The Hundred-Foot Journey (22 page)

But our relationship reached its logical conclusion during those closing days in Lumière one morning while I was at her tiny flat in town, just above the village’s pâtisserie. It was our day off and we were having a late-morning breakfast at the little table under the tall window of her kitchen.

Lumière’s famous light was pouring in through the old panes, where a few dried wildflowers—oxlip and yellow gentian—stood in a glass jar on the sill. We were wordlessly having café au lait and brioche and a quince jam her mother had made, each in our own world.

I was sitting at the table in my underpants and a T-shirt, looking out the window, when skinny Monsieur Iten and his plump wife walked hand in hand down Rue Rollin. They suddenly stopped in their tracks and gave each other lusciously wet kisses, before parting company, he to get into their Lancia, she to enter the local branch of Société Générale.

Margaret was naked under her kimono, reading the local paper next to me, and I am not sure why, but I stretched my hand across the table and spontaneously said, “Come.”

My voice was shaking as I held out my hand, hoping the woman across the table would grasp the fingers blindly searching contact in the air.

“Come with me to Paris. Please.”

Margaret slowly put down the paper and told me—I still remember that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach—that Lumière was where she was born, where her parents and siblings lived, where her grandparents were buried, up on the hill. She appreciated the offer, loved me for it, but she could not—she was sorry—she could not leave the Jura.

So I took back my hand and we went our separate ways.

If I am honest, my rise in Paris over the next twenty years, it was not as difficult as one would suspect. It was as if some unseen spirit were clearing obstacles and helping me take the path that I believe was always destined for me. For I was, as promised, promoted after just two years to the position of premier sous chef, at La Gavroche, that one-star restaurant behind the Élysée Palace.

But here is the great mystery, which I suspect I will never unravel: Was Madame Mallory somehow involved in my steady rise over the following years? Or did I imagine it?

During my time in Paris, my former
maîtresse
and I would exchange seasonal greeting cards, or talk on the phone, maybe once or twice a year. And I would, of course, pay my respects when I returned to see the family in Lumière. But for all intents and purposes, she was no longer actively involved in my education or career, at least not officially.

But I have always wondered whether she did not help me—a discreet call here and there—to help things along at key moments. And if she did, I have often asked myself, how was she able to ensure I never found out about her role?

Pierre Berri was, for example, the bighearted chef who enticed me north to his restaurant La Gavroche, but what I learned, after I got to Paris, was that he was married to a distant relative of Madame Mallory, a second cousin once removed. Naturally, with this connection, I quietly suspected there was a whispered word from Mallory that had elicited this offer from Paris. Chef Berri flatly denied it, of course, but I was never entirely convinced by his denials.

When I was back in Lumière to see the family that first winter after my move north, I crossed the snowy street to have tea with Madame Mallory in her attic flat. The steam radiators were clanking loudly, infusing the apartment with a cozy heat, and we settled into the old armchairs, drinking coffee and nibbling scalloped madeleines still warm from Le Saule Pleureur’s oven. I remember she wanted to know all about the tapas-style restaurant that Chef Pascal had just opened in Paris, which was then creating quite a stir in the capital, and a new craze for smart bistros where the food supported the wine, not the wine the food. It was during the course of our shop talk, however, that I nonchalantly slipped in a thank-you for orchestrating the offer from Chef Berri.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Hassan,” she said, refreshing our coffee with the same Limoges pot she had deployed during my apprenticeship. “I have far better things to do with my time than to call distant relatives on your behalf. Besides, I haven’t seen that particular cousin for thirty years—and I never liked her then. That side of the family is from Paris, you know, and they always thought they were superior to those family members who, like us, remained in the Loire Valley. Why in heaven’s name would I ask a favor from her? It would kill me. So I will hear no more of your nonsense. Now, tell me, is it possible for you to talk with your wholesalers in Paris and locate for me a few
Ostrea lurida
? Before I die, I want to try that American oyster. Just inconceivable to me that some French gourmands consider it superior to our Breton oysters.”

