I got through the last few months of that school year like a prisoner who knows that he will soon be paroled, if he can just keep his head up. I made myself anticipate the bright green smell of basil as I walked to the market with my grandma Maguy. I dreamed of long afternoons spent in the apricot tree, reading books borrowed from the nearby library. There would be Sunday lunches with the Italian cousins, and then I'd be off to Nîmes where my aunt Monique would spoil me beyond her means and my cousin Patrick would be the brother I never had. I thought about the jazz records my father would play when he came home from the bank during our weeks together, asking me what I thought about Mingus or Bird while we went down into his cellar to top off his vinegar barrel with the half-empty wine bottles from the party the weekend before. I collected my memories like the coins I sometimes found on the beach: shiny valuable things hidden by piles and piles of sand.

On the last day of school, when my mother came to pick me up, she hugged me and in her embrace, I could feel a hundred apologies. But I let my arms hang loosely by my sides. I did not—would not—hug her back.

 October 2, 1975

 Dear Eric,

 I have just seen the most incredible boxing match on TV. They called it the "Thriller in Manila." Two Americans. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Ali has a face like a baby, but he took Frazier out in 14 sizzling rounds.

 Ali calls himself the greatest and I must tell you, some people call him cocky, but I like it. Be confident, Eric. Be cocky if you feel like it. We only get one shot at this life, so why not float like a butterfly and sting like a bee?

 All my love,

 The Greatest Papa, Me

By the time I was nine, the suitcase underneath my bed was filled with letters from my father, but I never wrote him back. It wasn't my thing. Still, I loved getting his letters. They whizzed into my quiet and disconnected life like paper airplanes from a faraway land.

Before Hugo appeared on the scene, I did not mind all the ways my mother tried to pull me close. She picked my clothes, brushed my hair, hugged me on the steps of the school, and cupped my face with both hands when she kissed me, one kiss for each cheek, before I fell asleep at night.

I knew from watching the boys at school that a certain amount of exasperated pulling away was built in to the part that I had to play—the role of the beloved son whose mother cannot face that he is no longer a little baby.

But after Hugo, my pulling away was no act. My mother had, to my mind, chosen poorly, and I strove to remind her of this failing on a daily basis. Whenever she hugged me, whenever she kissed me, I wrestled away with a force that I hoped would convey the depth of my disappointment.

It was a round robin of pain and heartbreak: My father broke my mother's heart. My mother broke my heart by marrying Hugo. Hugo punished me because my mother was no longer happy with him and I hated him in return.

Even my father, married now to Francine and with another baby on the way, could not escape the fury that swirled around our home. Once, when driving me home after a holiday, he bought something in her store—a pair of pants, a belt—I suppose as a way to make amends. But she hated him as much as I idolized him, and as soon as he pulled away from the curb, she started in.

"Only hicks drive Audis," she'd sniff. "And did you see the pants he was wearing? Ridiculous. And his glasses are from 1965. I mean, not only is he cheap, the man has no taste. What a paysan."

Anytime I mentioned my father—after I'd read and reread one of his letters or talked about how excited I was to spend vacation with him—she'd rip him apart. He was a boring fonctionnaire, a paper-pusher in an unfashionable suit. He never wanted the beautiful things that she was working so hard to provide for us. He was a crappy trumpet player, a pathetic dresser, a cheat.

But nothing she said could temper the love that I had for my father. He was a big personality, a bon vivant, and an entertainer, but he was also unabashed and generous in his affection. My mother tried to impress me. All throughout my childhood, she worked hard to give me the best. She took me on trips to Paris when she was shopping for her boutique, she took me to fancy restaurants and bought me fancy clothes. She always let me know that everything we owned, from our car to the food on our plates, was "le top." But that was the difference between my mother and my father: my father might not have been the best dresser, might have worked in his garden in an old stained T-shirt, and might have gone too far when he puffed out his cheeks to play the trumpet like Louis Armstrong, but there was never any mistaking his love for me. When I walked into the room, his eyes lit up and he wrapped me in his arms as if it was Christmas morning and I was the best gift imaginable.

My mother was my caregiver, the one I depended on. Day in and day out, she did what my father had to do only on the occasional weekend visit and summer vacation. But her love didn't seem to be as big or as boisterous. It wasn't her fault, but it was her fate, like so many single mothers, to be caught between a wistful child and his fantasies of the father who is perfect, in part because he is hardly ever there.

The summer after I returned from boarding school, I spent a few weeks with my father. He took me to the beach for the day, just me and him, no Francine, which was a gift in and of itself. My father sat on the shore reading a book and drinking pastis. I played in the sand just a few yards away, spending the afternoon making the most elaborate sand castles. I used every tool at my disposal—buckets, shovels, twigs—and it took me hours to build. Then, when I was nearly done, a kid came by and kicked it down, stomping on it left and right.

I went crying to my father and he looked over at the kid I pointed out. My father stood up, furious, and said, "Eric, you have to go over there and teach that kid a lesson. I want you to go down there and kick his ass."

With that he pushed me forward, toward the water's edge where the kid was playing in the waves. My father was watching me closely—every time I turned, he was there—making sure that I would accomplish this task of defending myself.

I got to the kid and tapped him on his shoulder.

"What do you want?" the kid sneered, turning his back to me. In that moment, I knew that he did not live with a bully like Hugo, because he did not seem to know that you never, never turn your back on your opponent. Without hesitation, I jumped onto his back and he fell onto the sand. He was so startled that he couldn't regain ground as I straddled him, pummeling him with my fists.

The kid's father came running down to the water's edge, followed swiftly by my father. The boy's father reached for me, yelling, "Hey, get off my son!"

My father grabbed his hand and said, "Well, tell your son this is what he gets for kicking over other kids' sand castles."

The two men began to argue, and feeling the confidence of having my father close, I lit into the boy even harder. I hadn't wanted to fight him, but now I could feel the pleasure of holding him down and beating him. I did not beat him as a proxy for Hugo; I didn't imagine that I would one day punch Hugo the way I punched this boy. Rather, I beat him the way I had learned from being the recipient of Hugo's bullying and it frightened me, more than a little, how much it pleased me to pummel him, to lose control.

Summers were a welcome reprieve, not because I liked being out of school, but because I knew that this was my time to escape Hugo. Each summer, I went first to Nice to spend a few weeks with my maternal grandfather, then to Nîmes to spend a few weeks with my father's side of the family. They were all excellent cooks.

My mother's mother, Marthe, died of breast cancer when my mother was sixteen. My grandfather was devastated and completely overwhelmed. It was the late 1950s and he didn't know how to manage as a single father. My mother's older brother had Down syndrome and required nearly round-the-clock care. So, in a move that was shocking at the time, my grandfather went to a local dating agency to find a wife, and quickly. He was introduced right away to Maguy, a divorcee with a young son of her own. The two got along well and soon agreed that a quick marriage was both the most practical and respectable way to proceed.

Maguy was blond, pretty, warm, kind, and generous to the core. She came from a big Italian family and soon all of her siblings and their extended families became part of our family too. Maguy mended clothes for a living in the basement of their simple stucco home in Cagnes-sur-Mer. She sewed a few feet away from the workshop where my grandfather repaired televisions and tinkered with his homemade shortwave radio.

Maguy raised my uncle Roger as if he were her own son. Looking back, I can see how much she taught me about hard work and how to carry oneself with quiet dignity around difficult people like my grandfather, who made his demands very clearly known, but rarely his affection. Their marriage worked because Maguy could tell, from the start, how much heart my grandfather had, and she never lost sight of this.

Maguy also taught me how food brings people together, and how it also has the power to make even the loneliest person feel like the center of the universe. From the moment I arrived each summer, Maguy would bombard me with a steady parade of my favorite dishes. Pissaladière. Ravioli de daube. Paupiette de veau with fresh peas. "Manges! Manges!" she would say, which, in her faint Italian accent, always sounded like "Mangia! Mangia!" This was not the elegant food of my mother's kitchen—no saumon en croûte or dacquoises in Maguy's house. This was simple food, cooked from the heart. I loved nothing more.

