And then there was Raymond Blanc himself. Though he was more concerned with the business of the restaurant and the expansion of the physical property at that time, he was often around and he was unlike any other chef I’d encountered. This trim, sprightly Frenchman disproved many of the more prominent clichés that attached to his countrymen. He wasn’t a screamer. He didn’t loathe Brits, whom many Gallic whisks delighted in calling, with condescension and arrogance, “Roast Beef” (the implication being that that’s all we could cook). Moreover, this largely self-taught man had an inexhaustible love of cooking and a passion for sharing it with others. I appreciated this, even though I couldn’t necessarily relate to it. The emerging truth, between my inability to embrace the country and my regard for Blanc as a lovable curiosity rather than necessarily a soul mate, is that I saw myself more like the misanthropic Marco—brash, urban, and unapologetically antisocial. Fittingly, a few years prior, the two men had appeared together in a BBC special, where the differences between them came into high relief: Blanc waxing poetic on the gift a chef gives his guests, White expressing his belief that the guests had little or no appreciation for the toil that went into it.
Unsurprisingly, given his reputation, Blanc romped around the kitchen like a jackrabbit, a living, breathing illustration of this different, sunnier point of view and another way of life from what I had seen in other kitchens. Where others thrived on seriousness, Blanc was too irrepressible to let that define his roost. I remember one day, while he was walking down a corridor to the prep room, he spanked a line cook with two big squeegee sponges, leaving his ass soaking wet before zooming away like the roadrunner. Executed by another chef, the move would have been seen as abusive; with Blanc, it was utterly playful and amusing, even to the victim.
There were times when he could seem as absentminded as Inspector Clouseau, like when he was flambéing veal kidneys, poured green Chartreuse into the pan, and a mushroom cloud of flame shot up, singeing his eyebrows. “Merde!” he exclaimed, as though he had no idea that flame plus liqueur might equal fire. But lest we read anything into such moments, they were balanced by evidence of his laser-like eye for detail. One day, a cook, a woman of Scottish descent, was walking through the kitchen, a tray of navarin of lamb neck in tow. From among the chaos of the kitchen, his eye trained on the contents of the tray, the one thing amiss, like an intelligence drone. He leapt over the pass, intercepted her, and eviscerated her.
“You stupid girl,” he bellowed. “Do you not care? Do you not care?!”
As for the food itself, Blanc was unencumbered by the slavish devotion to convention that defined most of the cooking in fine-dining establishments. There was no rigidity in his personality, his kitchen, or his food. In this way, although his cuisine rang more classic than that of, say, The Fat Duck’s Heston Blumenthal or El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià, I recognized a kinship of nonconformity between him and those rising stars. For example, there were lovely pressed duck confit, shredded, seasoned with Xeres vinegar and chopped black truffle, pressed into a ring mold with foie gras in the center and frisée alongside, and a mosaic of cured Scottish salmon, caviar, and pickled carrot set within a salmon consommé.
There was also a Cochon de Lait for two, a choice of rack or saddle of pig that was cooked on the bone, then crisped under the broiler to burnish the crackling, before being served with baby Savoy cabbage sautéed in pig fat. (One day, I had the pork under the broiler and felt a poke in my ribs. I turned to see who it was, ready for a row, but there was nobody there. I looked down and saw Raymond Blanc, giddy at his little joke. “It’s good to be tall, yes?” he asked. I found it so delightfully quirky that it took me a moment to offer up the only appropriate reply: “Yes, Chef!” “Ah, yes!” he exclaimed, and off he went.)
Tête de Cochon
This winter dish never fails to remind me of my Le Manoir days because of its mingling of French classicism with a contemporary sensibility. I think of it rather like dressing up a rugby player in a Savile Row bespoke suit.
