The Hundred-Foot Journey (23 page)

My heart fluttered.

For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I was home.

“What do you think?”

“Fantastic,” Mehtab whispered. “But can we afford it?”

Just at that moment, from downstairs we heard the count impatiently jangle his keys. “Come, now, you two,” he yelled. “I can’t stand here all day waiting for you to make up your mind. I have work to do. You must leave now.”

Back on Rue Valette, I looked at the neighborhood with fresh interest, as Le Comte de Nancy locked the building’s door again. Down the hill, Place Maubert, the Saturday farmers’ market, and the subway station. Up the hill, the elegant Panthéon. It would take me at most ten minutes to walk to work from my flat over by the Institut Musulman.

And directly across the street, just down from the Collège Sainte-Barbe of the Sorbonne, stood one of the finest addresses of the Left Bank: the elegant Monte Carlo, a brass-plated apartment building where the mistress of the late president of France, a fiery Socialist, was known to be kept in magnificent ancien régime style in a third-floor flat. Two potted palm trees and a uniformed doorman now stood sentinel before the Monte Carlo’s carved doors.

No question. It was a fantastic location.

“Well, young man? Are you interested?”

“Bien sû-sûr,”
I stammered. “It’s lovely. But I don’t know if I can afford it.”

“Pff,”
said the count, waving his hand. “Mere details of finance. We’ll work something out. The point is, I want a good tenant, reliable, and a restaurant of quality, well, it rather suits my particular tastes and interests. And you, I believe, you need a good address to make your mark. So we have a common purpose. Terribly important for a partnership. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes. I do.”

“So there we have it.”

He held out his arthritic hand.

“Thank you, Monsieur Le Comte! Thank you! I will not let you regret your decision. I promise.”

I shook his hand, rather vigorously, and for the first time the aristocrat smiled, with little yellow teeth. “I am sure of it,” he said. “You are a young chef of talent and that is why I am backing you. Remember that in the days ahead. Now do not worry. I will have my lawyer contact you very shortly with the details.”

Le Comte de Nancy Selière became not just my landlord but also my best customer. Le Chien Méchant
was his “local,” as he often said. But even that description does not really do his role justice in what later became of me, for the count was in fact a kind of protective spirit, always looking out for my interests.

The rent we settled on was fifty percent below market rates for the first two years, but even over the subsequent years the count only increased the rent very gradually, and usually prompted by some increased insurance cost of his or to keep up with a wave of inflation. Fact is, throughout the next years the count helped me in a hundred different ways, including, right from the beginning, a line of credit on very good terms from his own bank, for the four hundred thousand euros I still needed to borrow in order to complete my two-million-euro vision.

But more than that, I liked the fellow. Le Comte de Nancy was a surly curmudgeon, that is true, but he was also very decent, to anyone who gave him a chance, and really quite amusing. When, for example, one of my junior staff had the temerity to ask the count if he had room for dessert, he looked at the fellow as if he were a dolt before replying, “My dear man, a gourmand is a gentleman with the talent and fortitude to continue eating even when he is not hungry.”

But on that first day, the moment the count expelled his breath with that particular
“Pff”
after I had asked about the property’s costs, I knew in my gut what had just happened. For that noise, so arrogant and dismissive, it was very familiar to me, and while I had no proof, indeed never got it, I knew in that instant the arrival of Le Comte de Nancy Selière and his property, it was all somehow the work of Madame Mallory’s invisible hand.

For how else can anyone explain how the best customer of Le Saule Pleureur suddenly became both my landlord and my best client in Paris, as if a baton were being passed from one restaurant to another?

“You are alarming me, Hassan,” Madame Mallory said into the phone, in a rather clipped and icy tone, when I brought up Le Comte de Nancy. “I am starting to think you are taking drugs, the way you keep running to me with these paranoid fantasies. Honestly, have you ever known me to encourage any of my customers to go spend money at a competitor? The very idea is preposterous.”