I returned to La Gavroche, worked hard, and five years after I arrived in Paris I was offered another opportunity and a big jump in responsibility. There was no opening expected to show up at La Gavroche for many years to come, so I handed in my resignation and instead became
chef de cuisine
at La Belle Cluny, a small and elegant restaurant in the 7th arrondissement, where I stayed for a total of four years.

I was very happy working alongside white-haired Marc Rossier, an elderly chef who, to put it politely, had his own ways. Chef Rossier made us dress completely in black, rather than the traditional whites, right down to the clogs, and he used to shuffle around us with his own billowing black pants tucked inside his socks, like a seventeenth-century Dutch pirate, all day singing raucous tunes from his youthful days in the French navy. But it was precisely this eccentricity that made Chef Rossier such a delight to work for. He liked to have fun.

He was, for example, amazingly open to new ideas, despite his advanced age, and so very unlike most other patrons. That meant I had, as his right hand, a great deal of room to try out my own new creations, such as a roast kid with lemons sewn into its stomach cavity. This creative freedom paid off, I think, and within two years of my arrival, La Belle Cluny was elevated from one to two Michelin stars.

This rewarding work at La Belle Cluny whet my appetite, and at the age of thirty I returned to Lumière to have an earnest talk with Papa. I desperately wanted to open my own restaurant, to finally become patron in my own house, but I needed capital. That Haji ambition, it was burning. So I sat in the chair opposite Papa’s desk in the old Dufour mansion and pleaded my case. Not five minutes into my fevered pitch, my cash-flow projections spread out across his table, Papa held up his hand.

“Stop! My God. You are giving me a headache.”

Spreadsheets with return-on-investment analysis, that was never how Papa worked; with him, it was always through the gut. “Of course I will help you! What did you tink?” he demanded crossly.

Papa took from his drawer a thick sheaf of communications. “I have long been expecting this,” he said, opening the file. “I am not some sleepy wallah picking at his toes all day. Nah? I long ago asked the lawyers and bankers to start arranging matters. It is all taken care of. Each of you children will get one-seventh of the family estate. You will get your share now. Why wait until I am dead, yaar? I would much rather see you launched and happy and making me proud. . . . But please. Don’t start sending me these computer printouts. I cannot stand such things. Always left accounting to your mother.”

I had to blink a few times, to cover up my emotion.

“Thank you, Papa.”

He waved his hand dismissively.

“Now. Here is the ting I am worried about. Your share, it will come to roughly eight hundred thousand euros. Is that enough?”

No. It was not. My Parisian accountant and I had figured the cost of securing a long-term lease on a top restaurant location in Paris, the space’s complete refurbishment, including a state-of-the-art kitchen, then hiring a team of top-rate staff—in short, all the initial start-up costs of launching an elegant restaurant targeted at the most sophisticated clientele—it would require close to two million euros in initial capital, to safely get off the ground.

“That’s what I thought,” said Papa. “So I have a proposal for you.”

“Yes?”

“Your sister Mehtab. She is troubling me. I cannot find a man in this little mountain town who will have her, and every day she is becoming more and more like your aunt. Cross all the time. She needs a bigger pond to catch her fish. Do you agree? So I tink you should consider taking her in as a partner in your fancy Parisian restaurant. Nah? She will be a great help to you, Hassan, and of course, she brings her own share of the capital to invest. It will also be a great relief to me, to know you are looking after her.”

This is the Indian way, of course, and so it was settled. Mehtab moved to Paris with me. But I must confess my one regret of this period: my parting from Chef Rossier, who was so good to me, it was not as I would have liked. Not at all. For when I told Rossier I was going to open my own restaurant, the elderly chef went quite red in the face and threw a pan, two plates, and a pepper-crusted salami. But life perpetually moves forward, not backward, so I dodged the flying projectiles and headed, for the last time, out the restaurant’s back door. For some time thereafter, however, Chef Rossier’s unusually creative maritime curses continued to ring in my ear.

But onward. Our path forward entirely clear, Mehtab and I embarked on our new mission to open our own restaurant in Paris. It was shortly thereafter, sitting in the bathtub, drinking a tea spiked with garam masala and dripping with sweat, all the while thinking of my father, that the name of the new restaurant suddenly came to me.

