The Hundred-Foot Journey (31 page)

“That’s not true!”

Fortunately, at that moment we were distracted by Maxine descending from the upstairs office, wringing her hands, informing me Monsieur Barthot, the
directeur général
of
Le Guide Michelin
was on the phone and urgently wanting a word. My heart thumped as I took the spiral stairs two by two, the staff’s cries of good luck ringing in my ears as I disappeared up the turret.

I took a deep breath and picked up the phone. After the usual feigned politesse, Barthot asked, “Have you read the evening paper?”

I informed him I had, and asked straight out whether it is true we were to get the third star. “Damn papers,” he finally said. “Yes, it is true. Congratulations are in order.”

Only then did I allow the news to sink in, the enormity of it all.

Destiny had finally paid me my visit.

Monsieur Barthot rambled on about procedural matters and I struggled to stay focused on his florid talk. It seems I was expected to appear at an awards dinner in Cannes. “You know, Chef,” he said, “you are the first immigrant ever to win the third star in France. It is quite an honor.”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Quite agree. A great honor.”

“I had to fight for you, you know. Not all my colleagues think chefs with—how can I put it?—with exotic backgrounds have the proper feel for classic French cuisine. This is a new thing for us.
Mais c’est la vie.
The world is changing. The guide must change as well.”

He was lying, of course, and I didn’t rightly know what to say to the man. It wasn’t Barthot who championed my cause, this I knew; he would have been among the last to vote for me. It was the inspectors’ fiercely independent reports, filed after their secret visits to the restaurant and discussed at the committee level twice a year, that undoubtedly carried the day. They were uncompromisingly dedicated to the truth as they saw it.

“Monsieur Barthot,” I finally replied, “I once again thank you and the Inspectors’ Committee. But forgive me. I must go. The restaurant opens in under two hours. You understand.”

That magic night in late March when I won my third star, there was, as the evening’s sitting drew to a close, an about-face on the tongue, toward the light and sweet and meltingly good, toward the pistachio madeleines and the star anise
clafoutis
and my famous bitter-cherry sorbet. Only a soufflé or two in the oven, only Pastry Chef Suzanne working hard at bringing up the rear. I went to her station and side by side we spooned a Beaujolais compote into crisp pie crusts just taken from the oven, a dollop of mascarpone, the final touch to my
tarte au vin
. And you could feel it, the heat of the kitchen, as it was notched down, that time of night when Le Chien Méchant’s stoves were silenced, one by one.

The guests outside, they slapped their linen napkins on the sides of their plates, hoisting the white flag. And I saw, from my glass portico, their legs stretched out at odd angles under the tables, upper torsos collapsed over the tabletops like meaty soufflés.

Jacques and the staff still fussed, but not so intensely. Now it was the endless subtractions, the taking away of sauce-stained platters and wine-teared crystal, the crack and crumb of bread rolls scraped from tabletops. Reviving coffees and petits fours arrived; digestives in cut crystal and a good Havana, taken gingerly from the footstool’s pocket.

“Jean-Pierre,” I called, taking off my jacket. “Bring me clean whites.”

An Australian couple seated in what we called “Siberia” saw me first, coming out of the kitchen’s swinging doors, but were unsure. As I proceeded deeper into the next salon, however, a hush swept across the room, and Jacques, looking up from the books, came forward to meet me.

Le Comte de Nancy was at his usual table to the far right side of the restaurant, with two senior partners from Lazard Frères as his guests, and he raised his liver-spotted hand in greeting, the elderly aristocrat only with great effort coming to his feet. Before I knew it, the mayor of Paris, he and his guests, they, too, were on their feet; as was Christian Lacroix, the designer, and that great Hollywood actor Johnny D., shyly tucked away in a booth with his daughter. The front-room commotion, it pulled Serge and the others from the kitchen, and they emerged to stand in the back of the dining room to join the applause. And the clapping from guests and staff alike—it was deafening—as they congratulated me on my elevation to the uppermost echelons of French haute cuisine.

What a thing, I tell you. What a thing.

That moment, that moment was the pinnacle of my life, these famous and distinguished people on their feet, my
camarades de cuisine,
all showing me such respect. And I remember thinking: Hmmm. Rather like this. Could get used to it.

