Luckily, my second-year teacher was a no-bullshit lifer named Monsieur Korbel, who had zero patience for mediocrity. Korbel had worked on La France, an ocean liner legendary for its cooks and waiters—many of whom had gone on to work at Le Pavillon in New York—and come up in the same generation as Jean-Jacques Rachou and André Soltner. In Korbel's world, Escoffier's haute cuisine was the ideal, and the chef had the power to demand absolute perfection from his brigade. He had no problem screaming at us or tossing a pan in the sink when one of us made a mistake—luckily the school wouldn't allow him to go any further. If we made a tomato salad that had a single seed in it, he literally threw it back at us and screamed, "I'm not a pig! I don't eat like that. Make it perfectly or go home." Then he'd grab a fresh tomato and a paring knife and, within seconds, transform the tomato into a lifelike rose, just to show us how precise you can be when you become a master of technique.

He was tough but good. We all knew that we had the best teacher in the school, and we were happy to be pushed by him, competing to make an exact consommé or vol au vent. Finally, with each new dish, I was beginning to feel passion. Through conducting hours and hours of lessons and then standing over my shoulder in the kitchen, he taught me craftsmanship, discipline, and cleanliness: how to make the perfect potage cultivateur, a soup with dozens of pieces of diced vegetables, each of which has to be precisely cut; how not to talk, to stay in my station, to say, "Yes, Chef!"; how to keep my station and my person impeccably clean during service, and to execute all of his orders without questioning them. (Not talking was almost the hardest, right after remembering to clean my stove as I worked.) More important, he started to open up the instinct in me: I'd be working at the counter, and just by listening to what was going on in the pan on the stove behind me, I would know when it was time to add the onions or remove the meat. I was also learning timing—how, say, in ten minutes I'd have to be ready to send my sole parisienne to the pass. It was good experience, but it wasn't yet in my bones.

Outside of the classroom, a side of me that I didn't know I had also began to awaken. Both years, our dorm master was a young divinity student named Raymond Centène. He looked like an orthodox Johnny Cash—black clothes, long beard, very austere. But all the students loved him. This was a guy who would get up at six A.M. to drive me to the train station on a Saturday morning without expecting a thank-you. When he caught older students hazing freshmen, he brought swift justice to the dorm, which we accepted without question. He always had time to listen to our problems and talk about tough subjects. And despite his severe appearance and ultraconservative royalist ways, he was incredibly funny and warm. There was something pure and generous about him that we all responded—and, in my case, aspired—to.

As embarrassed as I was by my family's flashy lifestyle, I was entrenched in the material world of Andorra, where how many stores you owned and how big your house was determined whether or not you were a good man. Raymond looked into your heart and soul to find your goodness, and being around him made me realize that I had been looking at whether or not you had a Mercedes. Although I'd spent my childhood in a designer clothing boutique, my time in the mountains of Andorra had instilled a spirituality that I was only just beginning to sense; I had found a kind of religion in nature. Being around Raymond brought me to realize that it had been blocked by my extremely competitive, materialistic side, which at the time was more powerful than any spiritual ambition. His kindness and compassion made me feel that there was a better, more profound way to be in the world. I'd been looking at it all wrong.

I was always trying to run into Raymond in the dorm or the cafeteria, where we would have intense philosophical and religious conversations after I'd finished my homework. My mother was never religious, and even as a kid I was skeptical of my aunts' devotion. (My aunt Monique loved to tell the story of when, as a toddler, I refused to take communion with her at the cathedral in Nîmes until the day I saw the priest putting something in her mouth. Apparently I ran screaming up the aisle, "I want a cookie too!") I would challenge Raymond to explain—seriously—how Adam and Eve fell from the sky because she ate an apple. I mean, believing that, in the twentieth century? Good one, Catholics! He'd say patiently, "Oh, it's an allegory; it means X." He would try to rationalize the stories of the Bible and explain them to me in a different way, showing me that faith and intelligence could go hand in hand.

Not once did he try to convert me. He never had to tell me what I was doing wrong, either. All I had to do was listen to my own answers during our debates about, say, the value of money. He would ask me what was so important about being rich or famous (not that I was necessarily looking to be either, but I definitely didn't want to be poor), and obviously there's no smart way to defend the idea that you want to be rich versus spiritual and compassionate. I was shocked into silence by the emptiness of my answers. In that quiet way, he unlocked something in my heart and mind that made me question my values and my selfishness.

He also let us come up against our own faults (such as that selfishness) in other ways. Once he organized a weekend camping trip for a bunch of us on nearby Mont Canigou. The idea was to be together as a team, kind of like Boy Scouts. But I saw it as a way to show off. I told everyone how I had the best hiking boots and the best backpack, and what a great hiker I was. I was determined to be the first on top of the mountain. It was two hours before anyone else caught up to me. And then we realized that a slow kid had gotten lost in everyone's rush to keep up. Raymond was furious. My ambition had ruined his attempt to show us solidarity and teach us how to help one another. As he berated me, I became determined to be more compassionate and generous. To be more like him, at peace with his inner life rather than attached to the material crap surrounding it. At sixteen, the seed for aspiring to goodness was planted.

In order to graduate at the end of two years, we had to be able to perfectly prepare two of the 120 dishes that we'd committed to memory. During the oral exam portion of the practice, we would be asked to recite instructions for a few of the dishes, from the list of ingredients to the step-by-step preparation. (I was asked to explain how to make pork curry, down to the correct measurement of salt and exact browning time for the one-inch cubes of meat.) Then we would go into the kitchen and each find a box of ingredients at our station.

"Ripert, do you know what dishes these ingredients are for?"

"Um, not yet?"

"You will make a goulash and a rice pilaf with langoustine velouté. You have three hours. Good luck."

The goulash. One of the dishes I was worried I wouldn't memorize correctly. I looked at my meat and vegetables, veal stock, and paprika, and got to work as calmly and methodically as I could. I cut the beef into neat cubes and sautéed it right away, because I knew I needed to get the braise going before I could do anything else. I began to hear M. Korbel's voice as I seared the meat on each side of the cube, taking care not to let it stick too much to the pan or get too dark, just enough to caramelize and create a flavor concentrate that would later be absorbed by the onions. Then I deglazed the pan with white wine, added my vegetable garnish, and let it cook. Meanwhile, teachers were coming around and taking notes over our shoulders, asking questions and murmuring a little bit of advice (in my case, don't forget the tomato paste). I could hear one of my classmates crying from the stress, but I stayed calm. In went the tomato paste with the onions and paprika. Finally, the fond de veau, or veal stock, was poured in and I left it to simmer. I could tell from the rich aroma that M. Korbel had taught me well. Now I had to tourner a basket of potatoes, giving each one seven neat, even faces so that they were identically carved into a shape something like an American football.

The rice pilaf was technically trickier: I packed the cooked rice into a baba au rhum mold and prayed that it wouldn't crack when I inverted it onto the platter. It did, but not so much that the creamy seafood sauce—made from roux and a fish fumet and mussel juice, then poured inside the ring—leaked out. While guys around me cursed their burned dishes, I decorated mine with bright red crayfish heads and quickly took it to the dining room before the rice dam broke. There, our teachers were joined by chefs from the region, who would judge our food based on taste, presentation, and technique. The ring, miraculously, held together, and I passed.

By the end of culinary school, I felt I was on my way to mastering the basics. I wasn't the best in my class—that was my friend Raymond Victor, one of the only students who had actual restaurant experience—but I had ambition.


As I climbed out of the Pont Marie métro station in Paris, I couldn't help but think of Madame Amparo, the psychic from Andorra, and her prediction for my future. I was on my way to my first day of work at the only three-star Michelin restaurant out of eighteen establishments that had responded to my résumé.

It was a rainy September morning and I was so excited that every sense was hyperalert: I can still see the pigeon gray of the Parisian sky, smell the exhaust from all of the cars and scooters, and hear them rushing past me. Rarely in my life have I felt so present.

As I followed my new map across the bridge linking the Île St.-Louis to the Left Bank, I fell into a trance, oblivious to the tourists brushing past me on their way to Notre-Dame. I was lured ahead by the strangely familiar limestone building rising at least six stories along the far bank of the Seine. Tourists were posing in front of the grand wrought-iron doors beneath an Art Nouveau glass canopy that seemed to float along the Quai de la Tournelle. The city's sounds fell away. All I could hear was Amparo's voice as she described the restaurant where I would work one day, in a city surrounded by water. I had hoped that her prediction would land me in New York, imagining all the skyscrapers there where a guy like me could learn the art and craft of being a chef. But when I stood in front of La Tour d'Argent and gazed up at its classic seventeenth-century façade, it felt like exactly where I was meant to be.

La Tour d'Argent was so old and so storied that it is even referenced in Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past: "I have to return tomorrow to Paris to dine at the Tour d'Argent or at the Hotel Meurice….M. Boutroux is to address us there about certain séances of spiritualism—pardon me, certain spirituous evocations which he has controlled."

I had been hired as a commis, or junior chef, and La Tour was celebrating its four-hundredth birthday when I arrived. There are pictures of me, dressed in medieval gear, wheeling out a giant cake at one of the many celebrations the restaurant hosted that year. But that would come later. I looked down at my leather briefcase, filled with the knives that my mother had given me for graduation from the Lycée du Moulin à Vent in Perpignan.

The letter told me to enter through the staff door, which was around the side. I climbed the grand oak spiral staircase six flights to the kitchen, where my stomach sank. The kitchen at my school was more modern, and five times as large. The doors to the garde manger refrigerator were wooden, bleached and pitted from a century of nightly scrubbing. The central stove, called a Waldorf, was a monster: fifteen feet of cast iron with a glowing red center that dared you to go near it. (The guy showing me around told me that I was lucky: a decade earlier, they'd still been using a charcoal-fed stove.) That beast made the kitchen hotter than St. Tropez in August.

