Finally, that March, Jean-Louis Palladin's cool, raspy voice came on the line and told me that the visa had come through at last. He wanted me there in April.

I knew that I had to break up with Bernadette for the last time. If we didn't, it would just keep dragging on. She'd come to Andorra. She'd probably find me in Washington.

"Here's what I'll do," I told her as she sat on the edge of her bed. "You know that the relationship that we have is very bad."

She started to protest, but I kept talking. "I'm going there with no money, and neither of us speaks English. If it's bad, it'll be like Paris but worse. We should end it."

She began to cry. "It's not that I don't want to be a normal person," she said. "I don't want to make a scandal every time we're together. It's just…I can't control you, and I can't control myself. You're right: you should go."

Saying goodbye to Georges was harder. I knew that we would remain friends, but I also knew that America was far away and he was already an old man. Thinking of my father's death, I wondered if I should attempt to say goodbye just in case I never saw him again. Early the next morning, the coffee brewing in the fireplace, I tried to start, but he waved away all my attempts at sentimentalism.

"You think because I'm just a simple farmer that you'll be done with me?" he joked. "Just because you're going to cook for the president of the United States in Washington, D.C., doesn't mean I won't have a thing or two to teach you when you come home."

I began to explain that I wasn't going to cook for the president. I was going to Washington, D.C., not the White House. But Georges just laughed.

"I'm just having my fun," he said. Then he asked, "You taking Bernadette with you?"

"No, we're ending it."

"Don't feel guilty," Georges said. "She'll find herself another stray dog. Maybe the next one will like being kept on a leash." Then he laughed again, the kind of full-bodied laugh that filled the entire room. And it occurred to me that for the first time, in a long time, I was happy.

Georges, Raymond, Jacques, Maurice. In the year of changes ahead of me, I would often think of all of the good, wise men who touched my life. Could it be that, somehow, my father sent them? Pointed them toward me, as guides, to help complete the work he could not? My father died when I was young. That is the central tragedy of my life. But his spirit never left me, and that may be the defining miracle of my life.

I packed only one suitcase for my move to America, with some sweaters and my knives. The restaurant would provide my uniform, and I could buy whatever clothes I needed once I got there with the money my mother had given me. Besides, who knew what would come of this job. I remember thinking, I might be back in a month. I had no idea that I was about to build an entire life in America, that I would never again live in France. One suitcase, and it wasn't even packed to the gills. Perhaps unconsciously, I was leaving room for all of the possibilities.

To get to America, I would have to take two planes—one from Toulouse to Paris and another from Paris to Washington, D.C. My mother drove me to the airport in Toulouse and, as we had so many times before, we drove to the top of the mountain and there at the very top, we crossed the border from Andorra to France. When we got to the border, my mother stopped the car and gave the customs agents our documents. I remember her saying, with great pride, "My son has been invited to be a chef in America. Look at him, he's still just a kid and he's already made his name in Paris. They have invited him abroad."

Usually I would try to shush her, have her not embarrass me. During that last visit, I took great pains to point out that I was twenty-four years old. "Hey, I'm not a kid, I'm a man." But my mother insisted on billing me as a child prodigy. While she bragged about me to the customs agents, I sat quietly, lost in my own thoughts. I was deeply aware that I was turning a page, that I was—in my young life—at the top of the mountain in more ways than one. My childhood was over. I knew that I would never live in Andorra again, that I would never again have this back and forth of living with Mom. I had this sixth sense telling me, "This is over. You're going to America and you will never come back to Andorra in the same way."

I was not yet a Buddhist, but I had this very Zen moment of being absolutely and completely in the present. We couldn't have spent more than thirty minutes at the border and yet time slowed down so much that it felt like days. I looked at the mountains where I had hiked and cooked with my family and friends. This was the backdrop to the happiest moments I can remember and even that was a kind of revelation: my life had seemed so hard, but it felt good to look out at the bright blue sky and be able to recall so much happiness. I remember feeling a certain nostalgia because as much as I wanted to, I couldn't take the mountains with me. Once we cleared border control and my mother's car began its downhill descent, there were even more goodbyes. We were in France, but France for me was done. Whatever I had done in Paris, that was over too. I knew I would never go back to the world of Robuchon and Jamin. Twice was enough.

Years after my father passed away, my sister ran into some of the friends who had been with him on the mountaintop when he died. Apparently, he was holding his camera and peering through the lens right before he collapsed. "You go ahead," he had encouraged them. "I want to take some pictures." But his friends were in no rush, so they were just a few feet away when he began to snap photo after photo. Cameras were big mechanical boxes back in the late 1970s and one friend in particular remembered the sound of my father taking pictures, the click of each image being captured on film. All of the friends remembered his last words and it was a story they had discussed many times over the years. Before he passed away, before he dropped the camera and his heart stopped, my father looked through the lens and said, "Oh, it's so beautiful." I often wondered what exactly he saw through the camera as he gazed at the end of his life. I thought of him as we drove to the airport because I knew that, in my own way, I was seeing things for the first and the last time.

