longer moments. Do I phone and say, well, actually, would you mind doing a few more days—say the weekend and, well, the rest of next week—on your own?

  Richard was at the chef’s table, working on a recipe. I hesitated to interrupt him. Besides, I hadn’t explicitly asked him, not yet, if I could count on his help to find me a kitchen in Paris. He then disappeared before I had a chance to speak to him and didn’t return in the evening. (Probably having dinner with his dear friend Michel—the two Michels at a table somewhere.)

  On Friday morning, David got a text. “They’re coming!”

  Besides, how was I even remotely qualified? I knew how to lasso red-pepper sausages. I could make breadcrumbs and a tuna sandwich. I couldn’t speak French.

  “They’re here!”

  I heard them before they appeared: Had they been chanting? They burst through the door in a sprint—I had to jump out of the way—and went straight to their positions. They looked like an occupying army. It was the first time I witnessed what I would learn to describe as “kitchen focus.” Each team member looked straight ahead—no small chat, a perfunctory firm-handshake hello—and then they set up their stations. It was exhilarating to witness. It was intimidating. They were so different from the Americans at Citronelle. We seemed pampered, unserious, soft. They seemed like street brawlers. They were—there is no other word—terrifying.

  Rostang has two Michelin stars. I had never seen a Michelin kitchen brigade before.

  They spoke no English, or if they did, they kept it to themselves. It didn’t matter because they weren’t about to speak to an American anyway. During a break, they fell in with Citronelle’s French staff members, the “executives”—David, Mark Courseille (the pastry chef), Cedric Maupillier (a former sous-chef who was now at Richard’s Central, his “American” bistro), plus a chef from the French embassy, a former Richard employee.

  The Americans retreated, got on with their tasks, rarely looked up, and conveyed, unmistakably, that they were weak, frail, and catastrophically inadequate.

  I reflected: What did I have over the American cooks, all of them trained and experienced, who now looked out-skilled and intimidated? I couldn’t imagine being a member of the Michelin team. Two stars? Not a chance.

  Where was Richard? Were the two Michels now having lunch as well? By the afternoon, I had a train to catch. Jessica and I had our agreement. And I wasn’t too unhappy about it. But I did wonder: Had I just missed my chance to work in Paris?

  * * *

  —

  Three weeks later, there was another opportunity. I was on the line one night, at fish, finally learning the station, when David called out from the pass: “Michel wants you upstairs. There are people he wants you to meet.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Michel is my boss. You must leave the line.”

  Richard didn’t give a flying fig if I cooked or not—I wanted to be cooking, so he indulged me—and since I was basically there at his pleasure, he was fully entitled to summon me at will to be at his side. This was, in itself, a great pleasure, except that the interruptions were often longer than the time I was spending on the line, and I still believed that I would learn to be a French cook there. (Spoiler alert number two: I wouldn’t, although I would learn how to be a cook in Richard’s kitchen, which was not nothing.)

  The friends were Antoine Westermann, an acclaimed Alsatian chef, and his wife, Patricia. They were outside on a warm evening—wooden tables and benches, like a pop-up sidewalk café. I joined them. A platter of oysters was produced, a bottle of Chablis. Richard was telling stories of his childhood, his “mom” and her terrible cooking. More food appeared, charcuterie on a tree-bark platter; my glass refilled, another bottle put on ice. I relaxed. Why not? It wasn’t such a hardship not to be in the kitchen.

  (Meanwhile, I did, I admit, think about my wife, decisively even if briefly, and wondered what version of hell, at this particular moment, she was going through with the twins.)

  Westermann’s first restaurant, when he was twenty-three, had been a converted barn, in the heart of Strasbourg, that combined high technique with his grandmother’s recipes, and, over a twenty-five-year period, earned him three Michelin stars. Then he gave them up for love (“for the beautiful Patricia,” Richard clarified), left his former wife, and signed over his restaurant to his thirty-two-year-old son; Westermann and Patricia moved to Paris, where he bought Drouant, founded in 1880, one of the city’s venerable establishments.

  Westermann came to Washington regularly—he had a consulting arrangement with the Sofitel Hotel—and always saw Richard. For many French chefs (like Westermann or Alain Ducasse or Joël Robuchon—i.e., some of the greatest talents of their generation), coming upon Richard in the United States was akin to discovering an unrecognized national treasure—how could someone so accomplished be so unknown in France? They instantly “got” him, came to adore him, and were then lifelong members of the Michel Richard fan club.

  Westermann was demonstrative in his affection for Richard. The two chefs were about the same age. Westermann was tall and fit—he did mountain cycling—with perfect posture and round bookish glasses and a manner of vigilant rectitude. In a chef’s coat, and he seemed always to be in a chef’s coat, he had the manner of a scientist, a stiff, slightly formal manner that disappeared when he smiled, and in Richard’s company he smiled easily. Until that evening, the only people I’d met with Richard were employed by him.

  “You know, Michel, you really need to exercise.”