Paint fumes, yelling, phone ringing, shopping cart sweeps through stores, interviews, order forms, heated negotiations—what followed were long hours and backbreaking work. Mehtab dealt with the workmen, bossing them about, remodeling No. 11 in the image of my detailed illustrations and vision. I, in turn, when I wasn’t being called over to rule on a molding or color, was working on, most important, the hiring of the restaurant’s key staff. After hundreds of hours of interviews, for
chef de cuisine
I settled on Serge Poutron, shaped like an extremely large turnip, originally from Toulouse and quite rough, a fellow whom I’d met while working at La Gavroche. Difficult, sometimes even quite brutal to underlings, Serge nonetheless ran a very disciplined kitchen, and I knew he would consistently produce for me, night in and night out, beautifully executed dishes. And in the front room, Jacques, my maître d’hôtel, a veteran of the three-star L’ Ambroisie, so elegant and slight, like an upper-class version of Charles Aznavour, always ready to charm the guests.

The first restaurant review we received, shortly after we opened Le Chien Méchant, was in
Le Monde,
and I don’t mind admitting that I became very emotional when I saw my name and restaurant politely applauded in that august newspaper, which sits at the center of France’s opinion-making establishment. The article brought attention to the restaurant, as did the ever-growing word of mouth passed on by diners, most notably the one-man public relations machine that was Le Comte de Nancy Selière, who, naturally, was granted his regular table at the restaurant. And it is in this early period, the day after I earned my first Michelin star, but well before my second, that a man who would become so instrumental in my life and what followed sat down in a booth at the restaurant.

I was in the kitchen preparing
daurade aux citrons confits
when Jacques came into the kitchen to pass on two new table orders. Without looking up from his task of slotting order chits into the conveyor rack, Jacques tersely informed me I was wanted in the dining room, at table eight. My maître d’ looked uncharacteristically austere and harried as he turned and marched smartly back out through the swinging doors again, so I assumed it was someone of considerable importance not happy with the evening’s fare.

“Serge, take over. I must go out front,” I said over the metallic clatter of pans and clomping clogs, as the kitchen staff dashed back and forth along the steel ranges and across the tiled floor. Serge grunted that he heard me, before yelling, “Pickup”; a
commis
made me shrug off my fat-splattered whites, helping me into a freshly laundered version.

Le Chien Méchant
was full that night, and, past the kitchen doors, I nodded at one or two regulars as I passed through the anterooms. Table number eight, in the center room, was one of the better tables, and I knew only a celebrity of some sort would be sitting there.

The half-bald man at table number eight was sitting alone, a ring of silver hair around the back of his neck ending in bushy white sideburns that consumed most of his face, a style much favored in an earlier era. The fellow was brawny and muscular, with a gold chain around his neck and chunky gold rings on his coarse hands, jewelry that would not have been out of place on a member of the Corsican Mafia. But he also wore a beautiful charcoal gray silk suit of considerable taste, and he exuded an aura of quiet authority. I glanced down at his plate—this always tells me a lot about a person—and registered that he was eating a starter of smoked eel with fresh horseradish cream.

“Chef Haji,” he said, extending a big hand. “I’ve been meaning to meet you for some time. I was very upset to learn from my staff you’ve been to my restaurant twice and never announced yourself to me. I am quite hurt.”

Chef Paul Verdun. One of the nation’s greatest talents.

I was momentarily starstruck. I knew Chef Verdun well, from a distance, as his story was endlessly repeated in the French press. Over the last thirty-five years, Paul Verdun had transformed a modest country butcher shop into a world-renowned three-star restaurant, his immense talent attracting gourmands from across the globe to the second roundabout in Courgains, a tiny Normandy village where the gold brick Le Coq d’Or occupied a corner
maison
.

Chef Verdun was a master of that lard-heavy school of French cuisine that was just starting, at that time, to fall from favor, overtaken by the molecular cooking established by the fast-rising Chef Mafitte down in Aix-en-Provence. Chef Verdun was famous for his spit-roasted squab stuffed with sweetbreads, duck liver, and scallions; his hare cooked in port wine inside a calf’s bladder; and, perhaps most famously, his
“poularde Alexandre Dumas,”
a simple chicken studded with a decadent amount of black truffles.

I was delighted to make Chef Verdun’s acquaintance, and I slid into his booth, the two of us talking for a good thirty minutes before I reluctantly returned to the duties of my kitchen. But in that first chat we had the breakthrough moment that forever became the basis of our friendship. Chef Verdun talked a great deal about himself, with great exuberance, and so I wasn’t entirely surprised when he finally said, “Tell me, Hassan. Of the dishes you had at Le Coq d’Or, which was your favorite?”