At my grandparents' house, I was still a loner and a troublemaker. I'd climb the apricot tree in the yard and spend hours hidden in its canopy, daydreaming about having my family together again in our old house in St. Tropez, with its little garden and henhouse. The tree felt safe (and its fruit was delicious). When I was on the ground, I busied myself figuring out ways to destroy the well-kept garden around me. I'd make dams out of dirt, fill the centers with the hose, then kick in one side and watch as the muddy water flooded the pétanque field down the hill. I'd roll my grandfather's old tires in the mud and chase them into the street. I'd pick every lemon, yellow or green, from the tree, and pretend they were grenades. I'd tear the wings off of flies and drown ants in water. My grandparents called me "turbulent" or hyper, and "espiègle," mischievous. When I was being especially bad, my grandfather would grab me with his rough hands and yell, "You have the devil in your body! I have a secret medicine to get it out!" Then he'd spank me and send me to my room. But for me, being left to my imagination never felt like punishment. Quite the opposite—it was where I preferred to be.

Partly to keep me out of trouble and partly because she could tell how much I loved it, Maguy would hand me my own wicker basket every morning and take me with her to the market. For me, our shopping trips were more about the smells than the produce we brought back up the hill. By the summer of my sixth year, I was so attuned to the scents of the market that I could have found my way through our shopping list blindfolded. To start, I would let the scent of pains au chocolat ready to come out of the oven guide me to the bakery. I could smell they were ready before I could see them, and that was a kind of training for my future career too: being able to tell, from a room away, the exact moment when the chocolate began to crisp as it overflowed the golden pastries at the edges. Next I would follow the metallic odor of blood to the butcher across the street where we bought veal and beef. After that I sought out the fustiness of the aged ham and sausage at the charcuterie, and then the grocer, where barrels of briny-slick olives pricked the back of my nostrils. Finally, baskets already heavy, we would make our way to the covered market, where every scent was even more intensified by the incubator effect of the hot metal roof.

The top note of the market's bouquet was always basil, bright and vibrant, a sunny green perfume. To this day, basil never fails to trigger a palpable swell of joy in my chest. I almost swooned at the fragrance of anise, clove, and mint coming from the hundreds of foot-tall bunches jammed into beat-up cans of water. I followed Maguy closely as she picked her way through stacks of salted baccalau; piles of papery, honey-scented zucchini blossoms that seemed to float, one on top of the other; booths manned by farmers who tried to sweet-talk us into looking at their goods, their tables sagging under the weight of musky-sweet melons. Even the zucchini had their own slightly bitter perfume. Peppers, capers, anchovies, tomatoes, goat cheese, grassy olive oil: all the brawny, fragrant flavors of Provence vied for my attention.

Though sweet and friendly, Maguy wasn't the easy mark vendors often took her for. She insisted on the best quality and price. "These tomatoes aren't ripe," she would say, pressing her finger to the unyielding flesh and giving it an accusatory sniff before putting it back. "The bread had a better crust yesterday," she would tell the baker.

"Smell this melon, Eric," she would say, bringing my nose to the stem end. "It smells like rotting papaya. That means it's too ripe. And look: bigger dimples mean female melons, which means they're sweeter. Tu comprends?"

Everything was touched, inhaled, disputed. And since she was always smiling, she always got what she wanted. If I was good, Maguy would give me a few francs and let me buy whatever I wanted. Inevitably, I chose a pastry.

Back home, I'd watch as Maguy sorted the produce, leaving most of it in a basket outside the back door, French country-style, and tied on her apron. Then she started making ratatouille or petit farci or gigot d'agneau—rustic dishes that filled the small, white-tiled kitchen with their slow-simmering odors. Except for a few pizza-making classes she'd taken from a local housewife, Maguy was self-taught. She was an intuitive cook. She knew how to work with her hands and season instinctively.

When she made petit farci, she'd seek out the best tomatoes she could find, neatly hollowing them out and setting aside any usable scraps. Then she'd mince the jambon de Paris, veal, and pork (and maybe a little diced coppa) by hand in one of her bowls, her fingers telling her if the mixture was too coarse or too soft. Next she'd stir in the herbes de Provence I'd gathered from the backyard, along with some parsley and nutmeg, and add an egg. Every time, without using a single measuring cup or spoon, she would have just enough to fill the vegetables, without a speck left over. Her senses were a steady, reliable guide.

Of all of the food I ate during those summers, there was one dish that I willed into being every day: Maguy's tarte aux pommes. The scent of butter and apple was sunshine itself. I loved it so much, she made one for me every day, no matter how much it heated up the already-broiling kitchen. I watched her prepare the dough in the afternoon, rolling it impossibly thin and laying it on a battered old baking sheet. Her secret was using demi-sel (salted) butter instead of unsalted, to enhance the sweetness of the apples. Then, she covered the dough with a kitchen towel and put it in the refrigerator to harden overnight. During my nap, she would pull out the dough from the day before, layer translucent apple slivers over the pricked crust, sprinkle a few teaspoons of sugar on top, and pop it in the oven. That was all. No fancy techniques, no sticky glaze, and no comparison. I could never wait for it to cool. Even though Maguy insisted that I share, all twelve thin, crisp, just-sweet rectangular slices were gone within minutes.

Although Maguy turned out the same dishes that were being made all over the south of France at the time, her food contained the most essential ingredient: love. True, the quality of her meals was due in part to the quality of the produce she used. (Even today, with access to the best produce in America, I will never be able to buy a tomato or an eggplant that tastes as intensely itself as those Maguy got in her village from the truck farmers she knew by name.) But what truly made the difference was that she put her feelings for her family into every pot. She cooked with the same care and attention that she gave everyone in her orbit. Every dish tasted as though it was made just for me.

And, in a way, it was. Maguy wasn't interested in getting me to help. Men, I was constantly reminded, had no place in the kitchen. "T'es toujours dans mes jupons dans la cuisine!" I was told in every house: You're always in my skirts in the kitchen! But watching from her doorway was all the experience I needed. Other kids looked to TV to entertain and instruct them; I had a view of my grandmother's stove.

Sunday was my favorite day in Cagnes-sur-Mer. I'd climb the apricot tree and perch in my special forked branch, my hands smelling of bark and verbena. If I sat facing the house, I could look through the balcony's iron bars and catch a glimpse of Maguy in her kitchen, busier than usual. If I turned the other way, I could see the château on top of the hill across the valley. Many of my daydreams took place in that castle. I'd swing across the moat, narrowly avoiding the alligators, to face off a gang of cowboys and knights. My heroic fantasies always culminated in somehow bringing my parents back together again. My longing for them was almost physical: when I was with one, I felt the absence of the other like a dull ache. And when I was on my own like this, I missed them both even more. Like some people are tired all the time, I was in a constant state of missing my mother and father. But Sunday lunch made things better, if only for the afternoon.

Sunday mornings, I would watch as my grandfather and his brother-in-law Gaston hauled the long wooden table out to the yard below and set it up with at least twenty mismatched folding chairs in preparation for Maguy's big, boisterous Italian family, who came for lunch and games every week. Even from up in the tree, I could sense the excitement building in the house, which would burst forth as soon as the first old Renault chugged up the steep driveway, followed by the second, third…sixth….By then I was out of hiding, ready to be pinched and hugged—and fed.

The house and yard filled with people, laughter, and food. The women always gathered upstairs around the dining room table to roll out tagliatelle on a wooden board, or stamp out ravioli and fill them with cheese while a big pot of Bolognese sauce simmered on the stove in the kitchen. Meanwhile, the men had their first aperitif, always pastis or pernod, and divided into teams to play pétanque. The brightly colored metal balls thudded on the sand court. The young cousins peeled off and attacked the foosball table in the basement. Then we'd play other games: I'd put on my Zorro outfit and run through the garden with them, tearing out verveine, mint, and rosemary by the handful as we raced past the bushes to see how much we could collect before my grandfather got mad at us for ruining his plants.