  “Yes, I will, Antoine, I promise.”

  “It doesn’t take much—a little, but every day.” He was concerned about Richard’s health, and there was tenderness in the concern.

  Richard had once been a broad-shouldered man. In photos from his Los Angeles days, he conveys power. But now those hefty broad shoulders had lost their heft, and the mass of what remained seemed to have slid down to his middle. He was still a beautiful man—it was in the joy he exuded whenever you were lucky enough to be in his company—but his body was in distress. Three years earlier, he’d had a stroke. “It was here at the restaurant,” he told me. “I wasn’t making sense. I was saying random words.”

  “It’s your weight, Michel. You just need to lose it.” Westermann wanted to help.

  “Yes, Antoine, ma petite Laurence tells me the same. I will start tomorrow.”

  Richard loved his pleasures immoderately and was only able to moderate them by avoiding them. His Sunday lunches in Los Angeles were raucously drunken and taught him not to keep wine in the house. Food was more difficult. You can’t live without food. (“Once, Laurence gave me cottage cheese. Have you ever eaten it? I tried it for lunch. I wanted to make Laurence happy. But I couldn’t. It’s terrible.”)

  “Look at those
cheeses,” he said one night when we were sitting at the chef’s table. “So creamy and fat and luxurious.” The cheeses were for the dinner service. “Laurence told me, No more cheese, please Michel, promise me, no more. I promised. Mais regarde!” He drank a glass of water. He had another glass. Then he succumbed, a large plate prepared for him, no bread, just cheese, and his eyes rolled up into his head in a long protracted “mmmmmmmmm” of ecstasy. “It is butter’s greatest expression.”

  At the end of my evening, I returned to the kitchen to help clean up. I asked David: “What about Westermann? He has a good heart, and knowledge and famous skills.”

  David frowned. “An Alsatian in Paris? It is a kitchen unconnected to a place. Paris could be anywhere. Paris could be New York. I’ll speak to Michel. We will find you something.”

  * * *

  —

  Michel Richard was born in Pabu, a farming village in Brittany, the forlorn, far-northwesterly part of France, half an hour from the sea. His parents—André, a member of the Resistance, and Muguette, a young live-in chambermaid at a castle—had met fleetingly toward the end of World War II, as the Nazi army was in retreat. Months later, the war just over, the country a muddy crisscrossing of carts and two-cylinder vehicles, Muguette, now very pregnant, struck out for the village where she remembered that the parents of her Resistance lover came from. She got as far as Rennes, the capital of Brittany, where Richard’s older brother, Alain, was born in May 1945. She resumed her trek, and in Pabu, knocking on doors, found the infant’s father. Richard was born three years later.

  The young family lived with André’s parents. Richard’s memories are in images, mainly indoors, mainly wintry, a flickering fireplace darkness. Electricity was conserved like water drawn from the well—no lights after 8:00 p.m. The grandparents didn’t speak French. They spoke Breton, burned peat, had a dirt floor, and didn’t use plates but spooned dinner into rounded indentations, like bowls, carved into a thick wood table. Richard’s father was the village baker. Richard, who would eventually teach me how to create those perfectly spherical bread rolls for the tuna burgers (you knead them with your thumb as you roll them), remembered how his father made them fast, two at a time, against an unwashed apron that he crushed the boy’s face into in sloppy predawn hugs. He smelled of unfiltered cigarettes and wine—the father was an alcoholic—and was bristly and sweaty in the light of a wood-burning oven.

  There were jobs in the Ardennes—in the east, near Belgium, where factories were being revived. When Richard was six, and his mother pregnant with her fourth, the family moved, exchanging one of the most backward places in France for one of the most undeveloped. The marriage ended a year later, after an act of drunken brutality perpetrated by the father on Muguette, pregnant again, with her fifth. The next morning, she and her children boarded a bus and left.

  The mother is the most important and least likely first influence on Richard’s culinary calling because she provoked him to cook. She was too busy to make dinner without stress—she worked in a factory—and Richard, aged nine, stepped in to do it. He also stepped in because what she did cook, when she cooked, was inedible. He recalls many dishes, but my favorite is the rabbit cooked in a pot for so long and inattentively that, when it was brought to the table, and the lid lifted, he and his siblings had to stand up and peer over the rim to see if there was anything inside: The rabbit had shriveled to a hard black thing the size of a sparrow. Those same siblings were joyful when Richard took over—an early lesson in the happy love of happy diners.

  The mother also introduced Richard to pastry, again indirectly but unequivocally. When he was thirteen, the age when she either kicked her children out or made them go to work (she had already dispatched the elder brother to learn bookkeeping at a trade school while being given room and board), his mother got a job for Richard at a local bronze foundry. He was burned and his hands swelled and he was unable to continue. She talked to friends—he had to do something—and came up with his being an apprentice at a pâtisserie, room and board, plus 50 francs a month (around $10.00), in Carignan, a hundred kilometers away, no trains or buses in between. A flour supplier picked up the boy early on a summer morning—a blue Renault van, a pink sky, the smell of August flowers. Richard didn’t return for three years, not once.