When I entered the kitchen, twenty white toques rose from above steaming copper pots to show the damp, greenish-white faces of the cooks. They sneered at me as I discreetly dabbed away the sweat on my brow with the sleeve of my new leather jacket, which I thought made me look tough. Maybe not.

Even though they weren't that much older than me, these were men: fast and mean, muscular from real work, reeking of sweat and garlic. They'd been apprenticing in great kitchens since they were thirteen. By twenty, they were old masters. Me? I was seventeen, thin and wiry, with a culinary school education that didn't hold a candle to their years of training. A visible wave of excitement went through the room as the cooks picked up on a new scent, one that was even stronger than the aromas of melted butter, sautéing shallots, and that legendary roasting duck: fresh meat.

The sous-chef, Jean—a short, square, powerful man—told me to go downstairs and change, then come back up and wait for Maurice Guillouët, the chef poissonier, or head fish chef, who would be overseeing me on his station. Maurice arrived in his jeans and T-shirt, brushing away the wild hair that framed his gruffly handsome face. He was twenty-one—which at the time seemed so much older—and I immediately wanted to impress him. He had the kind of dangerous, rock-star charisma that comes from those who are truly good at what they do. That he arrived to work each day on a motorbike only added to his coolness in my eyes.

"Go mince some shallots while I change," Maurice said, jutting his chin toward his station before disappearing back down the staircase.

I ducked around as the other cooks were prepping for lunch service, reducing whole fish and vegetables into perfect portions with a precision and efficiency that would elude me for months. I found my spot at the end of the fish station. (And spot is the word: there were about six inches between myself and the next guy on either side.) I took one of my knives out of my suddenly ridiculous-seeming briefcase, grabbed a shallot with a trembling hand, and, before I'd even removed the skin, sliced open my finger.

I ran downstairs to the locker room. When I entered, Maurice was pulling on his pristine whites in the dingy changing area.

"Maurice? Hi! I'm sorry," I said, holding out my bloody finger. "Can you please help me find a Band-Aid?"

"You've got to be kidding. Where are you from again?"

"Andorra."

"Here," Maurice said, handing me a bandage.

We headed upstairs, the white paper toque I'd been given already sliding off my head.

When we got back to my station, I grabbed my knife, determined to prove that I could cook. Maurice took one look at me and his face fell.

"For Christ's sake. Do you even know how to use a knife?"

"Of course I do. I just graduated from culinary school."

That wasn't the smartest move. Back then, cooking was a blue-collar trade, like plumbing or bricklaying—not a prestigious career for boys whose parents took them to good restaurants. Real cooks—like the guys at La Tour—hated guys from culinary school. They believed that the only way to become a great chef was through apprenticeship and by surviving the physical and verbal abuse of the kitchen, not by memorizing recipes and taking notes and making a soufflé once a semester like I'd done for the last two years. Maurice laid into me, saying that I was a culinary-school baby. If I was going to cook three-star food for people, if I actually expected to produce dishes like quenelles de brochet and lobster bisque, I'd better learn how to hold a damn knife. Then he segued into a rant about how the chef must have searched high and low for the most unqualified commis in a special attempt to make his life hell.

Tirade over, he asked me to make the hollandaise, adding, as though it was nothing, "Thirty-two yolks, okay?"

"Oui, Chef," I dutifully replied.

This seemingly easy task would be the thing that broke me, showing me the gap between culinary school knowledge and real restaurant chops. To start, it took me almost twenty minutes to separate the eggs. None of the guys around me lifted their heads from their stations when I asked what to do with the whites. They were too deep in their tasks, moving with a smooth, mechanic urgency as they prepared their mise en place for the first service, slicing leeks as fine as eyelashes and "turning" carrots into perfect barrel shapes. Stopping for ten seconds to answer a basic question was unthinkable.

When I approached the Waldorf with my pan, the hairs on my forearms curled up and singed into nothing. I tried to negotiate for my own twenty inches of space with a cook who was calmly adding lobsters to a massive pot of stock. But even then, I didn't have the strength to move thirty-two yolks and make a light and foamy sabayon. I didn't know to feel the temperature of the pan with the back of my hand. I didn't know how to instinctively intuit the right temperature to cook the eggs so that they would become that magical sauce. I didn't know and I couldn't ask—this was La Tour, not cooking school—so I failed, at the simplest of tasks. Maurice was so shocked when he discovered my incompetence that he said nothing, just took the pan out of my hand and looked upward, as if demanding celestial intervention.

Everything he asked me to do that first day was an echo of the hollandaise. I couldn't do it, I didn't know how. I wasn't able to help, when help is what a commis is there to do. Maurice was obviously running out of patience and struggled to come up with a task that I could actually handle. He sent me to get chervil and clean it for garnish—the most humiliating job in the kitchen, since it required no skill. Picking herbs was not where I should be starting. I turned toward the refrigerator and paused.

"What's chervil?" I asked. "Is that like parsley?" I mean, I'd heard of chervil, but I'd never seen it. Our school couldn't afford expensive herbs.

At this point, Maurice lost it.

"Nom de dieu! Nom de dieu!" he started screaming (the worst curse if you're Catholic), waving his arms in the air. "This is total bullshit! I'm going to talk to the chef." I'd totally killed the guy.

For a moment, everyone in the kitchen put down their knives and stared. Shocked and ashamed, I almost collapsed from the weight of the realization that everything I thought about myself was wrong. Maurice didn't think I knew how to cook. I was so stunned, I couldn't even say I was sorry. I just got my ass over to the refrigerator to find any herb I didn't recognize and prayed it was chervil.


I felt weak at work and the sense of vulnerability and panic only deepened when I was away from the all-consuming rush of the kitchen. On a weekend visit home to Andorra, I ran into Madame Amparo.

"You're having a tough time," she said, sympathetically.

No psychic ability was necessary to see that was true. I was pale from all my time in the kitchen and I had deep circles underneath my eyes, a very different picture from the tanned athletic kid I'd been when I'd left for my first big restaurant job.

"And you were mugged in Paris," she said.

This was also true; my mother had told her. But what she said next shocked me because it was something no one else in the world knew.

She peered at me knowingly and said, "You weren't wearing your cross of Caravaca. The chain broke and you left it on the nightstand to the right of your bed."

She was right. One night, coming home late from work, I was mugged in the metro. Two guys attacked me on an escalator. One guy held a knife to my neck and I was terrified that with the movement of the escalator, he might slip and slit my throat before I could hand over my watch and my wallet. The minute the men ran away, I reached up and instinctively touched my neck. I wasn't wearing the cross that Madame Amparo gave me. The chain had broken and it had been on my nightstand, just as she'd said. I had never doubted Madame Amparo's ability before, but now I knew for sure that she was the real deal. I'd gone out without the necklace she'd blessed for my protection and I was almost harmed. I vowed not to leave home without it again.

As much as Maurice hated working with me, Chef Bouchet made it clear that the situation wasn't going to change. "No matter what, he's staying. You're dealing with him," he was told. Before, Maurice had been manning the fish station by himself, sending out dishes for 120 covers a night. If he got rid of me, he'd be back on his own. But more important, no one said no to Dominique Bouchet.

At thirty-two, Chef Bouchet was young to be running the three-star kitchen at Paris's most storied restaurant. But he had the natural authority of someone twice his age. Handsome, powerful, and disciplined, he looked more like a movie star than a guy who'd spent a career behind the pots. Thirty years before the invention of Food Network and the popularity of celebrity chefs on TV, Bouchet glided through the kitchens of Paris like there was a camera following him. His every move was elegant and he executed complicated dishes with ease. At a time when the top chefs of the world were messy, slovenly characters with outsize personalities that said they didn't give a rip, like my friend Jacques, Bouchet was different. Even the way he put on his apron and toque was perfection, crisp and flawless. He was still a young man, but Bouchet had taken over one of Paris's oldest, most venerable restaurants. We were all in awe of him. He was the savior of La Tour d'Argent.

Bouchet had apprenticed with the great Burgundian chef Marcel Pouilly. And, like me, he'd attended culinary school. Paris at the time was buzzing with culinary talent. Among them, one chef stood out as the one to beat: Joël Robuchon. Bouchet and Robuchon had crisscrossed paths throughout their twenties at Paris's finest hotels and restaurants, always with Robuchon a little ahead of Bouchet. They had worked together at the opening of the Concorde Lafayette, with Robuchon as executive chef and Bouchet as one of his sous-chefs. Then Robuchon went to Hotel Nikko and Bouchet to Jamin. But when he was just thirty years old, Robuchon made a play and successfully purchased Jamin. He needed to discreetly get Bouchet out of the way, so he arranged for Jacques Sénéchal, the chef of La Tour d'Argent, to move to the Nikko. Robuchon then moved Bouchet to La Tour d'Argent and kept Jamin to himself. The rumor was that Robuchon was part of a secret society of Masons and that the extent of his power ranged much further than his stovetops. More than the rising prince of the culinary world, he was regarded almost as a mystic who could influence the rich and powerful at will.

With Bouchet safely ensconced at La Tour d'Argent, Robuchon hired a team of young, talented chefs, and set about reimagining the restaurant as an innovative showplace for an evolution of the increasingly popular "nouvelle cuisine." Within a little more than a year, Jamin was awarded an unheard-of two stars from the Michelin guide. Two stars were impossible for a small, newish restaurant in a city where many of the dining establishments had decades upon decades of experience. Robuchon became the talk of Paris. The restaurant had only a dozen tables and soon the waiting list was months long.

That was in the early 1980s, and the food world in Paris, which had so long prided itself on tradition, did not know what hit them. Having mastered the classics at such a young age, Robuchon became bored and curious, like a young Picasso playing with cubism. He reinvented the form of formal dining, stripping away the artifice of heavy sauces, and discarding old methods of cooking poultry and meat for hours at a time as if every meal should be as heavy as a Sunday roast. At Jamin, Robuchon quickly gained a reputation as a genius and a tyrant. There was no such thing as good enough in his kitchen, and you could taste the demands he placed on his staff in each and every plate. There were no dried herbs, only fresh. A sprig of parsley wasn't tossed raw onto a plate but rather flash fried, like tempura. Robuchon was the first chef in Paris to roast a rack of lamb in an herb-infused salt crust. He seared the lamb and then put it in a salt crust and cooked it very slowly. With this technique, you got the benefit of the meat both being seared and cooking very gently, absorbing herbs, flavor, and saltiness from the crust. It was presented in the dining room for show and then removed from the crust and served to the client.