In Paris, everyone I cooked with—with rare exceptions—was French. There is a shorthand, a sameness that you come to take for granted, under those circumstances. I had very little fear about my new life because I thought anything would be easier than Robuchon. I did not realize how extremely naïve I was about America. First of all, I didn't speak English. I thought, Jean Louis is going to be kind to me because he's French. We're going to speak in French. He's going to be cool.

Then my ego started kicking in: You know they probably need me in America because I'm a great cook. I came from Robuchon and now I'm going to come to America. I thought there'd be a kind of culinary red carpet for me at the airport. I had no idea of the struggle ahead of me and how it would humble me. I did not know it yet, but an American restaurant kitchen is the perfect place for an immigrant to find his way: I would be surrounded by people who did not speak English as their first language, who know deeply and profoundly what it feels like to leave your country, without a safety net, to leave everything and everyone you know behind.

I also did not think that I would spend decades in America. I thought I was going for a training stint: three years, tops. My dream was to open a restaurant in Spain, my own mash-up of Jacques's place in Andorra and the kind of innovative cooking we were doing at Jamin: a small, intimate restaurant, with great service and great cuisine. I had vacationed in Spain since I was a teenager, and it had always been a fun place. I imagined I would end up there: pursuing a Michelin star or two, but also making sure that I had a great quality of life.

I knew that America would be an important part of my development as a chef, but I did not think, at twenty-four, that it would become home. Once I said goodbye to my mother, once I de-boarded the short flight from Toulouse to Paris, I set my mind on the adventure ahead of me.

Who would I be in America? Nobody knew me there, so I had—I thought—the opportunity to choose. I would be authoritative and modern like Bouchet, strong in technique and spirit like Maurice, creative and maybe a little unpredictable like Robuchon, dedicated and joyful like Georges.

I sometimes wondered why I hadn't gone into banking like my father or become an entrepreneur like my mother. While it is true that I developed a taste for luxury early—I can still picture myself in Jacques's kitchen at age thirteen, the two of us eating spoonfuls of Beluga caviar, scooping it straight from the tin—I have always liked the practicality of kitchen life: the way that every meal begins not with fireworks but a foundation of well-honed basics, a well-executed mise en place, and an appreciation for the ingredients. Georges was never in the kitchen like Maurice and Jacques, but he could see it in me: the dedication to the basics, the desire to master each dish and technique, the way that cooking was a mountain that I would patiently and joyfully hike until I made it to the top.

For whatever reason, I wasn't nervous when my mother left me at the Toulouse airport, perhaps because this car ride was so different from the monumental ones we had taken before. I was not eight, being exiled to boarding school. I was not fifteen, a kid headed off to my second-choice culinary college. I was not even the seventeen-year-old arriving for work at La Tour d'Argent. My boyhood had wounded me but, in time, I had managed to gather the pieces together into something that felt fairly whole.

During my transfer at Charles de Gaulle, I had just a handful of francs left, so I went to the newsstand. I picked up an issue of Playboy, thinking it a very adult purchase. But on the way to the cash register, a book on a low shelf caught my eye: it was about Tibet. Much like the moment when I had to decide between a date and my first dinner at Jamin, I found myself deciding between an immediate pleasure and the opening of a door that could change my world. There was so much I wanted to get out of my trip to the States, and achievement in my field and romantic love were high on my list. The book about Tibet seemed to offer something that I did not realize I was missing: it spoke to the possibility for peace—not in the global sense but a peace that could exist in one's life and in one's heart. When the announcer said that my flight was boarding, I acted on instinct. I dropped the Playboy, grabbed the book, and ran to my gate.

Back then the airport had an elaborate system of calling passengers from one waiting room to the next until you finally boarded a bus that carried you out onto the tarmac, where you climbed—in the fresh air—a giant set of stairs up to the plane. I had a lot of time to think, and as I would do so often in the months and years to come, I thought of Robuchon.

He had shattered my confidence and instilled a kind of fear in me that even now defies explanation. As terrified as I was of Robuchon, I stayed at Jamin, and returned for a second tour, because I knew that he was teaching me more than I could have learned anywhere else. Though this was hard to keep in mind while he was yelling at me for my mistakes and while I cursed at him under my breath, he wasn't just breaking me for the sake of breaking me. He was molding me, and the other young chefs he had chosen to be part of Jamin, in his image.

In Robuchon's kitchen every ingredient was precious; nothing was to be taken for granted. For him, everything that we touched, from the smallest fava bean to a sliver of black truffle to a tablespoon of caviar, was equally alive and therefore important. Robuchon taught me that no ingredient is humble; every ingredient is sacred. It has been many years now and I have been shaped by many other chefs, but there are moments—like when I grab a tray of tomatoes—when I hear his voice urging me to respect the fact that even a tomato is precious, and it is as if I'm twenty again and he is walking beside me. In those moments what I remember is not the pain, but the possibility. It's like the Buddhist author Shunryu Suzuki wrote: "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few." I had spent the better part of three years challenged by Robuchon's requests. But because of him, I was headed to America, a place I had dreamed of living since I was a boy. I knew then that he had seen something in me—not just a lack of skill, because the skills would come—but in all of my blankness, an endless span of possibility.