So I stood at the center of my restaurant, taking it in, bobbing my head in return, as I gave my thanks to everyone in the room. And I tell you, as I looked out at those good people—red-faced and stuffed with my food—I suddenly felt my father’s mountainous presence at my side, beaming with pride.

Hassan,
I imagined him saying.
Hassan, you killed them. Very good.

Maxine came downstairs from the office to say good night. “It’s incredible, Chef,” she said, flushed with excitement. “We took seven hundred reservations this evening, the e-mails are flooding in, and the phone is still ringing—from the Americas now, as the news spreads across the Internet. We’re already booked solid through to April of next year. At this rate, we’ll have a two-year waiting list by the end of the month. And, look, you have urgent messages from Lufthansa, Tyson Foods, and Unilever. They must be calling about some business deals,
non
? . . . What, Chef? Why are you looking so sad?”

Lose a Michelin star and business falls off by 30 percent, but gain a star, and the business jumps 40 percent. A Lyon insurance company—selling “loss of profits” coverage to restaurateurs in danger of losing their rankings—had just proven this fact through an actuarial study.

“Ahh, Maxine. I am sad because I am thinking of Paul Verdun. My friend, he could not save himself. But he saved me.”

The young woman put her arms around my neck and whispered, “Come by for coffee later. I will wait up.”

“Thank you for the offer. Very tempting. But not tonight.”

I said good night to two waiters and
Serge. He was the last to depart that evening, and only did so after we had kissed and congratulated each other one more time, and he had thumped me several more times on the back. But finally I eased shut the door, once again alone.

And that was it.

My special night gone, forever, passed into history.

With the definitive click of the back-door bolt slotting into place, I began spiraling down from the intoxicating height of the evening’s great performance. The low spirits, they rushed in, that familiar depression only a tenor coming triumphantly off the stage at La Scala could rightly understand. But that was how it was in the kitchen.

“Tant pis,”
as Serge always said. Too bad.

We must take the bad with the good.

I reassured myself the windows were bolted and the pantry padlocked. Upstairs, up the turret, I made sure all the computers and my office lights were off, picking up my mobile phone and key ring from the side table as I made my way back downstairs. Dining room lights, off. One last look at the restaurant, at the faintly luminous orbs hovering in the black, the white Madagascan tablecloths shedding their last vestiges of light. Alarm, on. And then I shut the door.

The ivy around the restaurant’s barking bulldog shingle was wet with evening dew, but it had not hardened into frost, and for the first time that year I felt the balminess of an approaching spring coming through the night. It was just a hint, but it was distinctly there. I looked up Rue Valette, up the hill, as I did every night. It was my favorite view in all of Paris, looking up at the dome of Le Panthéon
,
caught in the yellow glow of spotlights like a soft-boiled egg in the night. And then I locked the front door.

It was the small hours, but you know, night in Paris, it’s an intoxicating affair. Always the life: an amorous middle-aged couple, arm in arm, coming down Rue Valette, as a Sorbonne medical student roared back up the hill, in the opposite direction, on a red Kawasaki. I think they felt it, too, the coming spring.

I made my contented way home, by foot, through the darkened passageways of the Quartier Latin, to my flat behind the Institut Musulman Mosque. It was not a long walk home, past Place de la Contrescarpe, down through the gauntlet of cheap North African restaurants on narrow Rue Mouffetard, a few windows to the street eerily lit by a greasy souvlaki carcass under a red light.

But somewhere down the middle of the sloping lane of Rue Mouffetard, I stopped in my tracks. I was not quite sure at first, not quite trusting my senses. I again sniffed the moist midnight air. Could it be? But there it was, the unmistakable aroma of my youth, joyously coming down a cobblestone side passage to greet me, the smell of machli
ka
salan, the fish curry of home, from so long ago.

So I was helpless, pulled down the dark passageway, drawn by this haunting odor of curry, to a narrow shop front at the end of the lane, where I found, squeezed between two unsavory Algerian restaurants, Madras, newly opened but now closed for the day.