Robuchon also reimagined the classic île flottante, or floating island. One part of the dessert is a meringue that floats in a crème anglaise. Robuchon baked the dessert in the oven in a mold and then studded the meringue with pink pralines. All of a sudden, a dish that had fallen off restaurant menus was reimagined as something new: visually beautiful and texturally different, with its almost crisp mold. In his twenties, Robuchon had won all of the major cooking competitions in France. These illustrious formal competitions were prestigious platforms where a chef could show off an elaborate, almost over-the-top formal aesthetic as well as a commanding mastery of technique. Robuchon had first amazed the food world at these contests, and he brought his drive to wow the judges and blast the competition to every dish he created at Jamin. His mashed potatoes remain perhaps his most famous dish, and they exemplify what his goal has been all along: to reinvent each ingredient and in the process transform something as humble as a potato into something almost noble.

From that aerie of culinary reworkings, Bouchet came to La Tour d'Argent. At La Tour, Bouchet was a hurricane of modernity, elevating and transforming the stale and stodgy menu into something exciting and new. His fights with the owner, Claude Terrail, were legendary: we knew it at the stoves, and the food critics knew it too. To survive, La Tour d'Argent needed to evolve. It was clear that Terrail thought merely hiring a younger chef would convince the media that the old place had been given new life, but Bouchet, trained by Robuchon, did not intend to be merely window dressing. He fought Terrail hard, and more often than not, he won. It was thanks to his modern vision that La Tour began to introduce lighter, nouveau dishes such as a warm poached scallop salad on top of mâche and monkfish, cooked à la vapeur with a sauce vin blanc on the bottom. At the same time, Bouchet peppered the menu with the classics that made Terrail happy, meals that patrons of La Tour had enjoyed for over a century—the pressed canard au sang, duck with green peppercorn sauce, the quenelles de brochet (pike) with sauce mousseline: hollandaise with whipped cream.

Bouchet's vision extended to the front of the house as well. La Tour was known for its arrogant tuxedoed waiters who had been serving there for decades and did as they pleased. Bouchet insisted that the waiters respect the system: no more sloppy behavior, walking behind the pass, the long metal shelf where dishes were plated and left for pickup.

I was incredibly lucky to have Bouchet on my side. One of his gifts was his ability to see the big picture. He assembled his team as if they were soccer players: you need the guy who can score the goals, but you also need guys who can pass, and young guys who can hustle. A good kitchen staff has to have a mix of skills and backgrounds, so that everyone is bringing something different to the table.

How did I end up at one of the crown jewels of the Paris restaurant scene when my knife skills were for shit? The answer, I would later learn, lay in Bouchet's ambition for change. He didn't need another line cook who had been trained to do things the old way. Bouchet was intrigued that I was from Andorra, another part of the world, with perhaps a different palate. He thought it was good for all those restaurant-trained blue-collar guys to mix it up with a culinary school grad. He liked that I came from a family where fine dining was part of our experience; as a young commis, this gave me an unusual perspective on the front of the house. But mostly I think he could tell how motivated I was. I may have been just seventeen years old, but I was clean cut, obedient, and hardworking. And hard work carried me through everything those first few months because I was still learning how to be a cook.

The first week, it took me ten minutes to julienne a quarter-cup of leeks. (It took the other cooks about forty-five seconds.) I badly needed to improve, so during my lunch break, I'd hop the métro two stops to my studio apartment on rue Broca and practice cutting carrots in my own tiny kitchen. I knew that once I came back in the afternoon, Maurice would be yelling at me to speed up. I needed to have everything ready on time for dinner—once service began, I'd get a sickening knot in my stomach from the pressure; it took all of my strength to keep my hands from shaking. As soon as the chef who ordered fire started screaming over the microphone, yelling, "You fucker! Where is that sole?" you could feel the entire kitchen tense up. I would get so flustered, I couldn't hear a thing.

Two weeks in, I gave myself an opportunity to spend considerably more time on my home knife-skills study. I was trying to lift a fifty-liter pot of boiling lobster stock for bisque—a two-person job—and spilled it all over me. Rather than ask for help with it, I had grabbed both handles and gone red in the face as I tried to hoist the three-foot-tall pot. My muscles instantly stung from the strain: stomach, back, legs. I thought I had a good grasp, but there was too much liquid inside. It started to tilt and my hands were scalded by the bubbling stock. In a moment of panic, I lost control. In school, they trained us to immediately rip open our jacket and tear off our pants if we got boiling liquid on ourselves. I stripped off my checked pants, but I couldn't unlace my shoes in time. When I finally peeled off my socks, layers of skin came off with them as I huddled in the middle of the kitchen in my boxers and toque. My injury didn't stop the cooks from calling me out for my error—"Look at all that fucking lobster stock we have to redo, you waste of space!"—while Maurice and Jean wrapped my feet in kitchen towels and accompanied me to the doctor around the corner. The doctor informed me I'd be laid up for at least three weeks.

After a week in my top-floor studio, I was a little faster with the carrots—I was spending about two hours on them every afternoon. But I was miserable: embarrassed that I'd made such a huge mistake, anxious to get back and prove myself worthy of my job. So I showed up at the kitchen in blue Sebago boat shoes, which I was still unable to lace because my feet were so swollen and bloody, desperate to get back to work.

"Get the fuck out of this kitchen!" Jean screamed, although I could tell that he actually felt bad for me. Maurice took one look at me and sent me home for another ten days. It must have been like a vacation for him.

I was so bored, so homesick, it was almost unbearable. I had no friends or family, and I hated that damn Parisian weather. But I knew I was living my dream to work in a three-star restaurant, and failure was not an option. I was painfully aware that this was the chance of a lifetime. I had to learn, and learn quickly, no matter how much abuse I had to take. If I had to glue myself to the stove in order to stay there, I would do it. I went through hundreds of leeks and carrots, each one taking what seemed like an hour to finish.

When I needed a break, I would hobble over to the Pompidou Center and hang out in the plaza, watching the acrobats and guys doing tricks.

One morning, I found an old man doing tarot-card readings. He was no Madame Amparo, but I really believed in these things and needed whatever comfort or memory of home I could find.

"How much for a reading?" I asked.

I could see him sizing up the leather jacket and nice shoes that had been a present from my mother.

"Ten francs," he barked.

This was about two U.S. dollars at the time, and probably twice what he usually charged. But I was intrigued, so I opened my wallet and handed him the cash.

He gestured for me to sit on the dark green metal chair opposite him and then he shuffled the cards.

"Cut the deck," he ordered.

I did.

Then he laid out three cards. Each, he explained, would tell me something about my past, my present, or my future.

The card for my past was the Tower, which he said spoke of disaster, upheaval, and sudden changes.

"Are any of these true of your childhood?" he asked.

I shrugged. After all, wasn't the whole process of growing up one of change and upheaval?

When he flipped the center card, the one that he said embodied my present, it was an upside-down Three of Pentacles, which he said spoke to a lack of teamwork and poor work skills in my current occupation.

I was beginning to feel that the ten francs were well worth it.

"What about the future?" I asked, eagerly. "Am I going to be in Paris for a long time?"

"You see that card?" he said, gesturing at the Hanged Man. "You're stuck."


Once I made it back into the kitchen, Maurice greeted me with grudging respect. It seemed like the bloody boat-shoe incident had made him finally understand how dedicated I was. Not that he made things any easier for me: the first thing he did was tell everyone the carrot-practice secret I'd revealed to him. And then he gave me twice as much work. But this time, I was up for it.

Within a few weeks, I'd figured out how to shell the langoustines (the secret: dislocate the first two sections of the body with your fingers and twist, then gently but firmly press on the tail while you pull out the meat). By the end of a month, I could finally handle the heat of the stove and had pretty much mastered the dreaded hollandaise. Watching Maurice make the sauce again and again (and listening to him yell at me again and again), I came to understand how to move the large pan on and off the heat—pulling it out, putting it back, pulling it out, putting it back—keeping a finger on its copper base to make sure that it was warm, never hot. I learned to make a continuous figure eight with my whisk to ensure that all sides of the pan were touched, rather than whisking in round circles as you might for a Chantilly. And I gained the fortitude to keep it up for the twenty minutes needed to get the yolks foamy, switching hands when the cramping got too painful. Sometimes the old guys would come by and make fun of me, watching my forearms burn.

Still, by mastering those thirty-two yolks, I had done something right. I was becoming a real cook.

Paris is magical for tourists. But when you work in dark, almost windowless rooms until the middle of the night, the city is like a fairground after the carnival is shut down. I left for work in the dark, wet gray of the morning. And when I went home, it was after midnight. It was as if I'd just missed…well, everything. I could see the remnants of other people's fun—the cigarette butts, the empty wine bottles piled up in trash cans outside the cafés, the matchbooks with phone numbers scribbled on them that had been cast away—but by the time I arrived on the scene, the party had moved on.

At work, I was scared, confused, lost, lonely, desperate to prove myself—feelings that were only intensified by the rude bustle and gray demeanor of my new city. My mother and I became very close during my first two months at La Tour d'Argent. She would call me every day and encourage me to stick with it. "You can do it. You're good. You're strong." She wanted to motivate me and although I didn't always believe her words, the sound of her voice comforted me.

I missed the mountains and sun of Andorra, so I bought framed posters of nature scenes to hang all over my studio apartment. They didn't help much. But I had chosen my path, so each morning, before the sun rose, I made my way through the back door and up the stairs to the dark, smelly locker room at the top of five flights of stairs.