But as much as I liked playing with the other kids, I preferred to be with the adults. To be specific, I wanted nothing more than for the women to teach me how to roll out pasta and then hang it to dry on an old broomstick. When I tried to watch, they just ruffled my hair and told me to keep out of the way. "Go play with the boys!" they'd say, chasing me away with a pat and a shake of their heads before returning to their good-natured gossip.

By two o'clock, all twenty of us were crammed around the rickety table in the front yard. I usually ended up squeezed between adults, listening to them argue about leftist politics. There were always the heated discussions about who cheated at pétanque or cards, who caught the biggest octopus the last time they went diving, and who made the best soupe de poisson over a campfire on the beach at Triasse.

It was a roller coaster of intensity: the euphoria of the games followed by the drama of who won, who lost, who cheated. All of the men pretended to be angry after the game and no one was more moody about the outcome than my grandfather, whom everyone allowed to win, so that the head of the household would be satisfied and not ruin the day.

Bowls of fresh pasta and platters of vegetables that Maguy and I had chosen at the market that morning were washed down with bottles of rough wine. People didn't speak; they yelled. But it was all warm and loving, filled with hugs and the pure satisfaction of coming together around the table for an afternoon. There was incredible solidarity among Maguy's family: because of the economic crisis in Italy, everyone pooled their money to send relatives sugar, coffee, clothes, whatever they lacked. And even though my grandfather didn't know how to express his love as easily as they did, everyone understood that underneath his gruffness, he loved us all. For a handful of Sundays a year, I felt like part of a real family.


After a few weeks with my mother's family, I was sent off by train to Nîmes, a few hours away, for the next stop on my summer vacation.

The first few days of my visit were spent with my father's parents in the old part of town. My grandfather would take me to the railway-pensioner garden to harvest dinner, spending hours chatting with other retired train workers. In the big cities, every employee of the railroad was given a large plot of land to farm. The size of the parcel depended on how long you worked for the railroad and what position you held, but it was yours to cultivate however you liked. My grandfather's garden was about two thousand square feet with a little shack. It was a great benefit, and my grandfather tended it with pride and pleasure.

At home, I watched my grandmother Emilienne can tomatoes, cook down plums for jam, and put up jars of cherries or apricots in brandy. She made me endless croque monsieurs using a medieval-looking iron contraption that clamped the bread between long handles so you could hold it over a fire to make melty, lightly charred sandwiches. (After she passed away in 1998, I honored her with a dish at Le Bernardin. Granted, my croque was made with caviar and smoked salmon instead of ham and cheese, but I sought to imitate her golden crust, and the adoration and respect that went into it were entirely for her.)

After living like a retiree with my grandparents, I was ready to play with my cousins in deepest Provence. My cousins, aunt, and uncle lived modestly in a steeply A-framed cabin that my aunt Monique's husband built. Known in the Provençal dialect as a mazé, it was so small it almost seemed like a dollhouse, but I only slept there. Most of my time was spent running through the woods, hills, and vineyards with my cousin Patrick, who was about my age, and the kids from the few houses in the area.

Completely unsupervised out in the garrigue—the wild countryside of thyme, scrubby oak, and olive trees—Patrick and I ran free all day. We stripped the bark from trees, drowned ants in the inflatable pool, and played cowboys and Indians. We walked the mile into the village to buy baguettes, trying to catch a glimpse of the baker (we'd heard he kneaded the dough with his feet). We made up ghost stories in the woods after dark and sprinted home screaming our heads off. We even convinced ourselves that the Abominable Snowman was coming to get us—this in a place so hot that Patrick's father lay down on the table after lunch and turned the sprinkler on himself to stay cool while he napped.

It was the only time, as a child, that I can remember enjoying being with a group of kids my age. The games I had played in my imagination all those lonely afternoons in the back of my mother's store or up in the apricot tree in Cagnes-sur-Mer were finally brought to life with real characters. At the mazé, our gang made up new adventures all day long, living them out between meals, which were the only time we were separated or still. By the time we sat down to dinner, long after the late-August sun had set, Patrick and I were dirty, dusty, scraped, and tan.

At Monique's house, every afternoon had the excited, familial mood of Sunday lunch in Cagnes-sur-Mer. She'd line up a few wobbly folding tables under the welcome shade of some pine trees and we'd eat for hours. Patrick and I could run off and play and come back for seconds and thirds, and everyone would still be there, laughing and passing the platters. The cooking was simple and economical, served family-style on a plastic tablecloth. There was no room to turn around in that kitchen, let alone make anything sophisticated, but Monique took great pleasure in feeding her family tasty, satisfying meals.

The flavors of her dishes are ones that I can summon anytime, even now, forty years later: the basil brightening the flavor of the white beans in soupe au pistou; the salty sweetness of pissaladière, with its olives, onions, and anchovies on a flaky crust; the rich fromage blanc mixed with pungent anchovy cream and parsley that we slathered on toast; the garlicky brandade, the nature of which Monique debated with her bearlike brother-in-law Serge, who owned a restaurant near Montpellier. "No potato in the brandade!" Serge would yell, pounding on the table. "Just cod, two cloves of garlic, and olive oil!" Garlic, olive oil: the simple Provençal palate suited me.

When it came to eating, I was unstoppable. I didn't think twice about eating three or four croissants for breakfast, or the entire brick of cheese that Monique had bought the family for the week. It never occurred to me that since Monique's husband was unemployed, they didn't have much money to spend on food, or that I was supposed to share. My gluttony was a running family joke. You couldn't tell it by looking at me because I was skinny and tall, but I could, and often did, eat everything in sight. Monique spoiled me by making my favorite dishes, and liked to surprise me with a snack of hot buttered pain de mie, toast that she grated chocolate over until it melted.

I could sense that my family wanted to please and protect me. In the early 1970s, divorce was still taboo in Catholic France, and Monique was as Catholic as they came. She knew that as a result of my parents splitting up, I was now something of an outsider in French society—divorce, to her, was a disaster. I wasn't living the life that an innocent child should. Years later she told me that she felt a special duty to make sure I knew I was loved and surrounded by family. She saw my sadness and did what she could to make me happy those few weeks in the country: she cooked to mend my heart.

"Eric, can I offer you a snack?" Hugo asked one afternoon when I got home from school. He sounded like he was reading from a script.

A snack? You've never given me a snack in your life, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut. There was, after all, food to be had.

Soon after I'd returned from boarding school, we moved to Foix, where I started the fifth grade in a one-room schoolhouse that was so old, we wrote with quills dipped into pots of ink. Then about a year later, my family moved to Andorra—a twenty-mile-wide sliver of a nation in the mountains between France and Spain—in a sudden and mysterious rush.

My mother explained that the French government taxed unfairly and that she'd be better off opening a store in a country that didn't charge sales tax. Hugo, the die-hard socialist, said that the whole point was to avoid detection by the oppressive bureaucracy. So the two of them chose to exile our family to a mountainous country where we had no friends and everyone spoke Catalan and Spanish. In the end, though, not much changed: my mother worked six days a week, making lots of money, while Hugo, whom my mother banished from the store regularly due to his uselessness, hung around our rented chalet in his ascot and knocked me around, harder and harder.

He'd smacked me in the face once or twice in Foix—stinging new ends to our daily arguments—but it wasn't until we got to Andorra that war was officially declared. One day after school, I provoked him about setting the table—my favorite way to make him angry was to remind him of his masculine chores—and he charged at me and hit me with such force, I was knocked backward. It was the closest that he'd come to giving me an out-and-out thrashing. Usually, he preferred a more subtle form of roughing me up: kicks, punches, and shoves delivered in an almost offhanded manner. This time, he meant to kick my ass. I remember being almost impressed, thinking, That hurt. Wow, he's strong for such a little guy!

Later, when my mother saw the giant bruise forming on my face, she flew into a rage that surprised Hugo and me both.

"Don't you ever touch my son again, you hear me?" she told him, practically snarling. "I am in charge of the discipline in this house. Hit him again and you're out."

Hugo lowered his head and apologized. After that, he was careful to hit me where it didn't show.

And so when he handed me a box of chocolates after I'd already had my after-school snack, I was suspicious. Mon Chéri chocolates? "And your mother made you daube de bouef for dinner with millefeuille for dessert." I didn't need the sixth sense that my grandmother always told me I had to know that something very bad had happened.

