“Look at those cheeses,” he said one night when we were sitting at the chef’s table. “So creamy and fat and luxurious.” The cheeses were for the dinner service. “Laurence told me, No more cheese, please Michel, promise me, no more. I promised. Mais regarde!” He drank a glass of water. He had another glass. Then he succumbed, a large plate prepared for him, no bread, just cheese, and his eyes rolled up into his head in a long protracted “mmmmmmmmm” of ecstasy. “It is butter’s greatest expression.”
At the end of my evening, I returned to the kitchen to help clean up. I asked David: “What about Westermann? He has a good heart, and knowledge and famous skills.”
David frowned. “An Alsatian in Paris? It is a kitchen unconnected to a place. Paris could be anywhere. Paris could be New York. I’ll speak to Michel. We will find you something.”
* * *
—
Michel Richard was born in Pabu, a farming village in Brittany, the forlorn, far-northwesterly part of France, half an hour from the sea. His parents—André, a member of the Resistance, and Muguette, a young live-in chambermaid at a castle—had met fleetingly toward the end of World War II, as the Nazi army was in retreat. Months later, the war just over, the country a muddy crisscrossing of carts and two-cylinder vehicles, Muguette, now very pregnant, struck out for the village where she remembered that the parents of her Resistance lover came from. She got as far as Rennes, the capital of Brittany, where Richard’s older brother, Alain, was born in May 1945. She resumed her trek, and in Pabu, knocking on doors, found the infant’s father. Richard was born three years later.
The young family lived with André’s parents. Richard’s memories are in images, mainly indoors, mainly wintry, a flickering fireplace darkness. Electricity was conserved like water drawn from the well—no lights after 8:00 p.m. The grandparents didn’t speak French. They spoke Breton, burned peat, had a dirt floor, and didn’t use plates but spooned dinner into rounded indentations, like bowls, carved into a thick wood table. Richard’s father was the village baker. Richard, who would eventually teach me how to create those perfectly spherical bread rolls for the tuna burgers (you knead them with your thumb as you roll them), remembered how his father made them fast, two at a time, against an unwashed apron that he crushed the boy’s face into in sloppy predawn hugs. He smelled of unfiltered cigarettes and wine—the father was an alcoholic—and was bristly and sweaty in the light of a wood-burning oven.
There were jobs in the Ardennes—in the east, near Belgium, where factories were being revived. When Richard was six, and his mother pregnant with her fourth, the family moved, exchanging one of the most backward places in France for one of the most undeveloped. The marriage ended a year later, after an act of drunken brutality perpetrated by the father on Muguette, pregnant again, with her fifth. The next morning, she and her children boarded a bus and left.
The mother is the most important and least likely first influence on Richard’s culinary calling because she provoked him to cook. She was too busy to make dinner without stress—she worked in a factory—and Richard, aged nine, stepped in to do it. He also stepped in because what she did cook, when she cooked, was inedible. He recalls many dishes, but my favorite is the rabbit cooked in a pot for so long and inattentively that, when it was brought to the table, and the lid lifted, he and his siblings had to stand up and peer over the rim to see if there was anything inside: The rabbit had shriveled to a hard black thing the size of a sparrow. Those same siblings were joyful when Richard took over—an early lesson in the happy love of happy diners.
The mother also introduced Richard to pastry, again indirectly but unequivocally. When he was thirteen, the age when she either kicked her children out or made them go to work (she had already dispatched the elder brother to learn bookkeeping at a trade school while being given room and board), his mother got a job for Richard at a local bronze foundry. He was burned and his hands swelled and he was unable to continue. She talked to friends—he had to do something—and came up with his being an apprentice at a pâtisserie, room and board, plus 50 francs a month (around $10.00), in Carignan, a hundred kilometers away, no trains or buses in between. A flour supplier picked up the boy early on a summer morning—a blue Renault van, a pink sky, the smell of August flowers. Richard didn’t return for three years, not once.
“Recently,” Richard told me, “I realized that I have no memory of my mother kissing me.”
I asked him about his father: Was he an influence? A pastry chef is not a baker, but they are not so different.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Pâtisserie is a grand profession.” He was quiet and seemed to be musing. “Well, maybe.”
The father he never had, he said, was Gaston Lenôtre, the twentieth century’s most famous French pastry chef. Richard was hired shortly after his twenty-third birthday, in 1971, and shortly before the restaurant review Gault & Millau published its famous October 1973 issue proclaiming the arrival of nouvelle cuisine and naming Lenôtre among the movement’s swashbuckling practitioners.
Lenôtre, the famous Lenôtre, regarded Richard as the artist—for Richard that regard was emboldening and liberating—and would come to depend on him as his secret weapon. (Much later, David Bouley, the New York chef, trained with Lenôtre. “People were still saying how Michel had created this, and created that, how he created all these other things as well.” This was years after Richard had left. “He was very big in Lenôtre’s world to have that kind of influence still.”) Because of Lenôtre, Richard discovered his own genius. Because of Lenôtre, he ended up in America: He accompanied him to open the first Lenôtre French pastry shop in New York. Because of Lenôtre (even if only indirectly), he discovered California, because Richard went there after Lenôtre’s New York operation failed. In Los Angeles, Richard opened an almost incomprehensively successful pastry shop in 1976 (chef Wolfgang Puck recalls being astonished by the lines outside the door—“Longer than I have ever seen”) and, later, Citrus, his first restaurant.
What was Lenôtre’s achievement? I had purchased Lenôtre’s first book, Faites votre pâtisserie comme Lenôtre (Make Your Desserts like Lenôtre), a three-hundred-page classic, now out of print. It includes recipes for tarts and éclairs and baba au rhum. How was this meant to be nouvelle cuisine?
“Lenôtre didn’t invent new dishes,” Richard said. “He invented new ways of making the old ones. He had a simple rule. You can change anything as long as the result is better than the original.”
The rule, which is among the most succinct descriptions of nouvelle cuisine that I’ve come upon, governed everything Richard did, even if his applications were more anarchic than any of Lenôtre’s. There was a fake caviar that Richard invented. We made it at the fish station. It looked and smelled like caviar, and was served in a fake caviar tin with a “Begula” label [sic] printed on the lid. It was pearl pasta soaked in a rich fish stock and dyed with squid ink. It is obviously not strictly a substitute for caviar, but, owing to the precision of its preparation and the little treasures found inside (a perfect sous-vide poached runny egg, a lobster knuckle simmered in butter), it is “better” than the original if “better,” in this case, means a “more enjoyable eating experience.” (Ever mischievous, Richard serves real caviar on a bowl of atmosphere, as though it were airborne, a trick of presentation made possible in a darkened, candlelit room, where the caviar sits atop a piece of plastic film stretched across a bowl floatingly.)