A streetlamp buzzed overhead. I shielded my eyes to cut the glare of the light and peered through the restaurant’s window. The dining room was dotted with a dozen rough wooden tables, covered in paper sheets and set for the following day. Black-and-white photos of India—water-wallahs
and loom weavers and crowded trains at a station—were framed simply and hung on bright yellow walls. The front lights of the restaurant were out, but the harsh fluorescent overhead tubes of the back kitchen, they were on, and I could just see what was going on down the long hall to the kitchen.

A vat of fish stew bubbled away on the stove, the special for the following day. Before the stove, a lone chef in a T-shirt and apron, sitting on a three-legged stool in the narrow back passage, his head lowered in exhaustion over a bowl of his spicy fish curry.

My hand, it rose on its own accord, hot and flat like a chapatis pushed against the glass. And I was filled with an ache that hurt, almost to breaking. A sense of loss and longing, for Mummy and India. For lovable, noisy Papa. For Madame Mallory, my teacher, and for the family I never had, sacrificed on the altar of my ambition. For my late friend Paul Verdun. For my beloved grandmother, Ammi, and her delicious pearlspot, all of which I missed, on this day, of all days.

But then, I don’t know why, standing before that little Indian restaurant, in that state of intense longing, it suddenly came to me, something Madame Mallory told me one spring morning many years ago. It was, as I look back, among the very last days I was at her restaurant.

We were in her private rooms at the top floor of Le Saule Pleureur. She wore a shawl about her shoulders and was sipping tea in her favorite bergère armchair, watching the warbling doves in the willow tree outside her window. I sat across from her, studiously absorbed in the
De Re Coquinaria,
taking down notes in my leather-bound book which to this day follows me everywhere. Madame Mallory returned her teacup to its saucer—with a deliberate rattle—and I looked up.

“When you leave here,” she said acidly, “you are likely to forget most of the things I have taught you. That can’t be helped. If you retain anything, however, I wish it to be this bit of advice my father gave me when I was a girl, after a famous and extremely difficult writer had just left our family hotel. ‘Gertrude,’ he said, ‘never forget a snob is a person utterly lacking in good taste.’ I myself forgot this excellent piece of advice, but I trust you will not be so foolish.”

Mallory took another sip of tea before pointedly turning those eyes on me, which were, even though she was an elderly woman, uncomfortably blue and piercing and glittery.

“I am not very good with words, but I would like to tell you that somewhere in life I lost my way, and I believe you were sent to me, perhaps by my beloved father, so that I could be restored to the world. And I thank you for this. You have made me understand that good taste is not the birthright of snobs, but a gift from God sometimes found in the most unlikely of places and in the unlikeliest of people.”

And so, as I looked at the exhausted proprietor of Madras, grabbing a bowl of simple but delicious fish stew at the end of a long day, I suddenly knew what I would tell that impossible man, the next time he told me how honored I should be, the only foreigner ever to earn a place among France’s culinary elite. I would pass on Mallory’s comment about Parisian snobs, perhaps letting the remark settle a moment before leaning forward to say, with just a touch of flying spittle, “Nah? What you think?”

But a nearby church bell chimed one a.m. and the duties of the next day beckoned, pulling at my conscience. So I took one longing last look at Madras and then unceremoniously turned on my heel, to continue on my journey down the Rue Mouffetard, leaving behind the intoxicating smells of machli
ka
salan, an olfactory wisp of who I was, fading fast in the Parisian night.

Hassan? Is that you?”

From the penthouse kitchen, the clinking of dishes getting washed in the sink.

“Yes.”

“It’s amazing! Three stars!”

Mehtab had her hair done smart that day and she came into the hall, kohl-eyed like our mother, in her best silk
salwar kameez,
smiling up at me, arms outstretched.

“Not so bad, yaar,” I said, slipping back into the patois of our childhood.

“Oh, so proud. Oh, I wish Mummy and Papa were here. I tink I might cry.”

But she looked nowhere near to crying.

In fact, she gave me a very hard pinch.

“Ow,” I yelped.

The gold bangles up her arm jangled violently as she shook her finger. “You stinker! Why you not call and tell me? Why you embarrass me with the neighbors? I have to hear from strangers?”