At dinner, my mother abruptly excused herself from the table, leaving Hugo to serve dessert. Later, I heard her crying in her room.

My mother's crying went on for another day, alongside Hugo's smiles and special treatment. He even drove me down the mountain to the bus stop instead of making me walk through the snow like he usually did. When my mother was finally able to compose herself, she and Hugo asked me to sit on the couch and said that they had something to tell me.

"Eric," she said, unable to make eye contact, "we have sad news. Your father was climbing a mountain, La Rhûne. He got tired and told his friends to finish without him. By the time they got back down, he'd had a heart attack."

I felt my breath catch. "A heart attack?" I said. "Will he be okay?"

My mother began to cry.

"No, Eric," she said. "Your father is dead."

Hugo rubbed her back and offered me more chocolate.

I knocked the box from his hand and ran to my room. My father could not be dead. It simply was not possible. He lived far away and I did not see him often, but the fragile web of my existence depended on knowing that he was out there and that he loved me, and that someday, when I was older, we would travel together and hike mountains all over the world, as he promised me. The tears came quickly then as I realized that my mother would never lie about a thing like this.

There was a lot of shooting in the TV shows and movies that I watched after school with Hugo and I often wondered, what did it feel like to be shot? When my father died, I stopped wondering. Metal tearing through flesh sounded like a walk in the park compared to the hurt I was feeling.

I cried on my bed for hours and when it felt like I had shed every tear I had, I pulled out the box of letters my father had sent me since the divorce and read through them all, skipping the parts where he told me how mad he was at me for not writing him back (not my strong point) and how I should learn to behave and be more respectful of Maman and Hugo. Instead I focused on the lines telling me that he loved me and missed me, and where he described all the fun we'd have on my next visit: we'd go see the fishermen, he'd let me count the money with the prettiest teller at the bank, and we could go to any restaurant I wanted so we wouldn't have to eat Francine's food. He'd teach me to play trumpet like Louis. I replayed all of the conversations we had, the times we played in his house, our picnics in the countryside.

In the morning, I finally came out of my room.

"Should I pack, Maman?" I asked. "I mean, for the funeral?"

"It already happened," she said. "You're only eleven, Eric. You should have happy memories of your father alive with you, not of some body in a coffin."

I could not believe it. Did she want me to kill myself? How could she have kept me from my father's funeral? My sadness turned to rage and then the anger to numbness. It was like my heart had been cooked in a bonfire. There was nothing left but ashes, but the ashes still hid a few lethal flames.


My father had died, but I missed only one day of classes. I decided I'd rather go back to school than spend another day home with Hugo. It was a snowy day and as usual, I walked from our house to the place where I waited each day for the school bus that would take me down the mountain. Sometimes the snow would come down so hard, the only thing that let me know the bus was coming was the two red lights in the distance. I sat down on the ground, at the base of the mountain, and I spoke, out loud, to my father.

"Papa, if you are really dead, give me a sign," I asked.

I saw two red lights and I thought it was the school bus, but then a dozen more lights appeared and they circled my head like a red halo. The lights went around and around, whizzing just above my head, for what felt like a very long time. I had asked for a sign, and I received it. When the school bus finally pulled up and the door opened, it took all the strength I had to leave my perch on the mountain.

Goodbye, Papa, I thought, as the bus ambled away. Goodbye. I love you. I'll love you always. I love you still.

As much as I learned to love food by eating in my mother's and grandmother's kitchens, Jacques was my first introduction to a real chef. After I had my first meal at his restaurant, I began heading straight there after school to watch him cook. Why would I spend my afternoons doing homework or getting picked on by Hugo when I could hang out with Jacques? I never offered to help, and he never asked; I was only allowed on the kitchen side of the counter when he wanted me to taste things. Jacques had kids, a son and a daughter my age, but I don't think they were interested in the restaurant. But by the time we met, food—shopping for it, making it, eating it—was my greatest happiness, and Jacques could tell this from the moment we met.

It soon became clear to me that even though he put on a show, Jacques wasn't actually crazy or cruel. He just played the part of the town character. Everyone in our tiny capital knew that the native Parisian was a career parachutist who'd fought with, and cooked for, the colonial troops of the French army in the Vietnam War. What he had done in the war—what he might be capable of when vexed—was anybody's guess. By keeping his knives sharp and his temper sharper, Jacques kept people off guard—which is how he liked them.

In the kitchen, Jacques was a master of the classics, but his travels as a soldier meant his menu included dishes that you rarely saw on restaurant menus at the time: Vietnamese spring rolls, lacquered duck with five-spice, and poulet au bambou. These dishes not only made him justifiably celebrated, they also added to his outsider reputation.

Jacques used to say his mother-in-law was his true teacher in the kitchen, not because she taught him to cook but because she educated his palate. According to Jacques, during the year that he lived with his wife's family, menus were never repeated unless favorite dishes were requested. Mercedes's mother did everything herself: duck confit, smoked magret, foie gras, preserves of all types, sausages, marmalade.

He spoke lovingly about going out to jazz clubs and returning late at night to his mother-in-law's cold tomato tortilla waiting on the dining room table for him to enjoy. After she passed away, no one ever dared to make that tomato tortilla again, not even him.

If it wasn't for Mercedes, his wife, Jacques said his family might have starved: the personification of the phrase "a casa del herrero, cuchillo de palo"—in the blacksmith's house, they use sticks for knives. He was so busy with the restaurant that at home he never prepared anything more complicated than Brie and bread. But Mercedes made the most delicious paella in the world, tortillas that looked like two-tiered cakes, stuffed calamari, cannoli, and garlic chicken. Mercedes was especially gifted at cooking fish with sofrito. And she never wrote a recipe down.

Jacques said that because of his life in the military, he had traveled the world. In every place, he made friends. In every place, he had girlfriends. He might have stayed in another country if not for the wars that brought him to those shores in the first place. But he and Mercedes made a good pair. He had grown up in Paris in a neighborhood of European immigrants: Polish families and Gypsies, Spaniards and Italians. To him, Mercedes and her large extended family felt like home.


"Only if you cook what you love and truly understand will people be happy with your food. Running a restaurant is not a popularity contest. It is not really any way to get rich. But you can make beautiful food and you can live your life your way," he told me one day as he was writing out the menu on the chalkboard. "C'est toi qui décides. It must be you who decides."

One afternoon, while I was polishing off a steak au poivre vert at the counter (the important thing, Jacques instructed me, was to get the pan as hot as you could before adding the meat—that, and always give good wine to your butcher), an English couple walked in and told Jacques they'd heard about him. He was in a good mood and he winked at me to let me know he planned to have a little fun with them.

They knew about the set menu and asked what he was making for dinner.

Jacques smiled and said, "Tonight it's spring rolls, poulet au bambou, and baba au rhum."

The couple understood what spring rolls were, but asked him to explain the poolay, sill voo play.

"Alors," he said, his round face widening with a wicked grin. "Je vous explique. C'est le poulet"—he started clucking madly, his arms flapping crazily—"avec le bambou." He made wild stabbing gestures as he ran toward them, screaming.

Believe it or not, they stayed.

For Jacques, it was imperative that he choose which customers had the privilege of dining in the restaurant. For him, inviting guests into his restaurant was more intimate than inviting them into his own home.

The more I came to watch Jacques cook, the more he began to share his recipes with me. Eventually, Jacques even taught me the secret to his perfectly crispy nems, or Vietnamese spring rolls, which I had loved since one of my earliest visits. To start, he puréed onions and squeezed them in a towel to get out all the water. "That way they won't oxidize, so they won't taste like onion in your mouth. Tu comprends?" Then he mixed the onion with carrot, crab, ground pork, chopped vermicelli, champignons noirs, and a few eggs. "Are you watching, Eric? Mix it all together to make the farce. Use your hands. Then, when you put it in the wrapper, you have to be extra careful not to use too much farce, and not to roll it too tight."