To prepare this tête de cochon (head of the pig) dish, we debone a pig’s head, but rather than adhere to the traditional method of rolling it, we take strips of the face, cheek, jowl, and back of the head and make a garlicky mixture, almost like a salchicón. This is rolled up into strips of the pig’s face to achieve a balance of meat to fat in every portion. (The magic of any tête de cochon is the interplay between the fat of the head and the immense flavor in the cheek.) It’s vacuum-packed and cooked sous vide, which breaks down the gelatin, and the result boasts what I think of as a refined viscosity; in the eating, it’s not unlike foie gras. It’s complemented by a tapioca cracker, fresh violet leaves, and anchovy, which helps pull all of the disparate flavors together, much as it does in, say, a Caesar salad.
Fond as I am of this dish, I serve this as an accompaniment to other dishes; a larger portion would simply be overpowering. The recipe can be found on this page.
PHEASANT EGG AND RAZOR CLAM This dish belongs to Le Manoir for me, reminding me of spring, when pheasant eggs begin to appear. The bubble is a spherification of olive oil and razor clam, which I think of as the veal of shellfish for its big flavor. When the spherification is popped and the clam is released, there’s an intense umami effect. Though photographed in extreme close-up, this is in reality a small dish that leaves you wanting more.
Blanc’s attitude fostered a sense of fun in the kitchen that sometimes led to harmless lapses in discipline. There was a dish of frisée lettuce with foie gras and pata negra, an Iberian ham that’s similar to prosciutto de Parma, but more intensely salty and flavorful. It was so delicious, and we were so perpetually underfed and hungry, that we snuck slices from the leg that hung in the fridge, hiding them in our bib aprons. It was like crack cocaine to us: at first you’d nip off a minuscule slice, but in time you’d take more and more. The leg got so whittled down that I can still hear the chef de cuisine upon discovering it, screaming out: “Who the fuck keeps eating the pata negra?”
I got off to a great start at Le Manoir. Though assigned to the meat station, I was also one of the rotating cooks who periodically did a breakfast shift for the hotel, which I enjoyed because it was a chance to cook a whole category of food that most chefs never get to, and it led to a pleasant tradition in that kitchen: competitions to determine who could make the best scrambled eggs.
To cook breakfast required arriving at half past five in the morning, but in return you got to cook such dishes as smoked salmon omelet with caviar, fried egg with brioche, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon, and, if requested, coddled eggs. It was just you and a member of the pastry team, one on each side of the oven, standing by to serve the guests of the hotel’s twenty rooms.
As for lunch and dinner, having cooked for White and Neat, I knew a lot of techniques that the other kids didn’t. For example, one night the sous-chef came over to me and asked if I knew how to make tortellini.
“Yes,” I told him matter-of-factly.
“No, seriously.”
“Yes.”
“I need one hundred fifty goat cheese and lemon tortellini.”
“No problem.”
I set about making the tortellini, and it was sheer bliss. Was I already old enough to have fond memories? I guess I was, because it brought back thoughts of L’Escargot. I was lost in a reverie, a cook’s high if you will, and when I came out of it, there were one hundred fifty beautiful tortellini on the work station before me. The sous-chef came over, picked one up, examined it, looking for a flaw, didn’t find it. Picked up another one, turned it over like a jewelry appraiser, put it down.
“You’ve done this before,” he said.
“Once or twice.”
“Okay then,” he said, walking away.
And that, dear reader, is how rapturous praise was conveyed in a British kitchen circa 1997.
Oyster/Almond Crème/Beet/Tropical Red Spinach
This dish, featuring kusshi oysters, harkens back to my classical days of preparing oyste
rs en gelée. The shucked oysters are set in a light gelée of their own juice with a delicate infusion of green cardamom. Paired classically with caviar to accentuate the salinity and metallic quality of the oyster, it’s supported here with a delicate almond milk crème (a dairy-free blend of almonds and water) and lightly smoked Chioggia beets. On the face of it, the combination skews slightly odd—a mixture of land (beetroot), tree (almond), and sea (oyster)—but the experience of eating it is unmistakably oceanic.
