France would be six hours ahead, a Saturday evening, the dinner service about to start. I tried to imagine a bistro in Paris, a bar with stools, a low-ceilinged room with a hearth, a city, a village, and couldn’t. I’d lived in England for twenty years. There it had been easy to imagine France. It was a ferry away. You could drive there. A flight was an hour.
Our train was scattering ducks, their colors blue and orange, when I spotted, on the glass of my window, the reflection of a computer screen, a bright movement. It appeared to be a slide show of French food.
Why did I think it was French? Because the plates looked like paintings? Because they had a sauce? They appeared, one after another, a fade, a new image, very Ken Burns.
I turned to get a closer look and spotted a guy, about thirty. I studied him: short hair, military buzz, skinny, tiny shoulders. French? I couldn’t tell. He didn’t speak. He snarled. He looked European. He looked like a football thug. It was his meanness.
I addressed my wife. “Favor?” I nodded in the direction of the computer.
She twisted in her seat, looked, and sat back down. “God is talking to you.”
“God doesn’t talk to me.”
She had another look, a long one, recomposed herself, folded her hands, and took a breath. “Trust me.”
I peered over her shoulder. Another guy was looking at the screen, his back to me. It was the queue jumper.
I asked my wife, “Should I talk to him?”
“You have to.”
“I think I know him.”
“Talk to him.”
“Unless I am wrong.”
“Talk to him.”
I rose and walked to his table.
“Hello. I am sorry to interrupt.” The queue jumper had two carafes of red wine and was reading a French cookbook (La Cuisine du soleil, a worn, out-of-date-looking cover). He looked up. Oh. I do know this man. This face: It had seemed familiar before because it was familiar, the James Beard award ceremony, the photo on the book jacket that I had two copies of.
But the name? It started with “M.”
Michelin?
Mirepoix?
They stared up at me, this now famous-seeming James Beard guy and his hooligan.
I thought: Wow. This is the man I just assaulted.
I said, “Are you a chef?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say: Are you a French chef whose name begins with “M,” which I can’t remember because I can’t remember French names?
I added, “Are you, in fact, a very famous chef…by chance?”
The man didn’t move. Maybe he didn’t speak English.
He took a breath. “Yes,” he said, “I am a famous chef. Yes! I am very famous.” He was grand—a little ridiculous, but grand people often are. “Allow me to introduce myself.” He extended his hand as though I should kiss it (Panic! Should I?) and declared, “I am Paul Bocuse.”
Paul Bocuse! I’d got it wrong! I’d assaulted Paul Bocuse? Bocuse is the most celebrated French chef in the world! Am I meeting Bocuse? Now I was confused. Also, wasn’t Bocuse 115 years old? And didn’t he live in Lyon?
“No, no, no, no,” the man said. “I am only joking.”
(Oh, joke, right, funny.)
“I am not Paul Bocuse.”
(Whew!)
“Paul Bocuse is dead.”
(What?! I am being made fun of, and Paul Bocuse is dead!)
“Or maybe he’s not dead.”
(He wasn’t.)
“I don’t actually know. I am Michel Richard. The chef and patron of Citronelle, Washington, D.C.’s finest restaurant. I repeat. Michel”—he paused in order to give the surname the full operatic treatment—“Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-CHARD!”
* * *
—
I would spend most of the next eight months in Richard’s company, off and on, not too much at first, and then, by the spring, pretty much full time, when I found a place on the line, cooking at the fish station. Our next meeting was a dinner at Citronelle, at the chef’s table, in the kitchen and with a view of its workings, and involved Jessica and me, Richard and his wife, Laurence, an American born of French parents whom Richard met when he lived in California. (“She never eats in the restaurant, she doesn’t like my food,” he said with a curiously upbeat irony, “but she will want to meet Jessica, and they will speak French.” And they did.)
The first course was scrambled eggs with salmon, which it obviously wasn’t going to be and wasn’t (it was raw scallops that had been liquefied in a blender with cream and saffron, and cooked like scrambled eggs, French style, admittedly, which is to say slowly, but they were still what they were: shellfish). The next was a cappuccino. (Ditto.) It was actually mushroom soup, except that it wasn’t, not actually, because it had been made without water, or stock, or any other liquid. It also had no mushrooms. (Mushrooms sweat when heated; the “soup”—which calls for fifty kilos of various fungi—was, in effect, nothing but the sweat. It was brilliant, and unheard of, and very concentrated—I would eventually try it at home and spend hours trying to put monstrous dark gobs of leftover mushroom goo to some kind of second use only to give up—it started to harden into a black crust—and, with a thud, threw it into the trash.)
Richard made a salad inspired by Claude Monet’s water lilies.
I thought: really? There are centuries of paintings inspired by food. How many foods inspired by painting?
I wandered into the kitchen to watch its being assembled. Around a white platter, floppy circles of “tube food” were being arranged—they had been sliced thin on a meat slicer—and included (I was told) tuna, swordfish, red and yellow peppers, beef, venison, and eel. The platter was dressed—frondy-looking herbs, a basil-infused, exaggeratedly green olive oil—and transformed into a swampy, mossy masterpiece. It was very Zen-making to look at, even if such a challenge to think about—I promise, the first thought that occurred to me when eating a thin round white disk was not “Oh, it’s eel!”—that it made you realize how recognizing your food, which we do all the time, was a precondition to our being able to taste it. (And I’m still trying to figure out what I’m meant to learn from that.)
Before bed that night, I found myself recalling, with unexpected fondness, Dorothy Hamilton’s Techniques of Classic Cuisine.
In January, I began learning Richard’s preparations in earnest, beginning suitably enough with one of the tubes that he had used in the Monet salad—the red pepper one, as it happens.