The Hundred-Foot Journey (25 page)

“Never, in all the three-star restaurants of France, will you taste anything finer,” he said. “We toil and toil, until we are exhausted, and nothing we do, if we are honest, will ever be as good as this, a simple bowl of tripe. Am I right, Hassan?”

“You are right, Paul.”

It was only when I recalled this memory, on the sad day of his car crash, that I finally had the decency to let in the enormity of my friend’s death, to really feel the loss of this incredible tragedy.

Paul was no more.

And so it was, halfway up the Rue Valette, that my palate independently demanded its own homage to Chef Verdun, and I found myself tasting on the broad back of my tongue the rich flavors and textures of his crayfish, a masterpiece of paper-thin slivers of grilled goose liver layered delicately between the pudenda-pink meat of freshwater crustaceans.

Starlings chattering near my window woke me the next morning, but when I swung my legs over to the floor, it felt as if I had been hit with a hammer. All the recent departures, the collapse of the old economic order that we were seeing in the news every day, it was as if all this death and destruction had physically settled in the marrow of my bones. I was profoundly exhausted, dragging my feet, and when I left my flat I found I had to stop off at my local watering hole, La Contrescarpe, on the Rue Lacépède, for a second cup of coffee, before I could continue on to the restaurant.

Marc Bressier, an acquaintance who was the front-room manager at the three-star Arpège, was already at our regular table under the brasserie’s green awning, eating an omelet, and he nodded when I pulled out a chair.

At that time in the morning, Place de la Contrescarpe was free of tourists, and when the waiter came by, I ordered a double and a brioche. A street sweeper was driving his whirring green truck around the square’s fountain, hosing down the cobblestones with pressurized water and sending dog shit and cigarette butts rolling into the gutter. A
clochard
was asleep on the far pavement under a bush, his grizzled gray head resting on his extended arm, totally oblivious to the spray steadily heading his way.

André Piquot,
chef-patron
at Montparnasse, pulled up a chair as shutters above the bar on the other side of the square suddenly clattered open, the noise sending a flock of pigeons soaring over the houses.

“Salut, Hassan. Ça va, Marc?”

“Salut, André.”

Paul was all we could talk about, and André expertly jabbed at his cell phone applications with his stubby fingers to read us the latest press accounts. There were unresolved questions about Paul’s accident. The absence of tire tread marks on the road suggested there had been no braking of the car before it sailed over the ledge, and the car itself had just been serviced at a garage, so no technical malfunction could have explained the loss of control on a road that Paul knew like the back of his hand. Furthermore, a witness, a farmer across the road, said the car appeared to be accelerating, not braking, as it headed straight for the cliff and disappeared over its edge. Investigations were continuing.

“I still can’t believe it. He seemed so full of life.”

“What do you think, Hassan? He was your friend.”

I shrugged, the French way. “He was as much a mystery to me as he was to you.”

We moved on to the upcoming demonstration against the restaurant industry’s special value-added tax, a subject then much consuming our world.

“You will be there, Hassan,” Piquot said. “Please. As a director of the Syndicat Commerce de l’épicerie et gastronomie, I must deliver bodies for the protest. Please. Bring your staff.”

“We must stand together,” added Bressier.

“All right. I will be there. Promise.”

It was time to go. I shook their hands, crossed the square, and noticed another two shops, a
parfumerie
and a sandwich shop, had permanently closed their doors. But as I descended the raked Rue Descartes, I had to negotiate around a delivery of tarp-covered paintings to the Rive Gauche Gallery, all conducted with much yelling and theater, and it made me recall the time when Paul and I had spent an afternoon at the Musée D’Orsay, to hunt, as he said,
“pour la source d’inspiration.”

He was in good shape that day, at his charming best, and it was a very agreeable afternoon we spent together, even though we moved through the museum at vastly different tempos. I would regularly turn the corner of a room only to see the back of Paul’s silver head rushing ahead into yet another of the museum’s chambers.

At one point, I sat alone before Gauguin’s
The Meal,
painted shortly after the great painter arrived in Tahiti. Not one of his best, according to the experts, but I recall the painting’s extreme simplicity—the three locals, the bananas, the bowls on the table. The painting stunned me, for it made me realize only a true master could strip away all obvious artistry and drama, to leave only the simplest and purest ingredients on the plate.