My mother was happy to hear that he started frying them in a pan of cold oil, just like she did. She was less happy to hear that he let me eat twelve nems, versus her limit of eight at home.

I was fascinated by this new world of flavors and techniques that he had brought into the mountains; I imagined Jacques in the jungles of Vietnam, chopping down bamboo trees with a machete to make dinner for his regiment, or learning how to fold rice-paper wrappers from an old village woman. I began to imagine what other dishes lay beyond the borders of France, Spain, and Andorra. My mother introduced me to Moroccan dishes, and from my grandmother Maguy, I had enjoyed many great Italian dishes. My father's mother, Emilienne, taught me the tastes of Provence. She cooked with a lot of passion too. My grandmother Emilienne was shyer and not as expressive as Maguy, but I loved the time I spent in her kitchen. She cooked from her own garden and the radio blared opera—the bellowing tenors and cascading soprano voices that she loved.

The Asian influence was becoming big in France at this time, and Jacques played a big part in bringing those flavors to my life. So did my godmother, Rosemarie. She was an old friend of my mom's: a pretty strawberry-blond woman who never married and never had kids. On the occasional Saturday, Rosemarie would take me out to a Vietnamese restaurant and a movie. But I did not just eat Vietnamese food in restaurants. My mother also had friends in St. Tropez who were Vietnamese immigrants. They were the ones who taught my mother how to make Vietnamese spring rolls, and through them, that influence entered our kitchen.

Vietnamese cooking was very different from the Italian and Provençal influences, which were more prevalent during those times. In the early 1970s in France, mint and cilantro were not common in savory food. Mixing pork and shrimp was also unusual. Rice paper was a completely new ingredient in French cuisine, and the sweet-and-sour dishes that you find in Vietnam, like pork caramel, were not common flavors for the French at all. As a kid who was obsessed with food I loved all of it: not just the spectrum and combination of flavors, but also the way the food was served; it felt entirely new to take a piece of chicken and dip it into an aromatic, like fish sauce, before each bite. And of course, to a kid, chopsticks were highly entertaining.

At his restaurant, Jacques showed me how he made his mousse au chocolat without cream—just dark chocolate melted with butter before adding an egg yolk and folding it all into meringue with the lightest touch. He made it in the same scratched glass bowl, using the same aluminum fork, for years.

Everything at Chez Jacques was cooked with love and care. Serving only a few dishes meant that he could spend all the time he needed to baby his food: he would take an entire morning just to make a tarte tatin, something I would never again see in a restaurant kitchen. On weekend mornings that I was there, he showed me how to first melt the butter and sugar in the skillet, and how to nestle half of the apples in the pan and cook it all very, very slowly, as though he had nothing else to do that day. It was my Saturday-morning cartoon.

But Jacques's baba au rhum—the rich, yeasty cake soaked in dark rum with just the right hint of vanilla—was my true addiction. One day I asked if his mother had taught him the recipe.

"No," he said, holding up the bag of supermarket flour. "The recipe's right on the package. But when you cook a dish with passion, you elevate even a box recipe."

He was the culinary king of Andorra. Jacques, my hero. No bullshit, no pretension, just quiet mastery that seemed to come from his bones, and a true love of cooking that you could see, feel, and, most important, taste. When he wasn't trying to scare people, he was making them truly happy.

Watching Jacques over the years, I came to understand how much hard work goes into being a chef. Each night, Jacques's dinner service was a one-man show with triumph after plated triumph. But the next morning, he always had to start over from scratch, no matter how tired or hungover he may have been. He told me that despite decades in the army, he'd never really known hard work until he opened a restaurant. He made every dish himself and never took shortcuts. There was no one to help him in the kitchen, not even a dishwasher. But Jacques was happy to go shopping all morning and then come back to his restaurant and cook all day, and at the end of the night, to scrub his own pots and pans. As much as he loved to create exquisite meals, I began to see that what Jacques loved most was the autonomy. And as I moved from middle school to high school, that mixture of great food and great independence started to appeal to me too. I began to wonder what it would be like to cook for myself and on my own terms.

Jacques had a pension from the army, so he didn't need to work so hard, but he had no choice; it was in him. When he saw someone swoon over his chicken marinated with ginger and star anise, served with all of its juices in a then unheard-of bowl of hollowed-out sourdough bread, it was worth more to him than the hefty price they'd paid for the privilege. He was happy to have clients and do his little act. It was his life. More than happy, he was content, and that contentment came from the fact that he was cooking the dishes he chose, for the customers he approved, in a restaurant that he owned. He was a free spirit and lived, in that way, totally independently. It was a contentment that I felt too, but only when I was around him. He never encouraged me to become a chef, only to eat whatever I wanted, but maybe that's because he could see that the desire was already in me. I couldn't see it at the time, but what began as a refuge from home and an escape from Hugo became my truest school.

For all of her glamour, my mother loved being outdoors as much as I did. She needed the break. The boutique made our whole affluent lifestyle possible. The transparent coats, short skirts, and clingy sweaters made by Courrèges were incredibly popular, and my mom was the only person selling them in a petite boutique in a tiny country with no sales tax.

Come Friday night, every curve of Andorra's dangerous mountain roads was bumper-to-bumper with French and Spanish residents coming to buy clothes, liquor, cigarettes, perfume, and watches in the makeshift capital, where the traditional stone buildings with their slate roofs were being torn down to make way for a nondescript late-seventies boomtown. My mother's boutique was set off the main shopping street in an arcade called the Galerie de Paris. She had an eye for fashion and even I have to admit: no one wore those clothes better than my mother. Part of her success was that she was not just a great salesperson, she was also the embodiment of the brand, the way that Ralph Lauren came to symbolize a preppy lifestyle during the same era.

Come Saturday, her boutique was so crowded that she had to lock the door after every tenth customer. The line of women seeking the latest Courrèges styles stretched to the end of the arcade. People bought five or six of one item at a time; my mom had to restock before opening the door to the next round of customers. As her business got more and more successful, my mother began to groom employees she could rely on to watch the shop while she was away. Our weekend camping and hiking trips became a sacred refuge.

Outside of the time I spent with Jacques, the only true serenity I found was in the mountains. On Saturday mornings, we loaded our backpacks with tents, sleeping bags, and so much food and wine that Hugo's friend Roger often came along. Roger had owned a fish market in Toulouse, but had sold it by the time he and Hugo became friends. He was semiretired at that point, and a good companion on the road. He made Hugo more mellow, helped my mom, and was funny and kind to me. Our weekend hiking trips were welcome escapes from the tension in our home. It was as if we could only be a family when we were on top of a mountain. Every time, I could feel my whole body relax as we disappeared up the foggy peaks for two days of hiking and eating, the men happily carrying backpacks of food and bottles of champagne and Bordeaux.

There are dozens of lakes in the mountains of Andorra. During our years living there, we'd gotten to know which waters had the most trout to be caught. (Hugo, of course, fished with fly larvae, which were banned.) My mother would poach the just-caught trout in a big pot set over a camping stove. When the fish was almost done, she would add a dash of vinegar to the court bouillon in which she was poaching the trout. That burst of acidity caused the skin of the fish to turn blue—a rare delicacy I'd read about in one of her cookbooks. Then she would reduce the liquid, emulsify it with a little butter, and serve it as a sauce for the fish.

Typically, we'd leave our Jeep on a sliver of gravel at the side of the twisting road and hike in for a few hours. Once we set up camp, we gathered the green flowering branches from wild rhododendron bushes (domestic rhododendron is poisonous, especially the American variety) to fuel our fires. I tried to name all the wildflowers with help from Roger, who was a local. Whenever we were thirsty, we drank the snowmelt from a lake or stream. We scrambled up the narrow trails between the rocks until we came to the next pass. We edged sideways along icy cliffs, using hooks to keep from slipping, and one time got stuck in place while a fog rolled in and blotted out the path. One of our favorite weekend excursions was to hike past three lakes, over a mountain, and into France.