Le Chien Méchant.

Perfect. No?

Our first objective was to find the right space, of course, and Mehtab and I tramped through Paris for several months looking for a prime location. Real estate agents seemed to show us either cavernous warehouses in obscure side streets of the unfashionable 13th or 16th arrondissement, or else cramped shop fronts not much bigger than a doll’s house in the better streets down toward the Seine. Nothing suitable. But we pressed on, with great determination, in the knowledge the right location could make or break our fledgling restaurant.

After one such hot and fruitless search, back in the flat, Mehtab kicked off her sandals and began examining her bunions, groaning each time she touched upon a tender spot. “My God,” she said, “this is worse than finding a flat in Mumbai.” She was just about to summon me over to examine her feet, but I was spared by the phone ringing, which I jumped to pick up.

“Am I speaking with Chef Haji?”

It was an elderly-sounding man at the end of phone, and I could hear, somewhere in the background, a dog barking.

“Yes. This is Hassan Haji.”

“Chef, I met you many years ago, when you were a young man just starting out. In Lumière. My name is Le Comte de Nancy Selière.”

“Oui, Monsieur Le Comte
. I remember you well. You came every year to Le Saule Pleureur.”

“I hear you are looking for space. To open a restaurant.”

“Yes, I am. Quite right. How did you know?”

“Aah, Chef. You should know this by now. Paris, it’s a village. Gossip spreads with utmost efficiency through the markets, particularly when it involves haute cuisine. Or politics.”

I laughed.

“Yes. I suppose you are right.”

“Are you free? Perhaps you’d like to come visit me. Number Seven Rue Valette. I might have just the thing you are looking for.”

*   *   *

Le Comte de Nancy Selière owned a
maison particulière,
complete with turrets, up at the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève hill. He was just a half block from Le Panthéon, the basilica and elegant square where France’s great men, from Voltaire to Malraux, are buried in its chilly crypt. Mehtab and I, we were awed by the count’s imposing home, and we stood meekly out on the street, nervously ringing the bell, fully expecting to be met by a severe butler ordering us to the servants’ entrance in the back. But it was, much to our surprise, the count himself who opened the door, tousle-haired, in corduroys and leather slippers.

“Come. It’s two doors down,” he said, after curtly shaking our hands.

Without waiting for our response, Le Comte de Nancy headed down the raked Rue Valette, still in his house slippers, a large set of keys on a ring jangling from his liver-spotted hand.

I will always remember the first moment I set eyes on Rue Valette’s ivy-clad No. 11. The sun was setting over the city’s rooftops as I looked down the hill, and a glorious haze of pollution had created a kind of pink halo around the limestone building, reminding me of the lighting in Lumière.

No. 11 was half the size of the count’s imposing home, and it appeared rather plump and jolly, the wooden shutters and the ivy encircling the bottom floor giving it a relaxed air of informality. More country, in short, and less the hard elegance so common in Paris.

The entrance hall was quite dark, covered as it was in heavy wood paneling, but through the second set of doors we discovered a series of linked and airy living rooms and anterooms, each in itself not large, but flowing gently from one to the other. I stood in the main salon for several moments, under the crystal chandelier, imagining the possibilities, and it was not at all hard to picture an elegant dining room. Folds of heavy velvet sealed off the tall windows looking out onto the street, and we pulled the drapes back. Even in those weak shafts of dusty sunset, we could see how fine the wood pleating was in the parquet floors.

There was, in the back, a very large room and bathroom, ideal for a kitchen conversion, and it led out to a small courtyard for deliveries. The light-filled floor above we could rent as offices, because there was an internal spiral staircase installed in the 1970s connecting the two floors. The three higher floors in the building had their own side entrance, but the count said he did not rent them out; that was where he stored old furniture and paintings inherited from his family. So a restaurant in the bottom two floors would not be a noise problem for other tenants. Mehtab and I, we tramped between the two floors, up and down the spiral stairs, not believing our eyes and trying not to give too much away.