The Cook

by Maylis de Kerangal

  * * *

  As he grows older, the desire to amaze the adults at the family table—parents of friends—gradually lessens. Mauro has better things to do, teenage kicks to get, and the floor of home burns his feet. If he continues his incursions into the kitchen now, it is for his friends, and because it’s better, cheaper. All the same, he does have principles: junk food is a form of violence perpetrated against the poor; the mass-produced ready-meal a sign of the solitude of urban existence. A thirteen-year-old ideologue, Mauro warns the gang: frozen pizzas are crap, and so is McDonald’s. The friends say okay while patting their pockets and wonder out loud what could possibly beat the Big Mac Meal for less than seven euros? Me! Mauro jumps up.

  Now on Saturday evenings, when Mauro and his five amigos turn up at the house in Aulnay, he immediately starts cooking, because the pure immanence of adolescent sloth—which is charming but also, let’s be perfectly honest, pretty exhausting—requires its quota of slow sugar and its dose of calcium.

  During those years, the Aulnay Six fuel up on “homemade” pizza, spaghetti carbonara, potatoes sautéed with shallots, chocolate mousse, crêpes suzette. It’s all right, guys, it’s not expensive. That’s what Mauro tells them when they come to veg out at his house on weekends or after school and slump on couches while passing around a pot into which each of them chucks three or four euros—not including the Cokes, the beers, the smokes. They moan, they joke, and finally they devour what’s put in front of them, silent except for the little sounds of swallowing. It’s fit for a king.

  After that, Mauro is responsible for the fueling of the troops before trips. Stocking up, doing the food shopping, I’ve always loved that, he tells me as he pushes a cart down the various aisles of the giant supermarket near Porte de Bagnolet, where I accompany him one morning: five thousand square feet, and he knows every inch of it. Unlike those—me included—who return every week to their local grocery store and scan the same rows of the same products, which they will buy in the same quantity, Mauro likes to move around, to explore, to amble. He is not numbed by the infinite variety of each type of food, by the packets of cereal in identical formats, by the multitude of butters—salted, unsalted, slightly salted, grass fed, cultured, clarified, clotted, organic, homemade, goat or sheep, packaged on butter dishes or in plastic tubs or simply wrapped up in greaseproof aluminum foil. On the contrary, he seems happy to have this multiplicity of choices. Soon, he slows down in front of the condiment aisle, picks up a jar of tomato sauce from the twenty or so on display, and holds it to the light, observing its color, reading the label—I watch him do this, waiting for him to speak—then he turns toward me and declares: Tonight, we’re going to innovate! He knows everything there is to know about cookies, oil, rice, and is even capable of telling me the best brand of pasta to buy, depending on whether you’re cooking a bolognese (Barilla) or an arrabbiata (Panzani). I ask him if he figured out the menus in advance before a week’s vacation in a rented apartment with his gang when he was fifteen, and he nods: Of course, you have to have a menu, otherwise you’re just messing around … And anyway, it’s what I like to do, composing.

  3

  Restaurants

  TOURNEDOS ROSSINI

  The first time he works in a restaurant, it is early summer 2004, at a brasserie named La Gourme, near Les Invalides. A summer job, which he got because his father knows the boss, paying a thousand euros a month. An opulent-looking place with a solid reputation: imitation leather benches in rose madder, tall mirrors on the walls, paunchy patrons with thin faces wearing charcoal suits and dark ties that are sometimes concealed by the large white napkins knotted around their necks like giant bibs. Not many women in the room—I’m the exception. Lurking in a corner behind a thriller, I am on the lookout for Mauro, waiting for him to burst through the double door from the kitchen, but he never appears; it is the boss himself who wanders around the restaurant, jovially greeting his customers, making jokes.

  La Gourme offers a menu based on a gastronomic culture of quality craftsmanship: traditional recipes, generous portions, first-rate ingredients, not many surprises. The taste of continuity. The restaurant’s philosophy is clear: here, the chef is at the service of the ingredients, not the other way around, and this sort of humility is polished to perfection with the delivery of seasonal produce. The customers, too, are regulars rather than adventurers, the kind of people who do not take many risks, who are looking for something they know, or have known, and come here to reactivate a sensory memory—terrine of rabbit with pistachios, seven-hour leg of lamb, grandmother’s apple tart, or that delicately cinnamon-flavored madeleine, to be dipped in a light tea at the end of the meal.