The walks were always intense—try as I might, I could never pass Hugo, who motored ahead of us on his stubby legs. My determination to put him behind me always got me to the top. During the moments when I wasn't competing in my mind, the beauty of the endless mountains filled me with a sense of expansive calm that I began to crave. I started keeping a notebook listing each mountain and how long it took me to hike to the top. My legs and lungs were strong from walking up and down the mountain paths of Andorra. I was getting stronger every day.

After we'd reached our destination, we would make camp for the night. I had my own tent. Whenever we went camping in the snow (somehow it seemed like a perfectly normal family activity to sleep outside in below-freezing temperatures), our dog, Yuki, slept next to me to warm the tent with his breath. At night I read my favorite book by flashlight: a Reader's Digest volume on New York City, filled with pictures of all the famous buildings and people. As much as I loved my outdoor life, for some reason I was determined to live in New York. My quest to get there became a climb of a different kind of mountain.

Often, in the spring, we'd have my favorite meal: a salad of white pissenlit, or dandelion greens, picked wild from beneath a patch of melting snow. (The dandelions were baby-white because they hadn't yet seen the sun. Later in the spring, they would turn a brilliant verdant green. But in early spring, they are still white, tender, and sweet.) My mother would toss them in a mustardy vinaigrette and serve them with lamb chops grilled on a piece of slate—a typical Andorran preparation in which the charred meat takes on a slight mineral spice. Finally, she'd prepare a fricassee of chanterelles that we'd gathered while hiking in the woods on our way to where we would set up camp.

During these meals, I imagined my father next to me, telling me what a strong hiker I was and planning our next climb. I always talked to my father when I found myself in a dangerous spot, imagining what it must have been like for him to die on the side of a mountain. His words of wisdom, which came to me as flashes of good ideas, always got me to safety.


Madame Amparo was the town psychic. She lived in Spain but like so many, she came to Andorra to do her shopping. She was a blond fifty-something woman, dressed in a simple but chic dress and, in the winter months, a vintage fur coat. Madame was gifted and when she came to Andorra, there was no shortage of people who wanted to book time with her and hear her predictions. More than just a psychic, Madame Amparo, many of our friends and neighbors believed, had the power to heal, and they often requested that she visit their loved ones in the hospital, where it was said that she could cure even the most devastating illness with her warm touch and powerful prayers. Her work was rooted in the New Age, but the benefits were so well proven that no one questioned the validity of her gifts. She was as well-regarded as an acupuncturist might be today.

There were only fifty thousand residents in all of Andorra, which meant that everyone either knew each other or knew of each other. Because my mother's boutique was so successful, everyone knew her, and they also knew that she was on her second marriage and that she had one son and a young daughter.

So when Madame Amparo approached me in my mother's boutique one day, I knew who she was and didn't rush away from her. On the contrary: I had been using the Ouija board for years and had a great interest in the spirit world and questions of spirituality. After my father's death, I began to use a glass and board to call to the spirits. My little sister, Marika, was my unwitting accomplice, but I was determined to get as many messages as I could from the other side, so I made her move the glass with me, even though she didn't know what we were doing and often laughed, thinking it was a game.

"Eric Ripert," Madame Amparo said, using my full name, as she always did. "I have a vision for you."

I hoped that the vision involved food and a girlfriend because I was hungry and longing for love.

"You have a bright and powerful aura, Eric Ripert," she said, closing her eyes and tracing the air above my head with her small, wrinkled hands. "You will live in a city surrounded by water."

I liked the sound of that—New York, after all, was surrounded by water. Once, when I was in the sixth grade, I took my piggy bank to the travel agency in town to see how much it would cost to fly to New York and spend a weekend at the Waldorf Astoria. They were kind enough not to laugh at me and just encouraged me to keep saving, explaining that I had quite a long way to go.

"You're going to work in a famous restaurant right by the water," she continued. "Tall building, very luxurious…"

Madame Amparo handed me a necklace with a cross on it, a cross of Caravaca, which she implored me to wear around my neck. "The original cross of Caravaca was found in Spain in the fourteenth century," she explained. "It contained a fragment of the very same cross upon which Jesus was crucified. But even a copy of the cross can be potent. This one has the full power of protection because it has been blessed by a priest."

She said that the amulet she had given me, a double cross with two angels, would protect me from violence as long as I wore it. I put the cross on immediately and almost never took it off. I wear it to this day.

I think that somehow Madame Amparo sensed that the violence that would be of greatest danger to me came from within: my short temper, my anger at the injustices that I saw around me, and the rage that had already begun to build inside of me. Or maybe knowing that I was without a father or brothers, she intuited that I had a longing for protection and gave me a symbol to remind me that spiritual protection was always at hand.


If you asked me at age fifteen what I owned, I would've told you nothing but the clothes my mother still bought for me, my hiking boots, a few books, my skis, and my beloved BMX motorbike. It would take time for me to see that my mother had given me a gift by bringing me to Andorra. Growing up in a small town, with a mother whose business was central to the city, meant that I was surrounded by characters like Jacques and Madame Amparo. They knew me, and what's more, they watched out for me, and dreamed for me of a life beyond the mountain range. Ask me now what I own and I can tell you with confidence that among my richest possessions are the memories I have of the people of Andorra, people like Madame Amparo, who made our village not just a place between France and Spain, but also a bridge between the stark reality of my present and the rich possibility of my future.

That fall, I entered the ninth grade and the time came to decide what educational track to follow. The principal called me into his office and said, "You're not performing well as a student, Eric. We have to find a solution."

Thinking of Jacques and my love of hiking, I told him that I wanted to be a chef or a forest ranger. I was in love with the mountains, but even I knew that I'd never pass the tests on biology, botany, and the like. On the other hand, I knew that I loved to eat. I loved the experience of fine restaurants, and the great chefs of the day were my rock stars. I had a book from the library on the best chefs in France and studied it every night before bed, to the point that I dreamed about Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and Georges Blanc. I'd never been allowed into a kitchen, but I'd been watching from the doorway my whole life. If I learned to cook, maybe I would be able to repay all the people who'd given me such happiness at the table.

After several more conversations, we decided that I would try to get into a top cooking school. The principal spoke to my mother and told her that he had a friend at the hotel school in Perpignan, and he would see what he could do.

Jacques was hacking up lamb for a curry when I told him my decision. He stopped, cleaver in midair, and beamed at me for a second before catching himself.

"They'd better watch out," he said. "You're going to eat all the goddamn dessert."

I remember that afternoon well because a little while later, André, one of Jacques's suppliers, came by with a selection of caviar for him to taste. André, I learned, had also served in the French Legion, and he and Jacques went back and forth with stories about their bravery and the feats of heroism they had undertaken to save the honor of Mother France.

I had eaten at fine restaurants since I was a little kid, but I'd never tasted the tiny black pearls André took from a large jar in an insulated bag. It was a two-kilo tin, almost five pounds of top-notch beluga caviar.

Jacques handed me a spoon—not a tiny mother-of-pearl caviar spoon, but a big soup spoon. Then he dug in, taking a huge scoop of caviar and popping it into his mouth.

I had seen Jacques eat and drink dozens of times by that point. But his reaction to that caviar was quite unlike anything I'd ever witnessed. He was in heaven. I stood with my spoon, unsure how a jar of fish eggs could elicit such a gratified response.

Jacques gestured for me to dig into the caviar, and still unsure, I politely scooped out a small amount. He took the spoon away from me and scooped out a heaping serving. I swallowed it and was surprised at how the flavor filled not only my mouth, but also my nose. I loved it—the saltiness, the richness, and the briny finish as I swallowed it.

"Do you like it?" Jacques asked.

"I love it!"

"Then don't be shy," Jacques said. "If you are to be a chef, these are things you must know. Eat more."

I grabbed another spoonful and closed my eyes. It reminded me of having sea urchins as a boy, at a seaside restaurant in Cannes with my father. He told me that "even if you eat a thousand sea urchins, no two will ever taste the same." I thought the same must be true of caviar: the flavor was that rich, that strange, that complex.

André explained that caviar is one of the world's oldest delicacies. "It predates the invention of champagne and was enjoyed hundreds of years before oysters."

Jacques took another scoop of caviar and winked at André.

"My wife better watch out tonight," Jacques said.