While I was at his restaurant, waiting for the main course, I had impulsively tried the starter omelet with codfish cheeks and caviar. It was deceptively simple, but to my mind the pinnacle of French cooking, so refined and yet also so forceful. I later discovered, through my own research, the dish was originally created in the seventeenth century by Cardinal de Richelieu’s chef, served to the controversial cardinal at lunch every Friday until his death, this delicious omelet entirely disappearing from menus until Chef Verdun magnificently reinvented it for modern palates.

“That’s easy. The omelet. With codfish cheeks.”

Chef Verdun’s fork was on his way to his lips, but he paused perceptively at that moment. “I agree with you,” he said. “Almost everyone prefers the
poularde Alexandre Dumas
. But I think it is a bit much. Too
opera buffa
. The omelet, so simple, has always been my personal favorite. You and I, Hassan, we are the only two people who agree on this.”

In the ensuing years, Chef Verdun and I saw each other periodically. I don’t want to exaggerate our closeness; I don’t suspect anyone, not even his own wife, ever cracked the high-octane energy of that man. He was an enigma, always slipping away from our grasp. But over the following years, Verdun and I definitely established a deep and abiding professional respect for each other, even, I would say, one of real affection. And that friendship comes to life for me when I think about the time, the day after I won my second Michelin star, when Chef Verdun showed up unexpectedly at Le Chien Méchant.

It was late afternoon and unbeknown to me he had arranged with Serge and the rest of the staff—rather impertinently, when I think about it, but that was Paul—to hijack me for the evening, leaving the evening’s fare in Serge’s capable hands.

Spluttering with indignation and insisting I was needed in my own restaurant, Paul merely said,
“Oui. Oui,”
like he was humoring an unruly child, before forcibly pushing me down into the passenger seat of his Mercedes.

My staff waved good-bye from the restaurant’s doorway, disappearing in a blur when Paul’s foot hit the gas pedal and we shot off at an alarming speed in the direction of Orly Airport. He always drove like a madman.

A private plane was waiting for us on the tarmac, and only once airborne did Paul finally inform me that he had decided a proper celebration of my second star was in order, and that meant, naturally, a dash down to Marseille for a good fish dinner. He had bullied an investment banker friend in London into lending us his Gulfstream.

That night Paul and I dined at Chez Pierre, that Old World restaurant sitting on the cliffs above Marseille’s harbor. Our table was against the large bay window. When we arrived, the sun was setting, like a mango sorbet dripping over the horizon; the platinum rolls of the Mediterranean produced the soothing sound of waves thudding the cliff rocks below us.

Chez Pierre was old-school, dressed simply with sturdy tables under white tablecloths and heavy silver flatware. The aged waiter with pomade in his hair hauled a dented silver wine bucket to the side of our table. Paul and the elderly man bantered like they were friends from long ago, before Paul ordered a bottle of 1928 Krug champagne.

We sat in reverence as the ancient vintage was opened, as the golden-colored foam rushed to the glass rim and revealed its great age. But the real surprise came when we brought the flutes to our lips. The champagne, it was as fresh and sparkly as a blushing bride, and revealed no sign at all it was near retirement age. Quite the opposite. It made me want to sing, dance, fall in love. Rather dangerous, I thought.

We started, of course, with a teacup of Marseille fish soup, before moving on to a delicate dish of tiny clams, no bigger than babies’ fingernails, the translucent shellfish grown in the restaurant’s own grotto under the pounding cliff face. As a main course,
loup de mer,
grilled on fennel stalks and then bathed in warm Pernod before the waiter, towel over his forearm, dramatically flambéed the sea bass at our table, using a long matchstick, the fennel stalks and lemon wedges around the fish still smoldering as the plate was placed before us.

We laughed and talked deep into the night, until the sea outside seemed pumped full of squid ink. Sardine and mackerel fishing boats, their masts bejeweled with lights, headed out from the city’s harbor for a nighttime haul; far out, an oil tanker flat against the sea, a sugar cube of lights in the inkiest part of the blackening water.