Of course, there were also the usual bits of kitchen sabotage and subterfuge. Like the cook who had worked for Alain Ducasse in Monaco and thought he was the shit. He and his commis delighted in taking all the pans and trays from the meat station and hiding them in their fridge so that, during service, I couldn’t find one to save my life. But I was older and wiser now, and I knew how to get revenge. My favorite trick was to grind a handful of peppercorns and toss them on the flat top, where they’d crackle and explode like a sort-of mace. Of course, the key move here was to drop the peppers, then casually turn back around as though nothing had happened, and ignore the screams of your victims. (As is also the case in many kitchens, there were some transgressions that were beyond the pale, like the time a head chef passed off the effort of a sous-chef—a pigeon dish with a balsamic and endive tarte tatin alongside—as his own in a magazine article. Word of the intellectual pilfering spread through the kitchen like wildfire and quietly enraged the other young cooks.)
All of this probably sounds like a swell existence for an up-and-comer such as myself, and professionally it was. But I remained bored and increasingly depressed in the country. I would spend my Sundays counting the cars that went past my window and came to loathe the treacherous bike ride home each night. The rhythm of every day, every night, every week was utterly the same, and the monotony was unbearable. After a year, I resigned. The chef de cuisine told me that he took my departure as evidence that I had no stamina.
It was a compliment, I supposed. They’d have no trouble replacing me, so he must’ve been disappointed that I was leaving, taking my hard-earned knowledge elsewhere.
Around this time, Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine published a series of profiles of the most influential, avant-garde French chefs. The food that caught my eye was Pierre Gagnaire’s. It was arresting, in some cases not even instantly recognizable as food, but suggestive of nautical creatures, magnified microscopic organisms, or perhaps something extraterrestrial. There was a beauty in his compositions, and they filled me with a sense of wonder. Neat’s food had showed me that personal expression was possible on the plate; Gagnaire’s showed the extremes to which that notion could be taken. I literally could not believe my eyes.
Fuck me! I thought, instantly recognizing that my next move had to be to Paris. I couldn’t get there quickly enough but had no idea how to do it.
LIGHTNING STRIKES
Next thing I knew, I was in a nomadic mode, back in London, sleeping on a friend’s couch, and trying to figure out my next move. Faced with the need for income and to remain in circulation, and with the fear of growing rusty, I worked, helping an old kitchen colleague get a new upscale modern bistro off the ground in Fulham. But my heart wasn’t in it: to tell the truth, I was a bit rudderless. It was something to have worked for Marco Pierre White, Richard Neat, Raymond Blanc, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten all by the age of twenty-two. The Big Question in my life was as enticing as it was daunting: What next?
The obvious answer was the same as it was before I had pushed off for Le Manoir: Paris. I thought about the cooks I’d admired in the kitchens I’d worked in—guys like Simon Davis back at L’Escargot—and the one thing they all had in common was a turn in the City of Light. Nothing else made sense for me just then.
The last thing I expected when I walked into work one morning was for my life to change, but that’s what happened when a cook named Gregory casually mentioned to me that he had worked for Pierre Gagnaire in Paris.
I thought instantly of that article I’d seen just before leaving Le Manoir, in which I’d been so knocked out by Gagnaire’s food. I had studied his compositions for hours on end and come to realize that one of the things I loved about them was that you couldn’t detect the lineage in them. With most chefs, it is possible to look at their repertoire and make educated guesses as to where they had lived and for whom they had worked. Even with somebody as brazenly original as Richard Neat, you could see traces of Robuchon and Le Manoir. But that wasn’t true of Gagnaire. He was an utterly unique culinary artist. A true original. And this above all else made him compelling to me.
When Gregory revealed this detail from his professional past, I was more direct than I probably had ever been about anything: “Gagnaire? You worked for him? Can you help me get a job there?”
The old adage that “You don’t ask, you don’t get” never proved more true. Later that day, Gregory handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number on it, the kitchen line at Pierre Gagnaire, the chef’s eponymous restaurant, in Paris. “Speak to Michel, the chef,” he said. “He’s expecting your call.” I phoned up and, employing what little broken French I had picked up in kitchens, managed to get him on the line.
“How is your French?” he asked me.
“Un peu,” I said. A little bit.
“Okay,” he said. “Come over and say hi.”
And that was that. Next thing I knew, I was packed up and on the Eurostar en route to Paris.
