The Hundred-Foot Journey (27 page)

Those of us in the middle of the human colony were intent on moving into the center of the action, but as we passed the Place de la Concorde, about to cross the bridge, scores of anarchists emerged from the Jardin des Tuileries behind us, kerchiefs pulled up over their faces, slipping into our ranks.

I am not sure what precisely happened next, but rocks and Molotov cocktails and cherry bombs were suddenly whizzing through the air. The riot police, armed with batons and shields, instantly and defensively surged forward and pressed down at us from the other end of the bridge.

There was tear gas smoke and screaming, torched cars erupting in flames, and the horrible crunching sound of police bringing batons down hard on heads.

We were trapped by the police on one side, the anarchists on the other.

The battle didn’t last that long and none of my staff were hurt, nor, in fact, was anyone I knew personally; the press said, in the end, ninety demonstrators and eight police were taken to the hospital, out of a total of twenty-five thousand demonstrators, while eleven cars were torched and destroyed.

But the terror—the bloody heads and the blinding smoke and the high-pitched screaming—that was earthshaking and powerful and sobering right down to the very core. It awoke in me primordial fears from the past, of torchlit mobs bearing down on the Napean Sea Road. And when I saw the policemen on horses charge into the crowd, swinging their batons, this bubbling bile of animal panic rose in my throat and I grabbed the arm of my neighbor, the apprentice Jean-Luc, and forced him to turn with me, to run back against the crowd, toward the Place de la Concorde and the advancing anarchists.

Ultimately the anarchists pushing back forced us off to the side, down the steps leading toward the river, where, by chance, a barge was docked under the bridge. The elderly hippie couple on board were at that moment loosening their ropes to pull away as quickly as possible from the trouble overhead, eager to avoid the fiery debris that was falling from the bridge into the water below and onto their deck. But the couple saw our panic and yelled,
“Ici, vite,”
and somehow we jumped, Jean-Luc and I, with two or three other people, hitting the deck with a thud, just as the barge pushed off.

“Merde. Merde,”
was all the shaking boy could say for some time.

The riot on the bridge slowly retreated in the distance, and I recall the smooth sense of movement, of travel, of breeze. The couple had gray frizzy hair and soft voices and they made us sit on the deck under heavy horse blankets, the sun on our faces, while handing us shots of eaux de vie, for the shock, they said.

And I remember how we glided, glided silkily down the Seine, past the Eiffel Tower, past the Maison de Radio France, under Pont d’Issy, until at long last we reached the Île Billancourt
out in the suburbs of Paris
.
And there, at long last, the couple docked their barge and let us out on the local pier, where we thanked them profusely and took their names and where I called Mehtab to come pick us up.

While we were waiting for my sister, Jean-Luc and I sat on a low wall and dangled our legs over the ledge that ran alongside a dusty park. Shards of broken wine bottles littered the parking lot. A few feet down below our ledge, to the left, an Algerian immigrant family was spit-roasting lamb on a park grill fashioned from an old oil drum. The father was off praying on a rug in the shade of a linden tree, while the women cooked and the children played soccer. The smell of searing lamb’s flesh and cumin and bubbling fat came to us in the wind, and the simplicity of it all—the roasting meat, the mint tea, the cheerful familial chatter—it took my breath away.

And it was then, when I gazed back out across the quicksilver Seine, that I caught sight of the elderly woman on the promenade on the far bank. She wore a shawl and seemed to be calling me, waving, urging me forward.

She was the spitting image of Madame Mallory, I tell you.

But perhaps I imagined it.

C
hef ?”

“Oui, Jean-Luc.”

The apprentice licked his lips nervously.

“Monsieur Serge asked me to tell you the ptarmigan have arrived.”

I looked over at the wall clock, next to the Ndebele wall hanging picked up in Zimbabwe, depicting village women roasting a quartered buffalo. There was just an hour and forty minutes before the restaurant opened for lunch.

I had been reading one of Madame Mallory’s favorite cookbooks—
Margaridou: The Journal of an Auvergne Cook
—but at Jean-Luc’s beckoning, I gently closed the old book shut, its simple recipes from a bygone era, and stood to put it safely away on the bookshelf.

