“Which was?”
Basically yogurt plus gelatin, Richard said.
I was perplexed. Even I knew that you can’t add gelatin to a refrigerated yogurt and expect it to set. Jell-O 101 teaches you that you have to dissolve it in a hot liquid and chill it.
“Ah, mon ami, we don’t dissolve the gelatin in the yogurt. We dissolve it in a cup of hot cream and then fold it in.”
And for the whipping?
You put your mixing bowl inside a larger bowl of ice. The effect is to heat and chill at once, but more chill than heat. The result is richer than the normal yogurt, owing to the cream, and disjunctively savory, owing to the cumin, and wonderfully textured, pillowy and expansive, like the soft-serve that you get from an ice-cream van. It is also stiff. You can poke salad leaves into it.
But there was a problem with the dirt. “Merde!” Richard said. The eggplant looked like shit. Food must never look like merde.
He came up with a fix the next morning. He would roast the eggplant as before, but substitute onion (red) for the shallot, and add beets (red), tomato (red), and vinegar (red)—plus garlic, this time, for intensity. He put everything in a blender and strained it through a sieve, which yielded a bulky, almost dry texture like baby food. It also had an appealingly deep red-brown hue. (I couldn’t help myself: Had Richard added food coloring when I wasn’t looking?) It looked like a desert at sunset. It was too beautiful to be buried. It would be the topsoil. The weird, wobbly tomato would go to the bottom and be a summery surprise when your spoon reached it.
The weird, wobbly tomato, incidentally, was basically tomato water intensified, what is left over after skinning your tomatoes, having plopped the seeds and skins in a sieve. Richard loved tomato water. I wasn’t unfamiliar with it, but found it pretty fussy. Now, transported by Richard’s enthusiasm, I regard it as such a rare and essential feature of summer that it deserves its own molecular describer: H2OT4, say. If you put the H2OT4 into a pot, reduce it slowly, and poke your finger in to taste, you will discover a liquid so intense that, for no reason you understand, you find yourself thinking of hot, listless afternoons in August. Cool it with gelatin and you have some very weird wobbly. Richard loves the really weird wobbly.
The salad was a miracle to look at, with the come-hither appeal of a dessert, but wholly savory. It was like a ratatouille that had been rendered into a flower. It was sprayed with a vinaigrette.
We were about to taste-test it, Richard and I at the chef’s table, when Tyler Florence showed up, in town, no reservation, hoping for a bite to eat. Florence is a restaurateur and Food Network host. We ate the salad together. Florence ate his with a spoon.
“Whoa, Michel. What is the white custard thing? It is unbelievable.”
“Yogurt,” Richard said.
Florence tasted it again. “This is not yogurt.”
“It is. Taste it again.”
“Michel. I know what yogurt tastes like.”
“No, you just don’t know good yogurt.” Richard stretched out the word “good.” “This is gooooooood whole-fat yogurt.”
Florence had another bite, and conveyed, unmistakably, that he knew he was being bullshitted and that Richard was an asshole.
I later asked Richard why he didn’t tell him.
“And then watch him getting credit for it on his television show, and on his Web site, and his next book? No.”
Chefs do not invent dishes daily. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the author of The Physiology of Taste (1825), the famous meditation on eating, compares a new recipe to discovering a star. But here, in Richard’s kitchen, just about every item on the menu was new. And new ones appeared routinely, a bright idea on a Monday morning, a long-term experiment (like his effort to reinvent pâté-en-croûte—“Don’t you find the crusts are always soggy?”), or some impromptu innovation done in the spirit of “Why not?”
* * *
—
One afternoon, I overheard Courseille, the pastry chef, mention Marc Veyrat. I knew about Veyrat, the “mountain chef” in the Alps. I had never eaten at his restaurant, though I had tried once when visiting a friend in Geneva, and it was closed.
In Courseille’s description, Veyrat had ghostly transparent skin, wore a black, rimmed Savoyard peasant’s hat even when indoors, a black capelike shirt, Sgt. Pepper round tinted glasses, had the manner of a seer, and was just awful, utterly terrible to work for. “Rude. Condescending. Treated his cooks like slaves,” Courseille said. “The staff starts at dawn, are given straw baskets and clippers, and told what trails to climb, and what to look for, and then they all go into the mountains—as in the Alps, as in Mont Blanc—and don’t return until their baskets are full. They clean what they gathered. They prep it. Then they get ready for the dinner service.”
I thought: He sounds mad. I thought: He sounds perfect.
I also thought: This was the virtue of being in Richard’s kitchen. For the gossip, and the talk, and the visitors. This was how I was going to find where to work in France. In fact, maybe I had just found it.
“Almost no one in the United States knows him,” Courseille continued, “except Jean-Georges”—Jean-Georges Vongerichten, in New York City. “Veyrat came to see him once in New York. They went foraging in Central Park.”
I called Jean-Georges.
“I love Marc,” he said. “He is my spiritual cousin.”
Could he help me reach him?
He wrote an introduction and gave me an e-mail address and a phone number. I was surprised how easy it now seemed: You learn about a figure, you get an introduction. Jessica, my French ventriloquist, wrote a masterpiece letter (I would never again sound so good), respectfully expressing the hope that I might work with him, and off it went.
No reply.
She sent it three times. We phoned. Nothing. I asked Jean-Georges for advice.
“Marc is an unusual man.”
The next day we got an e-mail from an assistant. (Had Jean-Georges intervened?) Marc Veyrat and his brigade were looking forward to welcoming me. Nous vous accueillerons. The verb, Jessica said, accueillir, is important. It is not used casually. It means to welcome you in one’s home. I stared at it. I didn’t try to pronounce it. Did this amount to my having a plan?
I mentioned it to David.
“What a terrible idea.” David once applied for a job there and spent a weekend trailing in the kitchen. “His executive chef cheats at soccer.” Here David paused, giving me the chance to take in the enormity of the claim.
“Wow,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“We’ll think of something,” David said. “I’ll speak to Michel.”