The Hundred-Foot Journey (29 page)

“The partridge is delicious,” he said, waving his bread stub at me. “I want this on the menu at Le Chien Méchant.”

“Oui, Monsieur Le Comte.”

The dish that famously put Chef Verdun on the culinary map thirty years earlier was his
poularde Alexandre Dumas.
Paul filled the chicken’s cavity with julienned leeks and carrots, then surgically perforated the bird’s outer shell so truffle slices could be delicately inserted into the bird’s skin. As the bird roasted in the oven, the truffles and chicken fat melted together, their essences seeping deliciously through the meat and leaving a uniquely earthy flavor. It was Paul’s signature, a dish always found for a princely sum of 170 euros on the menu of Le Coq d’Or.

The night of his memorial, wanting to pay Paul an homage, I took the basic techniques of his
poularde,
and applied it to partridge, well known to be his personal favorite game bird. The result was a powerfully pungent bit of fowl, just this side of being feral. I stuffed the birds with glazed apricots—instead of julienned legumes—and then so blackened the fowl with black truffle slices inserted in their skin they looked like birds dressed for a Victorian funeral—hence the name Paul’s Partridge in Mourning. Of course, my sommelier then had the inspired idea to twin the partridge with the 1996 Côtes du Rhône Cuvée Romaine, a robust red redolent of dogs panting and on point in the lushness of a summer hunt.

Several distinguished critics and restaurateurs—including one of my idols, Chef Rouët—personally came by our table later in the evening, to congratulate me on the menu and, in particular, my interpretation of Paul’s signature dish. Even Monsieur Barthot,
Le Guide Michelin directeur général,
descended from the Olympian heights of the head table to shake my hand and to say, rather loftily, “Excellent, Chef. Excellent,” before striding off to speak to someone of more importance. And in that moment I finally understood why Paul had orchestrated this posthumous dinner.

I looked over to the head table, to make grateful eye contact with Anna Verdun, but Paul’s widow was at that moment looking vacantly out across the room, a smile of sorts frozen across her face, while Chef Mafitte was leaning in on her from the left, one hand under the table.

No, I would not tell her, I decided. She had enough on her plate.

Besides, it was enough that I knew why Paul had planned this evening.

The memorial dinner was not for Paul, you see, but for me. With this meal my friend had signaled to France’s culinary elite that a new
gardien
of classic French cuisine had burst on to the scene. I was his anointed heir. And so I think it is safe to say that before that night I was a relatively faceless figure lost among the scores of competent and talented two-star chefs all across France.

After that night, however, I was propelled to the top ranks, my good friend ensuring—even from beyond the grave—that the country’s gastronomic elite made room for a forty-two-year-old foreign-born chef he had personally chosen to protect the classic principles of France’s
cuisine de campagne,
which he and Madame Mallory had fought so hard to protect.

Winter drove us to the wall. The recession dragged on right through the coldest months, and fabled restaurants such as Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent, they finally fell to the economic malaise. It was a shock, to walk down the Rue Royale and see Maxim’s windows boarded up. No one in France, not since the war, had seen such a thing. The government again repealed the 19.6 percent VAT charge, but it was too little, too late; in the end none of us were immune to the new economic climate, and my own financial problems hit with great force in late February.

My biggest problem was a personnel issue that would not go away. The waiter Claude was tidy and pleasant-looking and had come to us, with glowing references, from Lyon. We found him quick to learn, energetic, and so unfailingly courteous and attentive with the customers that Jacques, my maître d’hôtel, wrote in his initial review that the young waiter conducted himself with the “highest professionalism.”

But this you must know about French labor law: during the initial “trial period” we could dismiss Claude without too much difficulty; after six months on the books, however, the waiter was considered a full-time employee, with a long list of ironclad legal rights. Getting rid of him thereafter was extremely difficult and costly.