I must have looked puzzled—I had no idea what he meant.

"Caviar," André said, diplomatically, "is a very good mood enhancer. It is used, among the wealthy, to cure depression."

The memory of trying a food for the first time imprints itself into the flavor. A happy memory can make a food delectable, make you crave it, savor it, and, when it is gone, dream about the next time you will have it. Every time I have caviar, I am a teenage boy in Andorra, hanging out with my friend Jacques, eating spoonful after spoonful of beluga, downing it like ice cream.

That September, I found myself at Le Lycée du Moulin à Vent, and I was back again in Perpignan, where I had attended boarding school. It was a well-respected institution where fifteen-year-old boys came to learn how to cook and run hotels, and an even greater number of teenage girls came to learn how to become nurses, beauticians, and hair stylists. I wasn't thrilled to be sharing a dorm with fifty other boys, but somehow I managed to avoid the bizutage—the violent hazing that was a rite of passage for most first-year students. The older boys kept a slight distance, seemingly fascinated by my exotic Andorran background and designer clothes. Being different became an advantage. While the other first-year students were constantly getting their beds upended in the middle of the night, or having water splashed on their faces while they tried to sleep, I was left alone. (Theft was also part of the freshman welcome, but again, not for me.)

At that time, vocational school wasn't a training ground for the great chefs of France. Most of my classmates were guys who just wanted to get a comfortable job with good vacation time at a school cafeteria. A position at a nice hotel was about as high as they aimed. There were more than a few borderline juvenile delinquents in our midst. Instead of sending them to a correctional facility, the courts shipped the boys they thought could be saved to Perpignan for the rigid discipline. As we would soon learn, the "brigade system" was as military as it sounded.

You'd think my mother would have been upset by this blue-collar path—the equivalent of training to be a plumber or electrician. But for her, chefs were men like Bocuse, and restaurants were temples to good taste, rivaled only by her dining room. I wasn't apprenticing a trade; I was on my way to becoming a chef and cooking fine food. I saw it the same way. Sure, I would have loved to become a forest ranger. At fifteen, I thought that all a ranger did was spend his happy days hiking and daydreaming. But in my heart, I wanted to dedicate myself to becoming a renowned chef—no matter where I had to start. The year was 1980. There was no such thing as MTV, much less the Food Network. My goal wasn't to become a celebrity chef, but rather to cook in the best kitchens, creating the most refined food, in the kind of places that my mother read about, the kind of restaurants where one planned a reservation for months in advance because the meal was as valuable as a vacation, a one-of-a-kind journey of textures and tastes.

I made some friends, but when I wasn't studying, I was infinitely more interested in spending my time off with the beauty-school girls. The only problem was, I was too shy to talk to any of them. However, because they outnumbered us, the girls weren't shy at all. They approached me in gangs in the cafeteria and between classes, teasing me about my green eyes and saying they could tell I was a good kisser. Unfortunately, I was too lame to do more than take them to dinner or a movie. Then what? While the guys around me managed to smoothly talk the girls into their beds, I finished school with all the same awkwardness around girls with which I'd started.

The first-year curriculum was basic but thorough: knife skills, sautéing, braising, grilling, broiling, baking, plating and decorating, breaking down animals, filleting, preparing master sauces…Escoffier 101, as laid out by our classic course book, le Gringoire et Saulnier.

Our teacher, Monsieur Chaput, was a hapless guy who'd lived in Andorra, but with whom I felt no bond. He tried hard, but struggled to teach us because he wasn't a very good cook and wasn't very confident in his own mastery of the techniques. Maybe it was for the best that he wasn't very rigorous. Standing on my feet for six hours after spending the morning in classes on management, history, foreign language, and so forth was challenge enough. We were expected to commit recipes and skills to memory after just one demonstration, and it was up to me to make it work.

It was in culinary school that I learned the difference between cooking and eating. Prior to my second stint in Perpignan, I was a fine diner and as I saw it, food was art. At vocational school, I was being taught how to cook, but I was frustrated by how basic the dishes were. I was like a kid who had grown up listening to Chopin, then showed up at music school, never having actually played an instrument. I mean, when you listen to Chopin all the time, you want to become Chopin. And then you go to music school and all you're doing is plunking out do…re…mi for hours at a time. It's boring as hell, and not why you enrolled. I was impatient to create great meals and not so excited about starting with the basics. Why were we spending hours learning how to hold a knife or mince a shallot when we could be making nouvelle cuisine? True, I didn't know how to cut a chicken in eight pieces or make a béchamel. But in the two-and three-star restaurants I had been to, they were way over the béchamel. Still, there I was, in school, making the most basic of dishes—salade Niçoise, potato-leek soup, an omelette.

A typical cooking class went something like this: While we slumped in our chairs, Monsieur Chaput would stand at the blackboard and explain the day's dish, beginning with the technique. Let's say it was navarin printanier, a lamb stew with spring vegetables. He'd say, "This is a braise. We braise the meat because the meat is tough and therefore we have to tenderize it. So we cook it for a long time and we make a stew with it. Here are the techniques to make a stew: You sear the meat in a hot pan; the oil has to be smoking. Then you're going to flip the meat when it's caramelized—don't move it until it's sticking to the bottom of the pan. That's where you get the flavor. Then you're going to remove the meat from the pan. Then you're going to add the brunoise of onion that you've cut and the clove of garlic and the bouquet garni." And he would explain how to make the bouquet garni and how to cut the onion and so on. Still with me?

After we'd changed into our whites, we'd go to the kitchen—a big room divided into stainless-steel work areas—where we'd cook individually, in groups, or in pairs. We'd look at our bon d'économat, a list of ingredients, and get what we needed from the refrigerator. For the stew, we'd start with the lamb. For that dish, we might be separated into groups of four guys standing around a standard-size cutting board, taking turns chopping a couple pounds of lamb into cubes, and yet it still took forever.

Once everyone had finished, Monsieur Chaput would say, "Okay, we'll slice the carrot first, because otherwise the cutting board will smell like onion." You learn how to do a dozen cuts in culinary school and when you see the photos in your textbook, they seem simple enough. They include some you might even use in your own kitchen: large dice, bâtonnet (which are, as they sound, like small batons), medium dice, allumette (think matchstick French fries), small dice, brunoise (very small dice), and fine brunoise (super-small dice). But you have to learn how to do these cuts with a variety of ingredients, and they all respond to the knife differently: celery cuts differently than leek; cutting an apple is not the same as cutting a carrot. If the vegetable is too soft, then a fine brunoise is a nightmare; it becomes like mush on your cutting board, just a horrible baby-food-like texture. And accuracy is important. At home, no one is measuring your matchstick fries. In even a one-star restaurant, an allumette has to be ¼ inch by ¼ inch by 2½ inches, and any sous-chef worth his salt will be able to tell at a glance if you've screwed it up.

Then there is the question of speed. Back in culinary school, it would take my classmates and me ten minutes to dice half a dozen onions. First we had to remember the knife grip that we'd been taught, repositioning our hands a hundred times. Then we had to painstakingly practice the proper onion dice: even slices lengthwise across a halved onion just up to (but not through) the stem end, flipping it on its side and repeating the exact same way, then laying it flat again and running the knife perpendicular to the other cuts. It was boring, but at the same time I was conscious that I needed to master the knife skills that I didn't have. If I wanted to be the best in the class, I was going to have to stay ultrafocused, studying twice as hard and practicing on my own time and weekends when I was home until the movements became second nature. I needed to keep going through the entire process, exactly like learning piano scales. Even Chopin didn't start with a sonata.


Instinct in the kitchen is something you develop very, very slowly. At sixteen years old, my passion for cutting onions was just not there. Today when I cut an onion, I have fun. It's like a musician warming up by playing a simple song or piano scales. I love the craft and the contact, the sensuality of it. But at school, I cut so poorly that my hand was riddled with blisters. Eventually the joint at my index finger would become so damaged that my finger is permanently bent, ever so slightly. I was in pain and crying because of the damn onion. I didn't really feel anything about cooking. The onion was not talking to me! And ultimately, nothing we made at culinary school was as good as the versions I had eaten before, from Jacques, my mom, or my grandmas, Emilienne and Maguy; or at the Michelin-starred restaurants we would make pilgrimages to.