  A traditional establishment, La Gourme is one of the last restaurants in Paris to employ a butcher in its kitchen; every night, at about four in the morning, the boss goes to Rungis to bring back various cuts of red or white meat. Back at the restaurant, he places them on his butcher’s chopping board, and they are prepared for the dishes offered on the menu. These exacting standards are the best kind of publicity: here, the meat is good, and everyone knows it.

  So, that summer, Mauro discovers bourgeois French cuisine—another planet for this boy who ate his first foie gras at fifteen during a Christmas lunch at his aunt’s house, and for whom the eggs in aspic ordered from the local deli by his grandfather for festive meals represent the height of sophistication—the edible capsule, the iridescent transparency, the delicate colors.

  He’s put in the Cold Appetizers department—in other words, anything that is served as a starter and does not need to be cooked afresh—and given a crucial post: the pantry, where the vegetables and the fruit are kept. He acquires a greater knowledge of them and is soon able to assess, by sight, the taste of a tomato, the subtlety of a stalk of asparagus, the crunch of a curly endive. Every day, he puts on a white apron made of thick, rough canvas that sheathes and holds him like a uniform, then he gets to work. The arrangements are simple, and—with the exception of the pâtés, which are presented in polished terra-cotta terrines—all the preparations are made on the plates themselves: tomato salad, herring and potatoes in oil, terrines of chicken liver chutney, egg mayonnaise, avocado and shrimp in cocktail sauce, a seafood platter. And the famous mi-cuit foie gras cooked in a dish towel, served with slices of toasted country bread, then swathed in napkins.

  Mauro does well at La Gourme. He likes his job and claims that he hasn’t experienced the tough side of life in a kitchen: the seventy-hour weeks, the authoritarianism, the relentless pace, the pressure. All the same, he’s no fool: as the son of a friend, he was almost certainly given special treatment. Yet, despite getting his foot on the ladder, he does not imagine turning this first experience into a future career. According to him, he might just as easily have worked in a movie theater or a bicycle shop or a bank. He says he simply took the opportunity to earn a bit of cash before going camping with his gang, and while he had a great time—skillfully placing the two thick slices of foie gras on the plate without breaking them, then sprinkling the pinch of pepper and the pinch of salt onto them in two cones of the same size, with a spoonful of fig preserve at the center of the plate—he is adamant that cooking, for him, remains a passion, not a job. So, while the majority of apprentices who have graduated from a technical school would have tried to secure full-time employment after completing their apprenticeship, Mauro whistles as he leaves La Gourme, unlocks his bike, and—in September—goes back to the round of economics lectures before, a few weeks later, moving on to the Catholic University in Lisbon, where he spends a year as part of the Erasmus program.

  The second restaurant is a completely different experience. It happens two years later, in the summer of 2006.

  The sabbatical year begun after the stay in Portugal is nearing its end, and Mauro is back from his foreign travels—Berlin, Italy, Venezuela. He moves into a studio apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement subleased to him by a friend who is away until September. He is in love with Mia
, who has stayed in Lisbon, and spends a crazy amount of time online, searching for cut-rate airplane tickets. But the prices never drop low enough for him to afford a last-minute flight. He decides not to ask for any more money from his parents and to work all summer instead. He immediately starts looking for restaurant work: although he doesn’t say it out loud, he knows now, he senses, that he could take that path, that he could become a cook.

  So what makes him apply for unpaid work? I try to dissuade him one evening when we meet at the swimming pool, where Mauro, having forgotten the mandatory swimming cap, pushes fourteen gold-colored coins, one after another, into the slot of a vending machine, without having enough—I give him the exact amount. Why are you so determined to work for nothing? Mauro tenses, his face turns hard: he is thinking about the long term; he wants to learn, to train in the best establishments, and he’s willing to work for free to do that. Anyway, thanks for the advice, but I know what I’m doing.