How does a chef make twenty cooks work in perfect synchronicity in a small, hot room, without sacrificing quality or speed? Every chef must find his way, but the historical kitchen brigade system is built on a universal truth: fear is a great motivator. At La Tour d'Argent, Jean, the sous-chef, did the intimidating so that Chef Bouchet did not have to. Bouchet spoke to Jean and Jean spoke to you. Jean was a terror, but everyone endured his outbursts and the way he beat us on the shoulders because he had such a good heart.

Though he didn't want to betray his soft side, Jean always knew exactly when to help you, and when to leave you alone. Because he saw Maurice and Chef Bouchet protecting me, he decided it was his job to help me build up the layers of toughness that are essential in the kitchen. Every time Jean looked at me, it was with a mixture of pity and professional consternation, like, What the fuck are we going to do with this scrawny little kid?

In the morning to say hello, he would start by whomping me across the back. "Eric Ripert! Badada! What new atrocity will you commit today?" He would hit me on the shoulder with all his strength whenever he walked by. I had to lock my knees in order to stay upright. Every night before I crawled into bed, I could see where bruises were turning from black and blue to yellow, and where new bruises were about to begin. Today this would be deemed unacceptable but back then it was not considered abuse, just part of life in the kitchen.

When Jean received the day's merchandise, the screaming began in earnest. The walk-in was on the lower level and he would shout, "Ripert! Move your ass! Go get your fish!" God forbid you put your mise en place in the wrong place in the walk-in. He would knock it over and then drag you down the stairs to clean it up.

The thing is that I liked Jean, and I knew he liked me too. He saw his job as twofold—to teach me the basics and make me less thin-skinned. He knew that both were essential to my survival in the kitchen. Any mistake I'd make, he'd say, "Ripert, you fucked it up. Tonight: garde!" Whack. Or "Lunch: garde!" Slap. It seemed like Jean used any excuse to trap me. "Do you know how to make a beurre d'échalote? Garde! Garde! Garde!"

Garde was when you had to stay after service to cook for the restaurant's owner, Claude Terrail, who ate around midnight, after everyone was gone. (He lived on the second floor, so the restaurant was truly his home.)

It was my responsibility to prepare Jean's mise en place as he cooked Monsieur Terrail's meal, usually a soup and salad. The soup was always freshly made, even if M. Terrail didn't always eat it. One evening a few months into my time at La Tour, he requested poussin farci with truffle and foie gras. If he requested an entrée, we usually sent out only half a fish or chicken. M. Terrail was known for having a small appetite and more often than not, we threw out the rest of the expensive dish. Once his entrée had been sent out, Jean left and I was stuck waiting for the boss to finish. The first dozen times I did garde, he never asked for the other half of his meal. It went right into the garbage. So one night, he had poussin. We would always send him one half of the poussin and the second half would be kept in the kitchen. That night, I was so tired and hungry and pissed off that I just grabbed it and ate the second half of the baby chicken.

Of course, that had to be the night when he requested the second half of his meal. It was nearly one A.M.; I was exhausted and hungry and, I was confident, soon to be jobless. I remember staring at the crispness of Monsieur's suit, wondering how the signature violet in his buttonhole was still fresh so late at night. After the captain came to the kitchen and asked me for the other half of his meal, there was a moment of silence as he took in the fact that there was truffle sauce dripping from the side of my mouth. I nearly threw up. The ensuing scandal almost cost me my job.

In those early days at the restaurant, I often made the kind of mistakes that I can imagine firing someone for today. Once when we went down to staff meal, I left twenty-four ducks in the oven. After they were burned to a crisp, they were just tinder for a huge gas fire. The kitchen filled with black smoke as the ducks burned and we quickly brandished fire extinguishers to put out the flames. Now at Le Bernardin, when a young chef makes what seems like a thoughtless mistake, I think of my younger self and remember, "I did things like that," and try to respond with compassion, with a tenderness toward the young cook I once was.

Jean whacked me at will, but he also regaled me with stories of his days as a young cook, when it wasn't uncommon to be beaten with cast-iron pans. "It was so violent then," he would say, as he shuddered, thinking about the chefs who would give you a black eye just for breaking a delicate beurre blanc. "It's so relaxed now!" he would say, visibly exhaling, as if the daily meal services were as pleasantly paced as a spin on a merry-go-round. I nodded as if I understood, but I couldn't imagine being any more scared or frantic than I already was.


All those nights I did garde, I didn't realize that what I was being given was a private opportunity to watch Jean cook. From my first day at La Tour until my last, Jean was always giving me the punishment of garde, garde, garde. I was so confident that he did it to screw with me that I didn't realize he was actually mentoring me.

Each garde came with a lesson, and although I didn't at first see it for the gift that it was, my brain greedily absorbed the information. Jean would say, "Let me tell you the story of the Belon oyster…." And then he would proceed to give me a master's education in the belon: how it is one of the rarest oysters in the world, found only on the Riec-sur-Belon, a tiny sliver of culinary heaven in Brittany, located between the Aven and Belon rivers. He explained that the Belon oyster has a distinctly nutty taste, a result of the mingling of freshwater and salt water in that river. Then he would instruct me to taste, and to learn. It was the kind of leisurely lesson that could never happen in service, when plates are flying out the door at breakneck speed and there's hardly time to think or breathe, much less talk.

One night, I spent an hour sweating shallots while Jean watched, tasted, and then threw out my efforts.

"Again, Ripert! It's just a fucking shallot, are you an imbecile?"

I learned that every stage of cooking a shallot produces a different result.

"Taste it," Jean said. "It's too sweet. So what do you do?"

"Try again?"

"During service, you don't have the time, you have to fix it. Add a little lemon juice or jus from the vegetable stock." Then he handed me another shallot. "Try it again."

I peeled another shallot, chopped it, then put a little bit of butter in the pan. When the butter was nearly popping, I sautéed the shallot and quickly removed it from the pot.

When it cooled just a moment, Jean tasted it and made a face.

"You taste it," he said.

I did. It tasted bad but I didn't know what I'd done wrong—and I told him so.

"Should I add lemon juice, Chef?" I asked.

He whacked me on the shoulder.

"It's just a bad shallot. It will add a moldy, putrid taste to the dish. It can't be saved. But you should know that. Let's do it again."

As a seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kid, I didn't see that being assigned to garde was a rare moment of intimacy with the head of the kitchen. "Do you see what I'm doing now?" he'd ask as he stuffed the little bird. "You think it's painful to stay late? You feel that you are punished, and you are. You cannot know this, but when you are a commis, you want to be exposed to the maximum, because after that, you will never have the same exposure again. You should thank me." He was joking, but he was right. In the years to come, I would thank him again and again. Merci, Jean.

I bonded with the other young cooks in the kitchen because we were the suckers they roped in to things like getting dressed up in seventeenth-century clothing, complete with stockings, wigs, and brocade caps, and carrying a model of La Tour d'Argent made out of sugar around the restaurant to celebrate its four-hundredth birthday. The other commis showed me the secrets to setting up Maurice's station: put everything that we would need during the three hours of service close to the stove; make sure there was enough water in the couscoussier at the start of the night, because there was never time to refill it, and if the bottom burned, everything that we steamed in it would have an acrid, smoky flavor; keep the sauces covered and all the tasting spoons, ingredients, vegetables, and trays ready; put the fish on top of the tray and put it in the refrigerator; and so forth. What I hadn't learned in culinary school, and what the more experienced commis explained, was that my most important job was to give Maurice the tools he needed to perform, then stand next to him and help him finish what he'd started or give him whatever instruments he needed as quickly as possible. I was part Formula One pit crew, part surgeon's assistant.

Once service began, things got a little more intense. First I had to listen to what dishes were being yelled out, determine which ones needed to be made by our fish station, then remember them—in order. What needed to be done now, and what needed to be ready to serve in twenty minutes? The big problem was, half the time I didn't understand what the hell they were saying. I couldn't understand the vocabulary of the kitchen—what was that guy yelling over the microphone about threelangotwomardsfivepressedbillstwospudswithlotsofair?

In a busy restaurant kitchen, there are so many ways to get distracted. But Maurice had a gift for creating a bubble around himself: all that got into the bubble was the order that was being fired from the mic; all that survived in the bubble was exactly what he needed to prepare the dish.

Gradually, I learned to be ultrafocused like Maurice, to hear only what was important, organize the information, and stay calm enough to do the work—not easy when you're overwhelmed by a kitchen in action. If he heard "three panachés de poisson," he would say, "Yes, Chef!" and forget about the screaming and just focus on those panachés. Maurice was also a master at staying ahead of the game, thinking about what he'd have to do next and getting me to reset the station to be ready for the next wave of orders. He somehow managed to keep an eye on the other stations as well, perfectly timing things so that his dover sole would be ready at the same time as Table 10's two racks of lamb en persillade. Of all the cooks in the kitchen, Maurice seemed to me the most disciplined, not to mention the most talented. It was almost like he didn't feel the pressure that the rest of us did.

In that kitchen, the highest compliment was silence. You either got screamed at or there was no feedback at all (which was good; it meant there was nothing to yell about). I learned this after two months, when the most incredible thing happened: I cut the carrot brunoise properly and quickly enough for Maurice. It was a complicated knife cut: first you julienne the vegetable, then you turn it a quarter and dice it. Each cube has to be exactly one millimeter all around, and you have to do it fast. There were days when I would brunoise half a dozen carrots, celery, leeks, and turnips. Each time I would take the tray to Maurice and he would say, "These are for shit. But they'll have to do." This was not that day. Instead, he did that rare thing in a kitchen: he praised me.

"Finally, you made it!" he said, slapping me on the shoulder. "It took you a long time, but you see? Whatever you thought was impossible, now you can do it. So you can learn more. You're ready." Notice that he didn't actually say I did a good job. But as I blanched the vegetables in salty boiling water and then dipped them again in ice water to stop the cooking and retain the vibrancy of the color, I knew that I had mastered something small but grand. The more the small things became second nature, the more I would be free, as a chef, to build on the foundations with even more complex combinations of tastes, textures, and colors.