Our honeymoon with Claude lasted precisely until the day after the young man’s six-month “trial” was over. What previously took Claude thirty minutes—polishing the silver candelabras, for example—suddenly took him an hour and a half. Or longer. Jacques, a stickler for proper deportment, coldly suggested Claude hurry up, but the nasty little fellow simply shrugged and said he was working as fast as he could. When Claude submitted his first time-and-a-half overtime work sheets, Jacques, normally coolly elegant and composed, threw the forms back in the boy’s face and called him a
“connard
.
”
But the boy had nerves of steel. He didn’t flinch. He simply picked the papers off the floor and gently left them on Jacques’ desk, knowing full well the law would protect him from us “capitalist exploiters.”

Claude had not only calculated his overtime to the minute, but included a demand for 6.6 days in extra paid vacation to offset the fact we were violating his legal right to work only thirty-five hours a week. The restaurant business is of course all about long hours—that’s just the nature of our work—and, not surprisingly, all my other hardworking staff soon began to complain about Claude, who was not pulling his weight and forcing the more conscientious members of the staff to pick up his slack.

This untenable situation finally came to a head when Mehtab handed me Claude’s payroll records. In the year he had been on staff, Le Chien Méchant had paid Claude seventy thousand euros in salary, plus three times that amount in various social security and pension taxes. Le Chien Méchant still owed him ten weeks’ paid vacation.

Claude was not a waiter, but a scam artist.

I called the Lyon restaurants, spoke to the owners, and they finally confessed Claude had done the same thing to them, and in the end they had written him glowing reviews simply to get him off their backs. So I told Jacques to fire him. And he did.

But then the boy returned—with his union representative.

“It’s very simple, Chef Haji. The young man’s dismissal is not legal.”

Mehtab used all the poetic flourishes of Urdu to curse the union representative’s entire family lineage. Jacques erupted in French.

But I held up my hand and hushed them both.

“Explain yourself, Monsieur LeClerc. This man is a cheat. A crook. How can this not be grounds for legal dismissal?”

Claude looked entirely serene as usual, and wisely didn’t say a word, but let his union representative speak for him. “Your allegations are unfair and unwarranted,” LeClerc said mildly, making a steeple of his hands and thoughtfully pursing his lips. “And perhaps more to the point, completely without proof.”

“That’s not true,” Jacques interjected. “I have documented very carefully how Claude deliberately drags his feet on assignments, how even simple tasks—like setting a table—takes him four times as long as it takes the others.”

“Claude is not the swiftest of workers, we concede, but that is not sufficient grounds to fire him, particularly since your own records commend him as a worker of the ‘highest professionalism.’
Non, non, Monsieur Jacques.
This is not right what you have done. He took so much time to execute your orders simply because of this professionalism you previously commended. Tell me, were you ever dissatisfied with the quality of his work, after he completed the assignments? Was the work somehow sloppily done? I could not find any complaints in his file about quality of execution, simply about the amount of time it took him to complete his work—”

“Well, yes, that’s true—”

“So, in a court of law, we could convincingly make the argument that it was precisely because
he cared so much about the quality of his work
that he took longer than the others—”

“This is outrageous,” Jacques said, his face an alarming beetroot tint. “We all know exactly what Claude is doing and what this is all about. He is holding us ransom. He inflated his work sheets. Monsieur LeClerc, you are colluding with a crook. I cannot believe you are taking his side.”

The burly LeClerc smashed his fist on the table. “Take that back, Monsieur Jacques! You have fired Claude illegally and now you are attacking my personal integrity to cover up your tracks. Well, you won’t get away with it. The laws are very clear in these matters. You must reinstate Claude
immédiatement.
Or, if you want to release him, you must negotiate a proper severance package as stipulated under the law, not the paltry sum you gave him yesterday.”

I looked over at Mehtab, who was furiously making calculations on a pad.

“And if we refuse?” she asked.

“Then the union will be forced to bring you before the
Conseil de prud’hommes
on charges of wrongful dismissal, and it will be horrible. This I guarantee you. We will make sure the press is in attendance at the
tribunal
and that your restaurant is rightly exposed as an ‘exploiter of workers.’ ”

“This is blackmail.”

“Call it what you like. We are simply making sure our union members are not taken advantage of by you
propriétaire,
and that you pay them what they are entitled to by law.”