It was, as I turned, the sight of the Credit Suisse “tombstone” in Plexiglas, the advertisement announcing the initial public offering of
Recipe.com
, an Internet start-up selling recipes and of which I was an outside director, that made me pause. My office, in that mote-filled light pouring in from the window, suddenly looked ridiculous to me. Wooden-and-brass plaques and awards littered every available surface in the office, the strangest of which was a gold-plated soup ladle from the Brussels-based International Soup Society. My long-cherished treasures suddenly looked like worthless bric-a-brac.

Something undeniable had happened since Paul’s death. It was as if his spiritual malaise had jumped bodies and entered me, like some flesh-eating parasite from a Hollywood horror film. I was restless, irritable, had trouble sleeping. I did not know what was going on, only that a feeling of doom was bearing down on me. And I hated it, this unfamiliar sensation, for this was not me at all. I have always been quite a sunny fellow.

But Jean-Luc was still studying me from the door frame of my office, unsure whether some other prank was about to befall him. So it was ultimately the look on the boy’s face—painful insecurity—that finally brought me out of myself.

I stood up and said, “
Bien
. Let us go to work, then.”

Jean-Luc led the way down the spiral staircase, and we returned to the clatter and scrape and whoosh of Le Chien Méchant’s kitchen gearing up for action; to waiters slamming through the swinging doors, polishing silver and filling cigar boxes and folding linen rosettes, their jackets off as they dashed between kitchen and dining room and back.

Chef de Cuisine Serge was on the far side of the kitchen with two sous chefs, standing over open flames. Suzanne, my pastry chef, was bent over a tray of tarts. There was excited palaver about soccer match this and that, but Jean-Luc and I made our single-minded way to the wooden crate standing in the cold kitchen, found on the counter every day in season, between late September and December, and flown in daily by game wholesalers in Moscow.

The boy forced open the wooden box with a crowbar, and together we carefully unpacked the braces of ptarmigan wrapped in tissue paper. Two other apprentices were hard at work, and I discreetly kept an eye on them as we unwrapped the birds. The girl on the far side of the sink was carefully sponging a string of red mullet with a wet cloth. I insist on this method; wash mullet under a tap and its subtle taste and color disappears down the drain. The senior apprentice brandishing a sharp knife on the meat counter—soon to don his own toque as a
commis,
now that we had Jean-Luc—was removing the nerves from the spine of the Charolais, the breed of French cattle that I prefer to Scottish Angus.

I took a plump ptarmigan in my hand. The arctic grouse’s white-feathered head and black eyes lolled lifelessly backward, a downy weight in my palm. With a satisfying whack of the cleaver I took off the grotesquely overdeveloped claws, and the bird’s legs disappeared into the vat of stock bubbling away on the burner to my side. I signaled to Jean-Luc that he should clean and pluck the rest.

I had to pluck forty game birds at a time when I started at Le Saule Pleureur, but happily for modern apprentices, automated plucking machines do the job quite nicely today, and I interrupted Jean-Luc to run my bird through the machine. The ptarmigan’s white feathers—still ruffled and blood-speckled from the hunter’s shot—were peeled off by the rotating rollers and then shot off on an airstream into a disposable bag to the side.

I took the plucked carcass over to the stove’s open flame to singe off the bird’s remaining quill stubble. A slice opened its crop and I took a few generous pinches of the bitter tundra herbs and berries that were still in the bird’s throat pouch. I washed the herbs at the sink, so similar in appearance to thyme, and set them aside in a ceramic bowl.

This was my trademark dish of late fall: Siberian ptarmigan, roasted with the tundra herbs taken from the bird’s own crop, and served with caramelized pears in an Armagnac sauce.

“I am not good with words, Jean-Luc. I talk best through my hands. So just watch how I do it.”

The boy nodded. I gutted the bird, washed it, and carefully blotted away all moisture with paper towels. There was some shuffling of feet but otherwise the kitchen staff was mostly silent as they concentrated on their own work or watched my demonstration. The only real noise came from the lids of copper pots rattling atop the stove, and the white-noise whir of washing machines and refrigerators and ventilating ducts in the background.

The bird’s meaty breasts came off with two clean swipes of the knife, and I seared the crimson pads of flesh in a hot pan.