Before long, I realized that each task was a lot like hiking in Andorra. There was only one way to go—up. All of those years of climbing mountains had given me an instinct for the ascent, a sense of how to pace myself, how to structure my approach—not through sprints to the top, but slowly and over time. Once I'd mastered the brunoise, I moved on to making a scrambled egg appetizer with crab on top. From there, I learned how to make a sauce vin blanc, and then a bisque. I remember the bisque was a big deal; Maurice was very proud of that achievement. Each of these dishes may sound very simple, but I spent a few months doing each of them poorly, then doing them acceptably, until I could prepare them with my eyes closed and know, with confidence, that they would be great.

I wanted to be as good as Maurice, so I emulated his every move. By his side, I learned not only focus and discipline, but also technique, speed, cleanliness, how to plate properly and fast, and the fundamentals of fish, of sauce, and of flavor itself. We were always tasting, tasting, tasting before service. He always had the right way to describe things so that I'd understand. As for the knife skills, to this day I can hear him yelling, "Not like that! Look at my hand! You put your fingers like this—that finger should be behind or you're going to cut it off!"

He constantly made fun of me, mimicking everything I said to Jean or Chef Bouchet in my thick accent and knocking my expensive clothes in the locker room. According to him, I would never learn to sharpen my knife properly, even though I did it exactly like everyone else. But Maurice's teasing was becoming more brotherly than humiliating. Whenever another cook made fun of me the same way, Maurice would tell them to fuck off and pick on their own commis, sometimes threatening them physically with his muscular body, built up from a lifetime of sailing and swimming in Brittany. Let's just say the teasing died down—or rather, it took place behind my back.


It was from Maurice that I first began to learn how foundational sauces were to the fine dining experience. In culinary school, I'd learned how to make a few of what chefs call "the mother sauces": the cold ones, like vinaigrette and mayonnaise, and the hot ones, like béchamel, velouté, and a brown sauce known in professional kitchens around the world as demi-glace. But few cooking schools have the budget to let a bunch of knucklehead would-be cooks experiment with the quality and range of ingredients that you use in a three-star restaurant like La Tour, which meant that I had a long way to go.

"Nappé!" Maurice shouted at me, holding up the spoon with sauce as thin as water running off the back of it. Nappé is a term that every young chef comes to hate, and then eventually to respect. When your sauce is ready, it coats the back of a spoon perfectly—a smooth liquid concoction of balanced flavors. Napper means "to coat" and sauces must have the right consistency in order to properly napper a dish.

I looked down, embarrassed. "I followed the recipe," I muttered. In a professional kitchen you work from memory, and obviously my memory had failed me.

"Forget the recipes!" Maurice growled. "You have to use your instinct when you are making sauces. What do your eyes tell you? What do you taste? Are you watching the clock and timing everything perfectly? That béarnaise sauce needs to be thick, like the consistency of a light mayonnaise. It should not run on the plate. And the color has to be bright, not 'tarnished' because it cooked too long. And you need to have a lift of sweetness—but you also need to have that sourness and richness."

As an eighteen-year-old kid, it seemed like such a tall order for a small pot of sauce: for it to be, all at once, bright and thick, sweet and sour and rich. And yet, as is true for almost anything, the more I practiced what Maurice told me, the better I became.

Sometimes when he had a few moments to spare, Maurice taught me things outside the purview of the fish station. It was from Maurice that I learned how to make a gastrique, a combination of caramelized sugar and a touch of vinegar. When added to a meat sauce, it gives the sauce more shine. A great gastrique can help rebalance the flavors in a sauce and help with the consistency. Maurice explained that a gastrique is a great back-pocket sauce, the kind of thing that separates great chefs from the more workaday hacks.

"Turn the flame down as low as it'll go," Maurice demonstrated. "Then let it reduce by half. Keep an eye on it so it doesn't burn."

I began to prepare a mushroom sauce while Maurice juggled three stocks: a crayfish stock, a fish stock, and a lobster stock for the famous lobster bisque.

I had cleaned and trimmed the mushrooms early in the morning, before Maurice came in. Then I heated the sauté pan with a mixture of canola oil and a generous chunk of butter. When the pan was hot, I cooked the mushrooms with a mixture of minced shallots, garlic, and thyme for just a few minutes.

Once the mushrooms were tender, I added a bay leaf and deglazed the pan with white wine. I reduced the white wine by half, then added some fumet, a concentrated, aromatic fish stock. I raised the heat, bringing the pan to a simmer, then reduced the liquid again. I had not known before Maurice's tutelage how much of cooking was chemistry, the use of heat to reduce and transform textures and flavors. I added the mushrooms to the sauce, which certainly looked thick enough, and let it sit in the hopes that it might thicken up just a little bit more.

A few minutes later, when Maurice stuck his spoon in the mushroom sauce, he held it up before he tasted it. The sauce perfectly coated the back of the spoon. Then he tasted it.

"Not bad, Ripert," he said. "But remember, in a sauce, you want to be able to taste all of the ingredients; one taste should never dominate. I am tasting more garlic than anything, you used too much."

I was crushed. "Should I do it again?"

Maurice shook his head. "Nah, I'm probably the only one who will notice."

At home, on my days off, I practiced making sauces. Even though I was in the fish station, at home I practiced more universal tasks, trying to learn the craft. Beef kidneys, for example, were not as expensive as ribeye, but required a great deal of technique to bring forth the flavors and make them delicious.

Upping my knife skills was important, but at the heart of it all was physical training. I needed to teach my hands to move so quickly that my brain did not have to tax itself in the execution of every chop and dice. Learning sauces gave me something more vital and more elusive: I began to develop, in the very smallest of ways, the instinct of a chef.

It seemed like it took forever, but every couple of weeks, I took a little leap in the kitchen. I mastered one cut, then got better at another. I learned the sauces of the fish station at La Tour and one by one, I was able to execute them with vibrancy and depth. The more that I was able to accomplish my tasks with precision, the more of a help I was to Maurice during service. Soon, whatever he needed, I was there to give it to him. Most of the time, we didn't even have to talk. And that's when he started to have respect for me; that's when he really started treating me like a little brother.

Maurice began to invite me out to have drinks with him and his friends after work. He found the fact that I was never able to score with a girl in a club endlessly entertaining. "You were slow dancing, you were both drunk…and nothing? Ripert! This is simply against the laws of physics! Do I have to teach you how to have sex too?" Maurice had a serious girlfriend, but most of the guys in the kitchen picked up girls at clubs or went to hookers in rue St. Denis, so the conversations were pretty raw—and nothing I could contribute to.


But then things got tougher on their own. About six months into my stay at La Tour, Maurice came to tell me that he'd been hired by Joël Robuchon to work at Jamin.

"Robuchon?" I gasped. "No shit!" All of the gossip in Paris was about the young chef, who had overseen a staff of eighty when he was just twenty-one. "How'd you do that?"

"Anything to get away from you," he said. "Finally, I'll be able to get my job done without having to answer stupid questions from a guy who can't even get laid in Paris."

I couldn't believe I was losing my protector in the kitchen, my big brother at the stove. But Robuchon…he deserved it.

After Maurice left, the guys who had been afraid of him came after me, but at that point I didn't care. I was too focused. And too busy: as soon as Jean saw that you were comfortable in one station, he moved you to the next, where you basically started at zero.

I was quickly moved to entremets, which is preparing all of the vegetables and garnishes for the meat station. "Oh, God! I know nothing again!" I would cry when I went home. But then I'd work hard and figure it out. And as soon as I began to feel good about myself, they moved me again. Next it was garde manger, where I made all of the salads and cold appetizers—like truffle-studded duck terrine with toasted brioche or lobster terrines—as well as portioned the fish and passed it to the fish station.

After I'd been at La Tour d'Argent for eight months they tried to put me on the station that fried the pommes soufflés, but I refused. The translucent puffed orbs that accompanied the duck dishes were delicious and impressive, but incredibly hard to make. You were peeling, washing, and cutting potatoes all day long, and they often burst in the oil, splattering and burning you. To me, that station was the Siberia of the kitchen. There was nothing for me to learn. At that point, Jean and I had grown close enough that I wasn't afraid to speak my mind. So when I saw that he had put it on my schedule for the following week, I told him half-jokingly, "If you put me in that station, I'm quitting on the spot."

The crazy thing is that Jean listened. By then, I had imposed myself upon the kitchen through sheer resilience and hard work. No one could accuse me of being the spoiled kid with the nice leather jacket. Now I was the guy who could cut off a piece of my finger, bandage it, and finish the day.

So the next station was pastry. I didn't last long: I was kicked off after I ate twenty-five strawberry tartlets and I don't know how many chocolates made for that night's petits-fours. After pastry came duck. Duck was the restaurant's specialty, whether it was served with green peppercorn or peach sauce, cooked au sang, flattened à la presse, or whatever they were doing. For four months, I was seasoning, roasting, and then spending hours breaking down about eighty ducks a day. I cooked so many that for years I had nightmares about those canards. Sometimes I was cooking and I burned all the ducks. Other times, I was being attacked by vicious killer canards. It makes me shudder to think of it, the amount of my dream time that was—and sometimes still is—taken over by nightmares about ducks.

I moved on to back sauce, where I learned more sauces and also made the staff meal every day, which required putting together menus of Escoffier classics that Jean had selected from the book, with appetizer, main course, and, twice a week, dessert. It was like cooking for my hotel school exam all over again. For my first dinner, I sautéed about a hundred trout for the entire staff, not just for the kitchen; I was cooking two or three trout in a pan and I had six pans in front of me. When you cook fish with the skins, the pan has to be very hot. I was in such a rush, I started with cold pans and then the worst happened—the skins stuck to the pan. I knew much better than to make such a simple mistake but I was already in the weeds. In my anxiety, I panicked. I just scraped the broken trout off the stove and instead of stopping to correct my mistake, I kept going, ruining pan after pan of trout.