Paul inevitably came back to find me, full of enthusiasm, like a child, to say “you must see” the painting by so-and-so in the next room, and he left again only once I had promised to do so. There was a period, however, when Paul disappeared entirely and there was no sign of him until I finally reached the third floor of the museum.

He was standing stock-still before a painting stuck in the far left-hand corner of the grand parlor. I am not sure how long he had been standing there, but he did not move as I came to stand by his side, but continued to stare blank-faced at the image that seemed to have a fierce hold on his imagination.

The painting wasn’t particularly good, I thought then, but now, looking back, the image does come back to me quite vividly. The painting was of a bearded king, sitting on his throne, his wife clinging to his side. They were both deep in shock, each separately wondering what would become of them. A huge and empty gray wall stretched seemingly forever behind them, a ceremonial church candle bluntly extinguished and abandoned on the floor in front of the distraught couple. The painting, by Jean-Paul Laurens, was titled, simply,
The Excommunication of Robert the Pious.

When after several minutes he never acknowledged me in any way, not even when I shifted my weight and cleared my throat, I said, “Paul?”

He blinked twice and turned in my direction.

“Ready? My God, it’s like touring with an old lady, you are so slow. Now, how about we have a drink at a little bar I know not too far from here?”

When I slipped through the front door of Le Chien Méchant, I found my maître d’hôtel, Jacques, at the table in the foyer, busy stacking the silver peaches that had just arrived from Seville. The spotlit table was the first thing guests saw when entering the restaurant’s darkened hall, and every day we seductively set it anew with fresh figs, pineapples, and mangoes, colorful pots filled with berries. Among the heaps of lush fruit, we frequently placed a plate of smoke-blackened sausages, or delicate and flaky pastries of the day stacked under a smooth glass dome, all to create a mouth-watering contrast of hues and textures. The only permanent fixtures were a preserved and mounted pheasant—with two glittering glass eyes and a long tail that majestically swept across the table’s polished pear-wood planks—and two strategically placed antique copper pots with lids of hammered silver.

Jacques, dressed in a tailored blue suit, stacked the last peach and turned his head in my direction as I eased shut the front door.

“Chef!
You won’t believe it. I cracked it. I know who they are.”

Again I was visited by that overwhelming sense of weariness.

“It’s a young couple. I am sure of it.”

Jacques made me come over to the podium and his leather-bound volume of research to pore over his reams of hastily snapped photographs.

“See? It’s all here. Look.”

Normally a man of great elegance and reserve, Jacques lost all sense of proportion when it came to restaurant critics. He loathed them. In fact, his great ambition in life was to unmask the anonymous
Guide Michelin
inspectors who secretly reviewed restaurants and doled out Michelin’s coveted stars. His strategy, these last several years, was to photograph guests he thought could be the Michelin critics, in the foyer, as they left our restaurant. He would then take his rogue’s gallery of photos to Bib Gourmand–designated restaurants, modest-priced brasseries and bistros that were the Michelin inspectors’ personal favorites, according to the guides’ own definition, and where they took their own families on their days off.

For years now, Jacques systematically dined in his free time at the unpretentious Bib Gourmand restaurants, comparing his portfolio of snapshots with the room full of diners. It was
complètement fou,
of course, like looking for a needle in a haystack, and this was the first time he had ever found a match.

“Look. It’s the same young couple. They dined here on the fourth. And then here they are again, four days later, over at Chez Géraud in the 16th arrondisement. I am sure they are Michelin inspectors. He has a rather sneering look about him. Don’t you think?”

“Yes. Possibly. But—”

“Well, I am sure of it.”

“Actually, that’s the son and daughter-in-law of Chef Dubonet from Toulouse. They were here in Paris that week on a research mission. They’re opening a bistro. I personally sent the young couple to Chez Géraud.”

Jacques looked crestfallen.

I tried to smile sympathetically, but it was halfhearted, and I moved on quickly before he could engage me further in his bizarre obsession.