A few minutes later I turned off the flame and looked up at the clock.

Just thirty minutes until we opened. The staff was watching me, waiting for the traditional presitting instructions.

I opened my mouth, but the usual platitudes, they choked.

They would not come anymore.

Because my head was flooded with torrid images, of Paul at the point of mangled death, surrounded by platters of his ornate dishes, loaded with goose fat and foie gras and rivers of his own congealing blood. I saw boarded shop fronts in the streets of Paris, the riot and bloodied heads and screaming on the Pont de la Concorde. And through these unsettling images loomed the supranaturally tanned face of Chef Mafitte, his bizarrely antiseptic lab-kitchen pumping out with great industriousness the most extravagant and decadently deconstructed meals.

And then, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, when I gave in to all these unsettling images, when I was empty and couldn’t find energy to fight and thought I might faint, they disappeared as quickly as they had come, and what poured into that empty space was a chiaroscuro vision of old Margaridou, that Auvergne cook, sitting at a farmhouse window, quietly writing her simple recipes in her journal. But when she turned her head to look directly at me, I realized with a jolt the aged woman was in fact my grandmother Ammi sitting at the upstairs window of our Napean Sea Road property in old Bombay. And she was not writing at all, but painting, and when I looked hard at the canvas in her hand, I recognized it as Gauguin’s deceptively simple painting
The Meal.

“You, in the kitchen, and you in the front room, all of you. Listen up.

“Tomorrow we throw out our menu, everything we have done for the past nine years. All the heavy sauces, all the fancy dishes, they are finished. Tomorrow we begin afresh, entirely. From now on we are only going to serve simple dishes at Le Chien Méchant, dishes where the most beautiful and freshest ingredients speak for themselves.

“That means no cleverness, no fireworks, no fads. Our mission, from now on, is to make a simple boiled carrot or a clear fish broth sing. Our mission is to reduce every ingredient down to its simplest, deepest nature. We will draw on the old recipes for inspiration, yes, but we will renew them by stripping them back to their core, removing all the period embellishments and convolutions that have been added to them over time. So I want each of you to go back to your hometowns, back to your roots across France, and bring to me the best and simplest dishes from your communes, made entirely out of local ingredients. We will put all your regional dishes in a pot, play with them, and together we will come up with a menu that is delicious and refreshingly simple. No copying the heavy old brasserie dishes, no emulating the deconstructionists and the minimalists, but our own unique house built on the simplest of French truths. Remember this day, because from now on we will cook meat, fish, and vegetables in their natural essences, returning haute cuisine to
cuisine de jus naturel
.”

And so, just a few weeks after this radical about-face in my kitchen, the day of Paul Verdun’s memorial dinner finally arrived. I remember clearly that a saffron sun was setting in a filmy way over the Seine that November night, and France’s culinary establishment—portly men in black tie and reed-thin women in sparkly gowns—climbed the Musée d’Orsay’s stairs, the paparazzi at the ropes snapping their pictures.

All very pish-posh. Everyone who was anyone in French haute cuisine was at the memorial dinner that crystal-clear and chilly night, as even the papers reported the following day. Lists were ticked, mink coats and wraps taken, the guests making their way in stiff taffeta and soft silk to the museum’s first floor, for champagne under Monet’s
Gare Saint-Lazare
and Seurat’s
Circus.
The excitement of a Cannes Film Festival was in the air, despite the sad occasion, and the cocktail chatter, reverberating between the museum’s walls, eventually reached the roar of an airport arrivals hall. Finally, just as it was getting to be too much, a bell gonged, and a magnificent baritone announced dinner was served. The guests floated toward the grand salon, to the sea of white tables and long-stemmed irises in glass, to the Baroque murals and Rococo mirrors, to the tall windows offering a panoramic view of Paris dressed in expensive pearl strings of nighttime lights.

Anna Verdun, hair bouffant and loaded down in diamonds, sat regally at the head table in a column of blue cobalt silk.

Much had changed since I had visited her, because the silver-haired
directeur général
of
Le Guide Michelin,
Monsieur Barthot, now sat to her right, entertaining her guests with his amusing tales culled from the lives and adventures of the culinary greats.