I tried to cover my mistake by hastily arranging the broken pieces of trout on the torpedo-shaped platters. Jean was short and the platters sat on a shelf of warming trays above my stove. When he walked by, I thought—I hoped, I prayed—maybe he won't notice.

But he did notice and what he did was jump up and slam the trays off of the shelf, sending them tumbling onto the floor on the other side. The whole kitchen stopped because of the commotion. Now the embarrassment that I felt at ruining the trout was compounded by the fact that the whole kitchen was privy to my humiliation. Jean glared at me and said, "I hope you have enough money to buy everyone sandwiches at the bakery." Then he stormed out.

Somehow I thought that because the trout was for a staff meal, he would let me get away with serving broken pieces of fish that had burned and stuck to the pan. But I learned that staff meal is not an assignment to be taken lightly: if you cannot cook well for yourself, how can you be trusted to cook well for the restaurant's clientele? More simply put, when all those trays came tumbling down, I got the message loud and clear: you don't give shitty food to the staff. And you have to learn your craft.

I was probably just nervous about that night. I'd finally met a beautiful girl and managed to ask her out. The younger guys from the restaurant would take me to the club La Palace, which was like a dating supermarket, to try to get me to meet someone. On my way to the bar I saw a gorgeous girl with long, dark hair. She looked at me and smiled, then started walking toward me. The next thing I knew, I was on the dance floor with this incredible beauty licking my ear. I felt like the chef at Le Sardinal when he turned on the salamander that I'd just hosed off. I could only imagine how she'd be in bed. We arranged to meet that Friday at the Trocadero at 7:30. I couldn't believe it: a date! Because she was traveling through France, it was a onetime deal. Guaranteed, the cooks told me back at work.

And then the pastry chef announced that he'd gotten a table for four of us at Jamin on Friday. Robuchon! No one could get a reservation—not even with Maurice there. There was a three-month waiting list to try the restaurant that all of Paris was talking about. I was like, "Oh, man. Sorry. Can't do it. I have a date with that girl, remember? I can't just leave her standing at the Trocadero. I can't…"

"You have until five o'clock Friday to decide, Ripert," said the pastry chef.


In that hushed little dining room in the 16th arrondissement, I discovered just how finely detailed a dish can be. If I thought the food at La Tour d'Argent was three stars, Robuchon was on another planet. He served dishes that no one had seen before. A ravioli, the wrapper so thin it was practically translucent, was filled with langoustine and nappéd with foie gras sauce—a startling pairing at the time. We had a miniature crown of rice with rabbit, the rim of the plate painstakingly decorated with alternating dots of truffle, some so small we couldn't imagine how they'd gotten on the plate in time to be served. (The rumors that his cooks worked eighteen hours a day must have been true, I thought.) It was revolutionary compared to what I'd been learning.

I had dined at two-and three-stars like the Ritz and Taillevent with a few of the cooks (the owner of Taillevent was generous and so amused to see a table of pale teenagers in baggy suits that he paid for our meal when he found out where we worked) and had been blown away by the food and service. When I dined at fine restaurants, I always appreciated the luxury, but I also admired the craftsmanship that went into creating the experience: the hand-painted plates, the hand-blown crystal, the true art of service. But Jamin was something else. This was genius. I now knew what direction I wanted my cooking to go in. Now I just had to get there.


During my year and a half at La Tour d'Argent, I was taught what a real kitchen is; I learned it in my bones. The brigade system is brutal, but it works. Without it there would only be chaos. Jean was tough but smart: he made us jump in to help anyone who was behind on his station, which meant that all of our skills stayed sharp and well-rounded. When I arrived, I had no idea how hard working in a kitchen would be. Psychologically, it was incredibly difficult: you're not supposed to cry, you're not supposed to say nice things, you can't wince when someone hits you. When I look back on it today, I think: Wow, I am what I am because of that exposure to all those stations and all those shitty jobs (though by the end, cleaning langoustines was actually fun—not that I let on). Because I made so many mistakes and burned so many things, I will always know what not to do. If a cook today tells me he ruined his hollandaise, I can tell him at exactly what step he went wrong, because I've ruined it in every possible way.

I thought I was pretty tough for a nineteen-year-old. And a good cook, too. I was ready for the next move. When Chef Bouchet heard that I was looking to leave, he called me into his office.

"I hear you've been looking for a job," he said. "You must understand one thing: I am the one who decides when you leave. Not you. And when you're ready, I'll send you to Robuchon."

I was sure he was bullshitting in order to keep me there a little longer. But just a few months later, he called me into another closed-door meeting. "Ripert," he said, "Robuchon is looking for a good cook."

"And you're sending me?" I asked, half-joking, half overwhelmed with pride.

Little did I know I was being sent straight to hell.

In 1983, all of Paris was obsessed with Joël Robuchon. The thirty-eight-year-old chef was so famous, he was known simply as J. R. He had received the award for Meilleur Ouvrier de France when he was thirty-one, and then had gone out on his own to open Jamin when he was thirty-six. The restaurant earned one Michelin star just three months after opening, and a second star came a year later. The acquisition of even a single star can make the reputation of a restaurant. For a young chef to receive two stars in such short order was the equivalent of a young actor getting an Oscar for his second film. By the time I arrived at Jamin, Robuchon was more than a chef; he was becoming a legend.

For some reason, I wasn't nervous during the interview, which Chef Bouchet had arranged. I was more curious to meet this phenomenon and be in his kitchen, which didn't seem nearly as stressful as everyone made it out to be. We sat in his cramped, humble office at the end of the rectangular white-tiled kitchen.

As the staff prepared that afternoon's service, the room was as quiet as a museum gallery. I wondered if it was just made up, all the rumors about how intense it was to work at Jamin.

As he talked, I was struck by how gentle and modest Robuchon seemed. The brutality with which he was said to run his kitchen must have been an exaggeration. He was clearly driven, but he also seemed to live very much in his head. You had to talk to him for only a few minutes to see that he had an intuitive sense of the ingredients and a gift for innovation.

"Chef Bouchet tells me that you've come a long way in his kitchen," he said. I nodded, trying to disguise my happiness that Bouchet would say such a thing. "Do you think you still have something to learn?"

Was he kidding? For all I had learned at La Tour, there was so much I did not know. "I've developed speed and knife skills," I told him. "Now I need to tackle precision."

Robuchon seemed pleased with my answer. "Oh, I think you're in the right place."

I nodded again. I knew that I was in the right place.

He stood, smiling broadly, and shook my hand. "Can you start at the end of the month?"

As I walked out of the office, feeling both triumphant and nervous, I heard a familiar voice. "Oh, mon dieu!" It was Maurice, standing over a pot, simmering fish bones for stock. The pan was not as big as the stockpots I'd seen in other restaurants. This, I would later learn, was by design. Robuchon purposefully did not keep large pots on hand because he wanted to make sure that we made everything fresh. Pots came in two sizes at Jamin: small and medium. Even the cold storage area wasn't big, because he didn't want us to store much. "I thought I'd gotten rid of you. Are you following me, Ripert?"

Though they never lifted their heads, the cooks who worked shoulder to shoulder around him seemed to come to attention when he spoke. I remember thinking, So he's the boss here too, even though he's still just the chef poissonier?

I grinned back at him. "I'll see you in a few weeks, Maurice. You'd better be ready."

Maurice shook his head knowingly. "Kid, you have no idea."


Early on a Monday morning in December, just a few days after leaving La Tour d'Argent with the blessing of Jean and Bouchet (and a drunken farewell with the cooks), I was ready to start my new life. At six A.M. sharp, I spoke my name into the intercom behind a modern apartment building in the upscale 16th arrondissement. As if in a James Bond film, the heavy metal garage door slowly lifted and I stepped inside, going from one level of darkness to the next. It would be a full eighteen hours before I stepped out onto the street again.

My fellow cooks welcomed me into the locker room. They were pale and skinny like myself, and most were not much older than my nineteen years. I'd heard that most of them had already cooked in incredible places like La Maison Troisgros, a three-Michelin-star restaurant run by a legendary French family in Roanne. Several of the guys had trained with Alain Chapel, one of the fathers of nouvelle cuisine who was internationally known for his gateau de foies blond, a delicate and near-impossible-to-re-create symphony of butter, heavy cream, and foie de volaille.

Even at the high end, Parisian kitchens tend to be small, making a métro car at rush hour look roomy. But even by those standards, the kitchen at Jamin was tiny. The station for garde manger, where I was starting, was behind the coffee machine and next to the dishwasher for the glasses. Even before service began, it was already loud, with hot waves of vapor bursting into the air as cooks helped themselves to espressos and wineglasses were given a second cleaning. Somehow, I was wedged into that tiny nook, along with an apprentice and the chef de partie. My responsibility in garde manger was to produce the salads and cold appetizers. As steam billowed all around me, I wondered how I would create dishes that were still cold when I sent them to the pass. It will be okay, I told myself. The kitchen seemed pretty relaxed, with much less screaming than I was used to. And besides, Robuchon was being so nice.

"He's like that for a couple of days," a cook whispered to me during my first staff meal. "But watch out: it'll change, you'll see."

I didn't believe him. Every restaurant kitchen has someone on staff who sees it as his job to convince you that the sky is falling. He's just that guy, I thought. I was sure that Robuchon was a quiet, humble genius. Even now, it's hard for me to believe that I was once that naïve.

By the middle of service, I was a little spooked by how quiet and focused the kitchen was. I almost missed the microphone at La Tour and the bellow of Jean swearing at us.

During a brief lull on my service, I saw that the fish station was in the weeds. Since I'd been cross-trained at La Tour by Jean and instructed to jump in and help those in need, I went over to Maurice and helped him at his station. Then I hopped back to mine. I could tell that Robuchon was impressed. He nodded at me and smiled, like I'd exceeded his expectations. But I hadn't done it to show off; it was just what I'd been taught.

Later, the sous-chef, Pierre Gosse, came over and leaned on my counter. "Congratulations," he said, his mouth tight. "Today you really scored some points with Chef. He apparently liked what you did."