Making the decision to relocate to a foreign land was no small thing. But it didn’t matter that I didn’t know the language or how the currency worked, or that I didn’t have any friends there. The next thing for me to do was to go to Paris and work for Pierre Gagnaire. It was as simple and absolute as that.
Disembarking at Gare du Nord, I didn’t even have to leave the train station to realize that Paris was a world unto itself. The magnificent soaring space, with sculpted support posts that seemed to extend up to the heavens and natural light pouring in from all sides, was a marvel of both engineering and artistry, a far cry from the stark, utilitarian train stations of London. Even the acoustics—a pleasing blend of voices, footfalls, and train squeals—were exquisite, like something remembered rather than being lived in the present.
All of this only added to an immediate and growing feeling—by no means unique to me—that Paris was a dream, and the sensation was reinforced by my first foray into the streets, the endless, rambling boulevards of the city, with its relentless architectural beauty. The deep culinary culture also seduced me: the smell of fresh baked bread emanating from boulangerie after boulangerie; the dainty, impossibly beautiful detail on pastries lined up in shop cases; the food on view through restaurant windows. Above all, there were the Parisian women. Walking the streets, I was almost drunk with the realization that “I’m in Paris.” If I closed my eyes, I could imagine La Belle Époque all around me. I wasn’t just in the land of all that glorious food, but also on the home turf of Robuchon, of Ducasse, of Gagnaire.
I met with Michel, a straightforward, calm chef de cuisine, whom I’d put in his midforties at the time. He was happy to have me work as a stagiaire for him but made it clear that there was no money to be made. I happily accepted the offer. Having led a Spartan existence for the last several years, I had some money squirreled away, as well as two credit cards that I was prepared to max out in the name of my own professional development.
Initially I put myself up in a flophouse, but once I knew I’d be staying, I phoned my father and for the first time in my life asked him to wire me some money so I could put down a deposit on a month-to-month rental. As I remember it, the room I secured was roughly one meter by one meter on rue de Lourmel in the 15th Arrondissement, which was essentially an outer borough. In a life filled with unremarkable living quarters, this was probably the worst and for sure the smallest: upon entering, the door hit the bed, which in turn was set into a cutout section of the wall. There was a sink (the toilet was down the hall) and a dresser, and for the entire tim
e I lived there, my suitcase was parked alongside, a constant reminder that I was just a visitor and that, at some point, I’d be leaving Paris and returning to “normal” life.
I was once again living in the tunnel, my life reduced to little more than my puny flat, the kitchen where I worked, and the commute between the two. Sometime before leaving Paris, I learned the expression tête don guidon, or “head on the bike,” which means that you are very focused on the task at hand and nothing else, and that’s what it felt like at the time.
Turbot with Shellfish Preparations
This winter dish of meaty turbot and shellfish (shown on this page), such as razor clams, grilled mussels, and Nantucket scallops (the scallops are topped with salted butter), is a warm, elevant answer to a plateau de fruits de mer, which I came to love on the rare occasion that I dined out during my time in Paris. The turbot is brushed with a reduction made from the juices of the shellfish.
At first, before I worked my way into the kitchen and greater responsibility, I was assigned the most fundamental tasks, such as standing in the corner and peeling girolles, helping out in pastry, or shuttling ingredients and preparations to and fro, upstairs and down. But I had a front-row seat for the Gagnaire Show, and the food did not disappoint. The sheer volume of ingredients and techniques that were new to me would have been overwhelming were they not so exhilarating, including Japanese ingredients such as fresh wasabi and herbs such as mustard flowers that I’d not touched, smelled, or cooked with before.
And the French ingredients, while not as exotic, were something to behold: wild hares, plump pigeons, poulet de Bresse, wild ducks with regal plumage that looked like something out of a fantasy movie, and pristine seafood such as baby soles from Normandy, huge brown torto crabs, and delicate little squid called la piste. To all of this, Gagnaire would apply classical French technique to unite seemingly incongruous ingredients on the same plate: like the baby Japanese eggplant caviar that was seasoned with cumin and powdered yuzu and served with apple mostarda.
To the Bone Page 9