The center room’s jasmine arrangements, faintly perfuming the salon, were from Chez Antoine over in the 6th arrondissement, and were strategically placed among the sea of tables to create a permanently soft and scented air.
Le Chien Méchant’s china was made to my design at Christian Le Page; the heavy silver flatware, it, too, was stamped under my instructions at a family-run factory in Sheffield, England. The stemware, Moser crystal, was handblown in northern Bohemia. The dining room linen, crisp and white, was not machine-made in Normandy, but from Madagascar, hand-stitched by Antananarivo women. And everything the guest came in contact with—from the wineglasses right down to the Caran d’Ache pen to sign the bill—was etched with Le Chien Méchant’s insignia, a tiny barking bulldog. Mallory had taught me that details make the restaurant, and no one could say I didn’t learn my lessons well, for I even twinned each table with a mahogany footstool, on which the women could rest their precious handbags.

My front-room staff was crisply snapping linen, draping it over the tables; the faint piano tinkling of Duke Ellington’s “What Am I Here For?” drifted out from the hidden speakers. An apprentice at the sideboard, wiping down crystal, he saw me surveying the dining room from the darkened wing of the restaurant, and he nodded respectfully in my direction as the cut glass in his hand flashed sharply in the light.

“Bonjour, Chef,”
cried several waiters as I passed through the salon.

I waved and pushed through the kitchen doors in the back.

Chef de Cuisine Serge was at the gas rings holding a heavy cast-iron pan handle with two hands, a towel across the grip, pouring hot goose fat into a ceramic bowl. The kitchen smelled sharply of just-cut shallots and simmering fish stock. Jean-Luc, a sixteen-year-old apprentice from a farm in Normandy, was standing by, looking on, until Serge barked, “Go put on a glove and help me!” The apprentice, startled by this unexpected command, turned in a panic, but Lucas, my
commis,
was ready at his side, helpfully handing him a glove.

No sooner had the earnest boy thrust his hand deep inside the mitten than he screamed and shook his wrist, sending the glove and a bit of sheep’s intestine flying across the kitchen. The entire staff instantly burst out laughing, none more so than the ruddy-faced Serge, who was laughing so hard his entire body jiggled and he had to hold on to the side of the cooking range to steady himself. The apprentice tried to smile and look game, but in fact looked a sickly white, but for his protruding ears, which were a purplish red. Pranks and boxed ears—that was how Serge broke in the young staff.

I had no patience for Serge’s antics at that moment, so I backed out of the kitchen and headed to the spiral staircase, to my office and the accounting department up on the second floor.

Maxine, one of my accountants, her hair in a twist atop her head, smiled warmly as I clunked up the stairs, and I think she was going to say something sweet and coquettish from behind her computer terminal, but at that moment Mehtab, sitting at the desk in the back of the room, said, “Have you not finished with last month’s accounts? My God, Maxine, hurry up.”

Maxine turned toward my sister and snapped, “You gave it to me two days ago, Mehtab. Don’t hand me the data late and then get like that. It’s not fair. I am finishing them as fast as I can.”

I ducked my head down and waved vaguely at the two of them as I quickly crossed the room to my office and shut the door.

Finally alone, I collapsed on the swivel chair behind my desk.

For some minutes I took in Madame Mallory’s floor-to-ceiling collection of antique cookbooks, the valuable archive she had bequeathed to me and which occupied half my office. I took in Auguste Escoffier’s notes, the great chef’s rough ideas for an 1893 Savoy dinner that I had purchased at Christie’s, neatly framed on my desk. I looked at the amusing handwritten note of thanks from President Sarkozy, hanging by the door, cheek by jowl with my honorary degree from the École hôtelière de Lausanne. I looked at all these precious artifacts, always a source of great personal joy, and still I could not avoid the facts.

My hands were shaking.

I was not well.

I am furious. Just furious.”

Madame Verdun, shocked by her own vehemence, quickly turned her attention back to the coffee table to pour us a smoky tea from china that had once belonged to her grandmother. She sat at the edge of the white silk couch exquisitely embroidered with birds-of-paradise, and the image I have now is of an angry woman sitting stiff-backed and erect in a cloud of black chiffon, her hair an intricate cocoon of finely spun strands, translucent in the light, as if a chef had taken a blowtorch to sugar and woven threads of the candied filaments through her hair.