One morning Robuchon showed me how to make a dish he'd "just thought up": assiette belle de mer au homard, a cold lobster salad. It was so complicated, I got dizzy as he went through it: The lobster has to be cooked just before service, he explained, because refrigeration killed the flavor of shellfish. The bouillon to cook the lobster calls for chopped carrot, onion, celery, a fennel bouquet garni, orange peel, star anise, and black pepper. You add a splash of sherry vinegar, but you have to be careful not to add it too soon or the acids in the vinegar will prevent the vegetables from cooking properly. Once the lobster has been cooked, you discard the bouillon.

The claws are cooked separately from the tail, for four minutes exactly. Then the tail is wrapped in plastic film and speared on a metal skewer—a little trick Robuchon had devised that kept the tails from curling up and allowed them to cook more evenly.

While the seafood rests, you prepare the dressing, taking care to whisk it constantly. The dressing calls for mustard, sherry vinegar, ground pepper, peanut oil, and truffle juice. Stir in each element one at a time, then put the dressing aside. With a mini–melon baller, make balls of tomato, apple, and avocado, reserving the latter two in a bowl of lemon juice to prevent oxidation.

Then you have to decorate the plate. For the sauce decoration, you combine mayonnaise and tomato compote. For the cream sauce, you mix mayonnaise-infused mussel stock, crème fraîche, wine vinegar, and a drizzle of lemon juice. Beating the mayonnaise, stir in one ingredient after another: vinegar, crème fraîche, and lemon juice. Then reserve the sauce in the fridge.

Nothing was tossed in a Robuchon salad; everything was arranged as if in a still life. When it comes time to plate the dish, first you artfully brush the plate with the cream sauce. Then you arrange the pieces of lobster into a Y shape on top of the sauce, mimicking the shape of a whole lobster and its claws. Dip the small balls of tomato, apple, and avocado into the vinaigrette, and carefully arrange them around the lobster, alternating pieces of avocado, tomato, and apple. Sprinkle the lobster with chopped truffle, thinly sliced chives, and a few leaves of chervil.

Now you are ready for the dots. Dotting the plates with hundreds and hundreds of edible dots could drive even the most detail-oriented cook to the brink of insanity. The dots are a blend of delicately balanced sauces. The sauces were difficult enough to cook, but then to use them to decorate the plate with precision, battling the heat of the kitchen and the pressure of time, was, each day, a fresh slice of hell. Once the dots are finished, you complete the dish with a final turn of the pepper mill. Wipe the edges. One dish is ready to serve.

The hollandaise I made on my first day at La Tour suddenly seemed simple.

If you were to take out a pen and a piece of paper right now and try to make a circle of ninety perfect, evenly spaced dots—even if you are a good artist, even if you take your time—I could look at the paper and tell you where Robuchon would find fault. Imagine trying to do those dots with a sauce made of mayonnaise and tomato compote. The sauce is cold and thick when you start, but if you work too long, it warms up and thins. Sometimes, as I spent hours painting red dots around a plate, I couldn't tell if Robuchon was a genius or a madman. The answer, of course, was both.

Even the simplest dishes, such as a lobster salad, had as many as twenty steps. You could write the recipe down when you learned it, but during service, there was no time to refer back to notes. When Robuchon demonstrated a dish, you had to give him your fullest attention. Watch with your eyes. Listen to what he said. Visualize your hands moving the way his did. Eventually, after making a dish a hundred times, you got it.

Then it was my turn to duplicate the meal he had demonstrated. He pointed to the balls of tomato that I was trying to mimic. "I want the balls to be perfectly round," he said. "Perfect, perfect, perfect." Then he walked away. End of instruction.

That first week, he came over several times a day to correct my salad.

"Eric, don't do it like that," he'd say, taking the spoon from my hand. "You have to redo it like this."

If I did not rise to the occasion immediately, Robuchon would send support my way, often in the form of Pierre Gosse, whom I quickly learned to dread.

"Pierre, Eric didn't do a good job on that one," he'd say, holding out one of my salads from the elevated platform where he stood, overlooking the chefs at their various stoves. "Go over there and show him how to do it." Pierre was quicker than we were and his plating more precise, but on a bad night—when Robuchon was in a mood and felt like we were all against him—even Pierre's version would be deemed lacking.

Incredulous, I asked myself, How is it possible that the sous-chef of the most talented chef in Paris couldn't execute his boss's vision? He had to have been a good cook. He'd worked with Robuchon at Concorde-Lafayette and Nikko. Perhaps he started out strong and somewhere, somehow, he fell off.

Looking around the kitchen, it suddenly clicked: everyone was so quiet because they were scared. There was no screaming, no plate-throwing, no bruising claps on the shoulder like I was accustomed to. The fear of not meeting Robuchon's demands was all it took to terrorize everyone into submission. Multiply that by the fierce desire we all had to cook to his standards and it was no wonder everyone was so tense. Almost immediately, I felt that pressure descend on me. It was like a guillotine had appeared out of nowhere, perfectly positioned above my head, waiting.


Within a few weeks, I was promoted to demi chef de partie (a step between commis and chef de partie) on garde manger, which meant that I was now responsible for all of the cold dishes: three salads and five first courses. I had an apprentice and a commis to help me, but even so, it was physically impossible to produce what was needed for twenty diners in the allotted time because each plate required so much attention to detail and precision.

Even Robuchon had to admit that sometimes what he asked us to do bordered on impossible. Once he came up with the idea to do red pepper lobster mousse with a gazpacho vinaigrette. We tried that dish for days but in the end, none of us could make it to satisfaction: the texture was hard to manipulate, and the combination with the lobster, while flavorful, was inconsistent. For a restaurant dish to succeed, it cannot be a one-time circus act. In a restaurant kitchen, you've got to be able to fire the cannon twenty times a night, five nights a week. Eventually Robuchon gave up and changed the lobster mousse to a tomato mousse, a dish that made it to the menu.

And then there were times when I failed simply because of inexperience: though I'd been trained well at La Tour, there was still much I didn't know. One evening during service, the chef poissonier asked me to open two dozen littleneck clams for him. A simple enough task, but I'd rarely done it before, and I was very clumsy. I was not a trained fish chef. I was still on garde manger: cold appetizers and salads. So I lined them up on the shelf and waited for them to open. When a clam opened a little, I shoved my oyster knife in and shucked it. When the chef poissonier returned, I handed him three clams.

"Where are the rest?" he asked.

I pointed to the shelf. "There, I'm waiting for them to open."


After a year and a half at La Tour, I had finally mastered the connection between thought and gesture—the ability to think, I'm going to put this dot of sauce right here, and to do it well. But Robuchon demanded a whole new level of precision. Each plate was not only delicious, it was also a work of art, and it seemed to require some mysterious combination of magic and science to complete a dish and have it arrive at the diner's table looking the way it had just seconds before.

I had thought I was a strong cook, but at Jamin, I began to believe that I wasn't talented enough or seasoned enough to deliver Robuchon's vision. Once I sent my dish to the pass, I would shrink inside myself as I waited to hear his voice saying, "It's bad. Do it over."

If it was good, he said nothing. But during those long moments when you didn't know, when he stood, staring at your plate—and he inspected every dish—the not knowing made seconds feel like hours. If the dish was okay, he sighed heavily, as if, even then, he was being forced to compromise some element of his artistic vision. Then he would clean the rim, even if the plate was spotless. Then the plate would go.

But if, say, the baby shrimp in a salad didn't have the perfect petal-like rosace shape, each one curved like the petal of an intricately designed bloom, or if he noticed a speck of chive on a truffle, then he would scream, "Ripert, I'm not happy with you! This is not the way to do it!" He needed to let the whole kitchen know that you had not only erred, you had failed him and the reputation he had worked so hard to create.

Not even the smallest error escaped his attention, and I always feared that I was next on the chopping block. Only Maurice managed (mostly) to escape his ire—Maurice and the dishwashers. Robuchon was extremely gracious to the African men who worked as the dishwashers at Jamin. They never bore the brunt of his criticism, even when their errors were egregious. What concerned him was the customer, and as he could not cook forty-five meals a night by himself, it was us—the cooks whom he trusted to execute his vision flawlessly, night after night—who felt the full force of his frustration. What happened away from the customer's plate and palate was of far less concern to him.

This leniency sometimes went too far: once Robuchon was giving a tour of the restaurant to a visiting Japanese dignitary between the lunch and dinner services. On that particular day, the dishwashers had decided to use their downtime to do their laundry. They hung a line from one end of the tiny room to another and after carefully cleaning their delicates, hung their socks and underwear to dry. Robuchon entered the kitchen, his face full of pride—until he looked up. Disbelieving, he ran up to the line of laundry, then slowly backed away from it. He tried to speak, but it took him a few moments to find the words. "What? What is this?" he sputtered. Then he turned to Pierre Gosse and whispered, "Please, take that down." He turned his guests around and took them out of the kitchen.

And yet, that afternoon, neither of the dishwashers lost his job. He seemed to understand that they simply didn't get it. He could, and often would, lose his mind over an ill-placed dot on a plate or a badly shaped tomato ball. But I had to give it to Robuchon. His focus was fully, and totally, on the food. Dirty laundry, even in the kitchen, didn't faze him.

At Jamin, every shift was a marathon. Each time that you lined up at the starting block, your fight-or-flight instincts were on fire and you wanted to say enough, I quit, I can't. Most of the time, when you saw someone break down on the line, the truth was that for them, it was over before the shift had even begun. If your sauces didn't come out right or you were behind preparing your mise or you overcooked an expensive ingredient, then you were screwed before the first diner even sat down and opened the menu.

I was on the train before sunrise every morning, rehearsing my morning prep in my mind. Each day I had only one goal: to execute my plates without Robuchon noticing me. As long as I didn't make some mistake that he caught, as long as my plate wasn't the one held at the pass for extra scrutiny—or worse, sent back to be done again—then it would be a good day. There were a hundred things to do before Robuchon came rolling into the restaurant at nine A.M. The earlier I arrived, the better chance I had of not screwing most of them up. When the subway stopped at Trocadero, the station nearest to Jamin, it was still dark. The only time I saw sunlight before work was at the height of summer, during the three or four weeks when my work schedule actually coincided with daylight. As I walked to the restaurant, I mentally went over the recipes that Robuchon had put on the menu for the season.