  The Merveil on Rue Lamarck, at the back of the Montmartre hill, is the establishment in question: a hushed, conservative, luxurious Michelin-starred restaurant. The best in the north of the capital. A dining room for sixty covers; wood-paneled walls, tieback curtains, chintz, round tables with heavy tablecloths that reach down to the floor, white napkins, sculpted glasses, and silver flatware. The dishes there are precisely, immaculately arranged. So Mauro learns a new skill in the kitchen—meticulousness—and he learns it under pressure.

  Initially, the young man is taken aback. Confronted for the first time with this desire for mastery, with this silent tension aimed at excellence, a tension capable of organizing the entirety of a team’s work, a tension that can make a hierarchy dance, create a complex assembly of rivalries and micropowers that encourage and fight against one another, demand that the employees surpass themselves. A tension capable of building a system.

  Above all, he enters a new world. This one is separated into two parts by a wall pierced by a double door; it is split into two opposing zones: the dining room on the street, the kitchen at the back. The former is a theater, a performance space, displayed before the eyes of all. Vast, lit up, serene. What strikes you immediately is its continual murmur: a calmness buzzing with sensations, looks, intentions. You hear whispers, the clink of glasses, the rustle of tablecloths and of fabric rubbing up against the backs of wing chairs; you feel the smoothness of bouquets of fresh flowers and the deep softness of carpets where high heels and leather soles sink; you imagine the exquisite presentation of the dishes, their sophisticated design, the pointillist line of balsamic vinegar on porcelain and the petals of beetroot chips forming a rose, the delicate little bowls containing miniature appetizers that melt or crunch in your mouth, the verrines with tie-dye shadings, the iced oysters scattered with petunias; you discover the flavors of those wines that slowly evolve on your palate, their taste that gradually overwhelms your entire body and creates a continuous sensual reality in which you dissolve; you visualize the softly lit room, intimate, rose colored, with just the right degree of shade for those smiling, pleasure-bathed faces unrestrainedly enjoying their privilege, obscene in their delight, while on the other side of the constantly swinging double door, behind the set, we find the second zone, governed by inverted laws.

  Here there is no tingling silence, no soothing calm; this is a zone of noise. The whistling of the gas-stove fires, the grinding of blades, the thrum of small motors here and there, the popping of bubbles at the surface of broths, the metallic scrape and clang. Time does not flow here in sensory layers of liquidity; it is divided into minutes, into cooking times and presentation times punctuated by the voice that gives the order and by the bell that delivers the dish in return; space, too, is segmented, compartmentalized, each person confined within set borders, occupying a station; the chain of actions is painstakingly detailed, inch perfect, structured by obedience, discipline, the execution of commands: it is a military operation in which each employee is a soldier.

  Mauro is disenchanted: people treat him like shit. They chide him, harry him. He feels as though he always has someone on his back, breathing down his neck, speaking into his ear. He realizes that in this place, words are merely a concentrate of rapid-fire instructions to which the only permissible response is a nod. They don’t teach him much, either: it’s up to him to adapt, to observe and understand; up to him to learn without slowing the tempo of the machine, without letting his inexperience and shortcomings affect the smooth running of the kitchen. You figure it out and you do your job. A situation that Mauro finds even harder to accept since he’s working for free: to his mind, this is not a fair deal.

  One morning, in the middle of a shift, someone whacks Mauro in the face with a metal melon baller—he chose the wrong diameter. Shocked, Mauro cries out, staggers, his nose bleeds; he stares around him in a circle, but no one meets his gaze; they are all busy working in silence. From his post, the chef yells at him to stop being a smart-ass and to do it all again pronto the way he’s supposed to—it’s not rocket science. Mauro loosens his fingers, lets go of his utensil—a potato peeler—then wipes his nose with the back of his hand, wipes his palms on his apron, pressing it against his chest, and picks up his knives, slowly washes them, carefully dries them, puts each in its sheath, unbuttons his jacket while around him some of the others now slow down, glance up at him—but without protesting, without stopping what they’re doing—and then, still calm, he grabs his bag and crosses the kitchen toward the door, passing the chef, who turns his back on him and continues to act as if he hadn’t seen anything, as if he never sees anything, until, as he is leaving the kitchen, Mauro dangles a hand along the work surface, knocking over a large stainless-steel bowl that clatters noisily to the floor as the doors flap shut behind him. I’ve seen him leave meals like that, classes, movie theaters, even girls; it’s a manner of departure that is very Mauro: silent and determined, as if nothing could hold him back once he has decided to quit—nothing. On Christmas Eve, he will confide to me, as he prepares a chili con carne for eighteen people: I stuck it out for three weeks, which isn’t bad, really. I was too old for that kind of thing—I hadn’t followed the usual path. I’d been through other experiences and I wasn’t like the other apprentices. They were younger, all about seventeen or eighteen, more malleable, more easily intimidated.