  “Recently,” Richard told me, “I realized that I have no memory of my mother kissing me.”

  I asked him about his father: Was he an influence? A pastry chef is not a baker, but they are not so different.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “Pâtisserie is a grand profession.” He was quiet and seemed to be musing. “Well, maybe.”

  The father he never had, he said, was Gaston Lenôtre, the twentieth century’s most famous French pastry chef. Richard was hired shortly after his twenty-third birthday, in 1971, and shortly before the restaurant review Gault & Millau published its famous October 1973 issue proclaiming the arrival of nouvelle cuisine and naming Lenôtre among the movement’s swashbuckling practitioners.

  Lenôtre, the famous Lenôtre, regarded Richard as the artist—for Richard that regard was emboldening and liberating—and would come to depend on him as his secret weapon. (Much later, David Bouley, the New York chef, trained with Lenôtre. “People were still saying how Michel had created this, and created that, how he created all these other things as well.” This was years after Richard had left. “He was very big in Lenôtre’s world to have that kind of influence still.”) Because of Lenôtre, Richard discovered his own genius. Because of Lenôtre, he ended up in America: He accompanied him to open the first Lenôtre French pastry shop in New York. Because of Lenôtre (even if only indirectly), he discovered California, because Richard went there after Lenôtre’s New York operation failed. In Los Angeles, Richard opened an almost incomprehensively successful pastry shop in 1976 (chef Wolfgang Puck recalls being astonished by the lines outside the door—“Longer than I have ever seen”) and, later, Citrus, his first restaurant.

  What was Lenôtre’s achievement? I had purchased Lenôtre’s first book, Faites votre pâtisserie comme Lenôtre (Make Your Desserts like Lenôtre), a three-hundred-page classic, now out of print. It includes recipes for tarts and éclairs and baba au rhum. How was this meant to be nouvelle cuisine?

  “Lenôtre didn’t invent new dishes,” Richard said. “He invented new ways of making the old ones. He had a simple rule. You can change anything as long as the result is better than the original.”

  The rule, which is among the most succinct descriptions of nouvelle cuisine that I’ve come upon, governed everything Richard did, even if his applications were more anarchic than any of Lenôtre’s. There was a fake caviar that Richard invented. We made it at the fish station. It looked and smelled like caviar, and was served in a fake caviar tin with a “Begula” label [sic] printed on the lid. It was pearl pasta soaked in a rich fish stock and dyed with squid ink. It is obviously not strictly a substitute for caviar, but, owing to the precision of its preparation and the little treasures found inside (a perfect sous-vide poached runny egg, a lobster knuckle simmered in butter), it is “better” than the original if “better,” in this case, means a “more enjoyable eating experience.” (Ever mischievous, Richard serves real caviar on a bowl of atmosphere, as though it were airborne, a trick of presentation made possible in a darkened, candlelit room, where the caviar sits atop a piece of plastic film stretched across a bowl floatingly.)

  * * *

  —

  One night, Jessica was wakened by the sound of boys’ giggling. She had put them into their cribs two hours before. She peeked past the bedroom door and saw them in the living room, pulling books off the shelves. They had learned how to climb out of their cribs, an unnerving milestone. She called me in Washington. I didn’t hear the ring.

  Showing no affect (it is what the experts say to do), she duly picked up each boy as though a kitten—no eye contact, no verbal acknowledgment—and retur
ned them to their cribs, ho hum, and went back to bed. They climbed out. She put them back. They climbed out. After the routine had been repeated fifty times, she phoned me.

  No answer.

  After another fifty episodes (which seems improbable, but she assures me that she returned them to their cribs more than a hundred times), she tried my phone one more time, gave up, and went to sleep. She later found the boys sitting cross-legged with the fridge and freezer doors opened, white handprints everywhere. On the floor were butter, milk, orange juice, broken eggs, and ice cream, which they were eating from the carton with their hands. Frederick had chocolate syrup in his hair.

  I showed up on the Friday evening. Jessica and I spoke in the morning. “This is not working,” she said.

  “I understand,” I said, but I was back in Washington on the Monday.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE FISH STATION, I DID PROTEINS. No one on the line—and we were all Americans—ever thought, Hey, I am a French cook. The skate took more or less the same savvy skill set that you would use to make a cup of tea: i.e., add hot water.

  Skate is like mini-stingray with maxi-big bones that, in France, is served with a brown-butter-and-caper sauce: not complicated to make, but not one that David trusted any of his cooks either to know or recognize the taste of. “Their mouths have been ruined by sugar.” So David made the sauce—always. He also boned the fish, then slipped it into a sack, poured in his sauce, vacuum-sealed it, and froze it. When the order came through, the fish went into a water bath for twenty minutes (controlled temperature, nothing to think about) and, when “fired” was removed from its sack. You didn’t have to know what you were doing. You didn’t have to know it was fish.