Robuchon did not believe in specials. He didn't believe in weekly menus. He believed that frequent menu changes meant that you sacrificed perfection for variety. If we were always cooking new dishes, he worried that we wouldn't have the luxury of executing them on the technical levels he demanded. So his menu was conceived by the season, and each recipe had more steps than any other I had ever encountered. It didn't help that the dishes were unlike anything that was served in other Paris restaurants. Every dish was a complicated pairing of ingredients that weren't usually served together: spiced sea bass with a verjus sauce; oyster medley with bay scallops and caviar. In culinary school, I had rolled my eyes at the humble dishes we were taught to make. Now I longed for something easy so that for once, I could pull it off without thinking. It was all so hard, there was no chance I would ever do it perfectly. No one who worked for Robuchon expected to shine. All you could do was keep your head down and try to survive.

Early in the morning I would at times almost forget to be afraid. But from the moment I heard the garage door open at nine, followed by his car driving in, the fear came rushing at me, a runaway car with no brakes. He walked into the kitchen noiselessly, like a ghost, but I always knew when he had entered the room. I didn't have to see him to know he was near. We could all sense him, the fear silently rippling through us.

The first thing he said when he strolled in was, "Come on, guys! You have to clean the kitchen!" If he was in a good mood, he would tap you on the shoulder and say hello. If not, he greeted you with a glare and chilling silence. You know how laughter can be contagious in a group? Anxiety was like that at Jamin, and I had caught it from Gosse and the other cooks.

The only reprieve in all the pressure was that Jamin, unlike most restaurants, was closed on Saturdays and Sundays. The catch was that our team worked double shifts Monday through Friday. We arrived around six, never later than seven A.M., and didn't leave until well after midnight. When Eric Gestel, whom we called Coco, came to work at Jamin, we all remembered his first day because he worked hard and was impressively capable from the beginning. Then around four o'clock, he took off his apron and asked, "When does the second team come in?" Maurice and I burst out laughing.

Maurice said, "You take a half-hour break and then you are the second team." Every day was sixteen to eighteen hours long, sometimes longer.

The grueling hours meant that we took shortcuts where we could. Everyone had his secret mise. On Monday we were required to start from zero, but that was absolutely impossible. So Friday night, we'd hide things just before we left for the weekend. I would tuck stupid, meaningless mise en place under the lettuces, like a mayonnaise or a vinaigrette base. The guy at the sauce station would stuff the chickens with things for his mise. Everyone except Maurice: only he was able to deliver things as quickly as Robuchon wanted them. The rest of us had to find tricks in order to be as precise as was demanded.

But we did the best that we could because we understood the pressures that fell on him. Robuchon had the challenge of running a tiny restaurant that couldn't possibly have made money: there were twenty-five cooks for forty covers (versus twenty cooks for a hundred twenty covers at La Tour d'Argent), and he bought the most expensive produce in Paris. We didn't want to waste or ruin any of the ingredients. We understood that he wanted everything done à la minute to preserve their essence.

In my mind, the only way I could give the chef what he wanted was to be "creative." It started with the rabbit terrine. He demanded that it be made fresh every morning and ready to serve by noon, but when made to his specifications, it would take at least six hours and eat up 75 percent of my attention—and even then there was no guarantee it would be up to his standards. To make the terrine I had to braise the rabbit and vegetables separately, then cut them into a perfect brunoise. The gelée had to be made using calves' feet to set it—never gelatin—and it couldn't be too firm. (All of these components were prepared in different stations, so I was always in someone's way.) The terrine needed to be built stage by stage, layer by layer, so that it would set while remaining perfectly soft, and the layers would almost float, one on top of another, sticking together instead of sinking. The challenge was to create volume and space in the architecture of the dish while balancing the elements of heat, the organic nature of the ingredients, in other words, how they might separate and change in just a few minutes or even moments of being left out of the fridge. We had to be good, but we also had to be fast. So there was that too—the constant, unending need for speed in a restaurant kitchen.

Often, the terrine wouldn't take in the short time allowed. It was so fragile that I had to slice it with an electric knife, rescuing the rubbery cubes of shiitake that popped out and painstakingly trying to fit them back in like a surgeon. I used dill to frame the terrine, almost like a painting. Once the terrine was done, you spooned gazpacho sauce around the base so that it created a perfect red circle around the dish. The trouble with the gazpacho was that tomatoes start to release water after a few minutes, breaking with the olive oil in the sauce, so again, you had to move quickly. Finally, I had to do those damn green dots. When the dish was executed properly, it looked like a perfect mosaic—for just a few minutes. Robuchon would take his time looking at it on the pass, my life flashing before me.

"Ripert! It's too hard."

"Ripert! It's too soft!"

"Ripert! Your vegetables are no good."

"Ripert!"

And that was only one of seven equally complicated dishes on my station. If he decided at lunchtime that I needed to make a new terrine, I wouldn't have been able to do it even if I had every cook in the kitchen helping out. So I decided there was only one way I was going to survive. I would make two or three at a time and hide them in my refrigerator, moving them to another fridge when he came to inspect my mise en place. This way I could just cut him a slice from terrine number two and pray that the fresh herbs hadn't turned brown.

"Ah, see? When you want, you can do it," he'd sometimes say.

This did not always work according to plan. "That terrine is no good! I don't want it!" he'd yell when he'd see a fleck of tarragon the same color as the gelée. "I don't want that terrine. Make it again."

It was one o'clock, and he had no choice but to use the terrine—even if I began a new one right then, it would never be ready for that night's service. Then he would settle for choosing just the right words to destroy me: "You really don't care about quality," he'd say. "I mean, seriously. How can you give me a product like that? What do you think you're trying to do? If you don't care—and clearly you don't—don't work here. Don't come back. Go do the kind of bullshit cooking you like somewhere else."

I knew that Robuchon had only become Robuchon by meting out the same punishing standards for himself. Picasso once said, "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." I think Robuchon worked the same way. He wasn't merely challenging us with the nearly impossible as a test. Deep down inside, he needed to know just where the line was, how far he could push an ingredient, a technique, a flavor combination. I knew that every criticism he hurled at us, he had hurled at himself a hundred times. He was more than a simple perfectionist; he was a visionary whose goal was nothing less than to change the face of French cooking.

I'd worked at La Tour d'Argent; I knew that Robuchon's terrines and dots were to traditional French cuisine what Picasso's cubist paintings were to a roomful of Rembrandts. Moreover, his business model was one of those complex mathematical problems that only a supercomputer could solve: you take the most expensive ingredients and multiply that by X dishes, then divide that by Y, the infinitesimally small number of tables we served each night, then subtract rent, lightbulbs, linen, and tableware, as well as the salaries of twenty chefs making a living wage. He was famous; he was the toast of the town; but each week when he sat and ran the numbers, he was barely holding on.

And yet for all the compassion and practical understanding I had of who Robuchon was and what he was facing, I was still just nineteen years old. He was my first truly frightening boss. After one month, I was completely terrorized. Even when I could talk myself into letting go of the emotional part of my fear, I would find myself crippled by the mere prospect of trying to match the pace. The amount of work was just too much; even Maurice was struggling to keep up. Sometimes I panicked and asked Gosse to come help in my station, but if Robuchon found fault in one of his dishes, Gosse would simply turn his back on me rather than take responsibility for the slightest mistake.

When I got home at night, I was too tired to brush my teeth. I slept all day Saturday. Sunday I lay in bed with a stomachache, dreading the week ahead while mentally preparing my mise. Monday morning I woke at four to shower and get to work, afraid that I would get there too late to prep in time for lunch.

Sometimes I felt like I didn't understand what Robuchon was asking me to do. The language and techniques were far too advanced. He was very specific about how he wanted, say, the velouté done. Typically a velouté is a light stock thickened with a roux blond. But when the first asparagus of the spring came in, Robuchon decided that he wanted to experiment. I was told to cook the stalks in chicken stock, wring them in a towel to extract all the essence, then mix the liquid with cornstarch to bind it. He wanted that sauce combined with crème fraîche and used as the basis for a new dish. I quickly discovered that the cornstarch mixture broke and became liquid, and there was no way I could save it—not that I had the guts to tell him. The sauce also had to be kept over ice until the last minute, because it turned to water the second it hit room temperature. I tried to come up with something similar to what I thought he wanted without him finding out that it wasn't his recipe, until one day the sauce was so thin, the green dots started to dissolve and run into the cream sauce.

I asked a waiter to do me a favor and just send it out. "Please! Don't show it to him! Just take it into the dining room!" I begged.

But the captain saw it and sent it back. He made it clear: he wasn't going to go down for me.

"I don't trust you, Ripert!" I heard the shout from the pass. "You're a liar! How could you lie to me? You already lie about your terrines."

The week before, he'd come over and barked, "Open your fridge!" I couldn't refuse. He pulled out three terrines and slammed them on the counter.

"What in the world are these doing here, Ripert? Are you a magician?"

"Well, it's to feed the staff, Chef! Because we don't want to throw them away." The terrines were actually looking much better, but Robuchon didn't care.

He never had to so much as lift a finger to hurt us: with the strength of his eyes and his attitude, being subject to Robuchon's anger felt like being crucified. "You're lying," he said, his eyes cutting into me. "Now I know why you've been serving this shit for so long. It's because you're cheating. You want to kill my restaurant!"

How had I expected him not to know? This is the man who would look at a scoop of apple on my lobster salad and declare it too white. He could tell at a glance that, in an attempt to get ahead for my service, I'd cut my apples early and dipped them in lemon juice to keep them from browning. How could I have expected him not to catch a premade terrine?

There was no way I could apologize in front of the kitchen. Apologies were never accepted, and they never fixed things.