  Outside, the sun beats down. Mauro is dazzled; he blinks, unlocks his bike, rides down Rue Caulaincourt without pedaling, freewheeling all the way to Place de Clichy. There, sitting at a table on the first terrace he comes to, he orders a ham baguette and a shandy and smiles, savoring the moment, free.

  It’s the middle of summer and Paris is full of tourists. There’s plenty of work in restaurants, bars, and cafés, a quick turnover in the capital’s kitchens. One week later, Mauro is hired as a commis chef at a brasserie called Les Voltigeurs in Montreuil. It’s a permanent CDI contract—the first contract he has ever signed—at minimum wage. In the restaurant trade, all contracts are permanent—it’s always the cook who leaves, never the boss who fires him, ’cause they can never find enough workers! Mauro squints appraisingly at a bowl of strawberries that he’s just picked from the garden. And minimum wage? Well, in a job where you’re often working seventy or eighty hours a week, your paycheck at the end of the month doesn’t really look like you’re on minimum wage, you know?

  The restaurant is large: sixty to seventy covers. Two lunch shifts and two dinner shifts, served by a team of four people—more sprints than the Olympics, says Mauro, handing me a bowl of pistachios. It’s not haute cuisine, but the ingredients are fresh, the setting pleasant, and Mauro gets along well with the tough Ariège-born owners—in the kitchen, two brothers of the same height and build, shaved heads, hunched shoulders, open smiles; serving the tables, their wives, two loudmouthed sisters, emotional and diligent, able-bodied, square jawed, with smokers’ voices.

  At Les Voltigeurs, Mauro is confronted with heavy shifts and a breakneck pace. He learns to deal with the rush hours, when no soone
r have you finished preparing a meal than it is carried off to its table and you are already working on the next one. He grows physically tough, excels, flying from one task to the next, multi-skilling.

  The two women treat him like a son, each of them outdoing the other with acts of generosity, saving him nice slices of calf’s liver (full of protein) with raspberry sauce, a cup of meat juice to keep his strength up, and bowls of homemade, pastel-colored sorbets, but he doesn’t touch any of it—no time, sorry—or if he does, he wolfs it down while standing in a corner of the kitchen. The women also squabble over who gets to look after him if he burns himself or cuts himself, the two of them standing side by side in the courtyard, preparing patches to help him fix his flat bike tire. Mauro likes them a lot.

  Soon, he is spending all day at the restaurant, sleeping on a bench in the backyard, a cat in the sun, while the chefs take their nap, or—even better—seizing the opportunity to talk with Mia, burning up the minutes on his cell phone plan. Mia, who only answers one time in a dozen, and who can never speak to him tenderly, because she, too, is at work. In reality, Mauro doesn’t do more with his break because he’s too exhausted to move—or, rather, too worried about tiring himself out even more before he starts the evening shift—and he tells himself it would be stupid to waste his free time and energy on bike trips. So it’s difficult to do the things he would like to do: to have a drink on a café terrace with a friend—me, for example—or to see a movie in an air-conditioned theater, or swim in a pool, or go for a boat ride.

  As the summer wears on, Mauro stays at Les Voltigeurs for a good part of the nights, as the party continues at the bosses’ table, where some of the more shameless customers often gather after the restaurant closes. Mauro hates those two-faced bastards, the way they squirm and say no, no, there’s no need to cook them dinner, when, if they’re coming here, at that time of night, it’s because they know perfectly well that they will never be refused nourishment, the good stuff if possible. And it’s Mauro who has to relight the oven that he’s just spent a quarter of an hour cleaning, who has to take out the saucepan and the frying pan for a special omelet—Make them a nice mushroom puree, okay, Mauro? We can’t let them starve, can we? The drinks, the jokes, the stories, often go on until about two in the morning, the bosses’ laughter growing louder as the night advances.