I stood up.

“I’ve heard enough. Give them what they want, Mehtab.”

“Hassan! That’s two years’ pay plus vacation. It will cost us a hundred and ninety thousand euros to get rid of the little pig!”

“I don’t care. I’ve had enough. Claude is stirring up bad blood with our decent staff, and if we keep him, it will cost us much more in the long term. Pay him. He’s figured out all the angles.”

Claude was smiling sweetly, and, I think, just about to thank me for the generous settlement, when I spoke deliberately and quietly to Monsieur LeClerc.

“Now get that piece of dirt out of my restaurant.”

Paul Verdun was among the first of the top-rated French chefs to truly understand that the economics of our business had changed entirely, and that the great restaurants of France were, like cancer patients, living on a drip of borrowed time. The French state had, in all its wisdom, finally made it impossible for us to survive a downturn. The thirty-five-hour workweek; the pension liabilities and dozens of “social” taxes; the incomprehensible bureaucratic filings requiring a half-dozen accountants and lawyers to complete. The rules and restrictions and added costs, they all pushed us to the brink that winter.

Paul, of course, had seen all these financial problems looming on the horizon well before the rest of us, and he had fought back well before they had reached their catastrophic tipping point. In particular he studied the French fashion houses that had gone through a similar shakeout fifty years earlier and he learned their lessons well: he noticed, for example, the labor-intensive haute couture, at the top of the fashion pyramid, built world-class reputations on their innovative designs, but few women in the modern age could actually afford or bought these costly creations. Result: the haute couture ateliers all lost money.

It was instead the ready-to-wear lines and perfume licenses further down the pyramid that made money for the fashion houses. The astute fashion impresarios—such as Bernard Arnault over at LVMH—effectively used such product lines to monetize the valuable reputations established by the money-losing haute couture operations at the top of their business empires.

Paul intuitively understood that Le Coq d’ Or
was the culinary equivalent of Christian Dior’s haute couture, and he similarly moved down the gastronomic pyramid to make money. He cut licensing deals in everything from linens to olive oil. Paul showed us how it could be done and he was quite simply the entrepreneurial inspiration for a generation of us lesser chefs trying to build our own gastronomic businesses during this difficult age.

So you can understand why I was so shocked when I finally understood Paul’s success was an illusion. He was both bankrupt and dead. It almost suggested—even if no one yet was admitting it—that there was no longer a place on French soil for haute cuisine, as we previously knew it.

And if I clung to any delusional fantasies about my own restaurant, then the severance package we paid Claude efficiently tore the veil from my eyes. The restaurant’s
bénéfice
the previous year—net profit, that is—was all of 87 euros on a turnover of 4.2 million euros. The year before that Le Chien Méchant actually lost 2,200 euros. Now forced to fork over 190,000 euros to Claude—something that hadn’t been budgeted for—we were destined to have a big loss at the end of the year. Here was the bottom line: Le Chien Méchant’s
break-even point had just jumped to a 93 percent occupancy rate; our occupancy rate was running at an 82 percent average for the year.

So I suddenly understood how Paul had started down the slippery slope of quietly borrowing money to bridge year-end shortfalls: a little here, a little there, because next year will be better. And if there was any chance I might not fully understand the implications of where Le Chien Méchant was heading, there was always my sister to remind me, at the restaurant—where she did the accounts—or at the flat, where she lived in the back room.

Indeed, that night, after work, I returned to the apartment behind the Institut Musulman Mosque. I dropped my keys and phone on the hall table and went into the kitchen; my nighttime snack plate—a spoonful each of my sister’s baingan
bharta and dum
aloo, mashed eggplant and potatoes in yogurt—was waiting for me on the kitchen counter. But Mehtab was not in her bed, as was normal at this late hour, but sitting in her nightgown at the counter before a pot of chai, her eyes red-rimmed and sagging in their fleshy pouches.

She got up, poured me a glass of sparkling water from the fridge, and handed me a napkin. “Very serious,” she said. “I see it now. We will be back to selling bhelpuri by the roadside in no time.”