I was ambitious, sure, but I was also totally clueless. I hated to take the guts out of a chicken and didn't understand why I had to waste time putting my fingers up the cold carcass, touching weird, slimy things. Cleaning fish was even worse.

When I protested, Monsieur Chaput just shook his head.

"This is something that you have to know how to do as a chef," he told me. "It's not optional."

"When I become a chef," I said, "I'm not going to take the guts out of the chicken. My cooks will do it."

"Maybe. But until then, you're going to take them out yourself." He plunked the bird onto my cutting board and that was that.

I stared at the bird and remembered all the times I had seen Jacques cook poulet au bambou. I had never watched him clean the chicken, but that didn't mean he didn't do it. For the first time, it occurred to me that though I'd witnessed my friend working very, very hard, Jacques had done much of the scullery work of cooking while I was still at school.


Learning how to make a perfect consommé was magical to me. When I was done, the broth was as clear and delicate as water, but it was incredibly tasty. It was my first experience of the importance of craftsmanship. I learned that everything had to be just right: cutting the vegetables just so; simmering the meat with the mirepoix and egg whites for well over an hour; keeping the liquid boiling at the right temperature so that the raft absorbed the impurities—too fast or slow and the consommé would remain cloudy.

Three months into school, I prepared one of my first truly successful soufflés, having first spent days slogging through lessons on how to make a Mornay sauce (béchamel with cheese and egg yolk, and a tiny bit of grated nutmeg). First I beat the egg whites until they were foamy and almost hard to the touch. Then I carefully folded the egg whites with the Mornay. When you make a soufflé, I learned, the mold, or baking dish, has to be very clean. And this is the trick: you paint the mold with softened butter, using upward vertical strokes because the butter painting upward will encourage the soufflé to rise. Then you dust the mold with flour. You have to make sure that the flour sticks cleanly and evenly to the butter, which is also essential if you want the soufflé to rise. Every tiny detail in that dish is very important, and I learned something about myself in the process. I loved the technical aspects of cooking: I loved the way that you had to master chemistry and craftsmanship, heat and timing, to make a dish like a soufflé come out well.

Restaurants love to serve soufflés because the timing shows off the expertise of the kitchen. The soufflé rises and rises. When it reaches its peak, it has a perfect browned color on top—and a soufflé will stay at its peak for all of about thirty seconds. It's a race against the clock to time it perfectly: from the oven to the client's table as fast as you can.

There's a way to cheat with soufflé. You can put in a lot of egg whites but less Mornay. The soufflé will stay high longer, but it won't have the same flavor. As much as I have an appreciation for the aesthetics of a dish, for me flavor was—and still is—everything. I had no interest in cheating.


When I went home for Christmas, I was feeling pretty bold. I wanted to impress my mother with what I'd learned. So I borrowed her Bocuse cookbook, found the recipe for the legendary foie gras soup that he'd served to President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and rode my motorbike into town to shop. The next night, we were all amazed that I had made my own puff pastry, molded it around the tops of the soup bowls filled with consommé, foie gras, and truffles, and baked it into golden richness. My mother—the most refined eater I knew—couldn't stop telling me how delicious it was. Even Hugo told me he was impressed. Seeing it as a rite of passage, they let me have wine for the first time. By my third glass I was so giddy, I didn't make it to the cheese course. I just went straight to bed.

That year we were also trained in the dining room, the idea being that in May the teachers would decide if we'd return to study as cooks or waiters. Two days a week, we had to set up and serve at the school restaurant, where locals paid ten dollars for a meal cooked and served by students. In addition, we learned the basics of oenology, table setting (why the fork goes on the left and the knife on the right), how to design an efficient dining room, the use of the waiters' station, and so on.

I liked being a waiter. I loved the formality of it, and the way my actions and appearance could help create a mood. You could say it's what my mother had inadvertently trained me for. And I was good at it: having spent so much time in restaurants, it was definitely easier to relate to my experiences as a client than as a cook.

As a kid, I bristled when my mother took me to task about discipline. In my mother's house, even when we were doing something as simple as packing a picnic for a hike, everything had to be perfect: every dish had to be wrapped just so, every napkin had to be folded, glasses had to be spotless before they were packed even though we would be setting them down on a patch of grass covered by an old blanket. In culinary school, I learned what my mother had been trying to teach me all along: there is comfort to be found in order. When you take your time and do things properly—quickly, but without shortcuts—you have the ability to create truly great meals.

In part because of what I witnessed both in my mother's house and at Jacques's restaurant, I took naturally to the nonnegotiable, army-like rules of the brigade system. Under the brigade, the chef is the command leader, and each cook has his station and short list of duties that he has to execute on command with perfect efficiency and consistency. Anyone who steps out of line is immediately—and sometimes brutally—reprimanded in front of the team.

On the one or two weekends a month that I went home to Andorra, I spent all of my travel time plus all of my noneating/nonhiking hours on my bed, studying my recipes from culinary school.

I also made time to see Jacques. Each visit, his influence on my decision to pursue cooking became clearer. He was so proud of me. Even more amazing was that he began treating me almost like a peer. I could tell he enjoyed having a fellow cook with whom he could talk about his passion, professional to professional, and I was happy to show off my growing muscles. Although I was barely a cook, I would swagger and act like a chef.

"So last week I made a canard a l'orange," I'd say, trying to sound casual.

"C'est formidable! How'd you do it?" he'd ask, pulling up a stool. I'd explain the method I'd learned and he'd tell me how he made his, making sure that I knew he was impressed.


It was up to the teachers, however, to decide if I would continue my studies as a waiter or as a cook.

In many countries, waiting tables is a working-class trade, or something you do just to pay the rent while you pursue a more creative profession. But in France, being a waiter is a proud vocation with a noble history. Accordingly, the dining room instructors were just as passionate about their work as the chef instructors were about theirs. So becoming a waiter began to look very appealing to some of the guys, especially when they found the rapid-fire pace of the kitchen both exhausting and perplexing.

No single person inspired more people to become waiters at the Perpignan culinary institute than the tough but fair manager-instructor of the school's restaurant, Monsieur Moccan. He was like a Dickens character: well into his forties, he was a chubby, slightly hunchbacked, bespectacled figure who strode through the dining room greeting customers with a voice that oozed charm and chastising staff with an entirely different tone that he used quietly, but severely.

Monsieur Moccan thought I was the best waiter in my class, and he took every opportunity to tell me so. He tried to push me, more than anyone, into a front-of-the-house career. But I never wavered. I wanted to work in the kitchen.

Toward the end of the school year, a decision had to be made about the focus of my second year, and consequently my career. Of course, my mind was made up, but I was only sixteen and the school was leaning toward placing me in the dining room. So it was decided that my mother and stepfather would make the drive from Andorra, have lunch in our restaurant, and meet the administrators to discuss my future.

To make the day as special as possible and afford me the opportunity to impress my family, Monsieur Moccan appointed me sommelier for the afternoon. The thought was that with nothing to do but pour wine and shuttle cocktails from the bar to the tables, an accomplished waiter like me would have an easy time of it and put a big smile on my mom's face.

I donned the waiter's uniform (white jacket with epaulettes, bow tie, black trousers, black socks, and leather shoes) and headed to the medium-sized dining room so that I could survey the hundred or so seats.

As the lunch service progressed and the dining room filled to capacity, a prestigious member of the French military came to our little academy. The colonel was accompanied by his wife and another civilian couple. I took their cocktail orders, got the drinks from the barman, and returned with one of our round, rimmed drink trays balanced on my open palm. Before I could get one glass on the table, something happened that had never happened before: I lost control of the tray, turning all four drinks over on the colonel and soaking his beautiful starched uniform. It was such a stupid error. With four glasses on the tray, I should have taken one from the front, but I grabbed one from the back. The tray was now unbalanced and before I knew it, it had toppled. To his credit, the colonel didn't lose his composure. He wasn't happy, but he was a true gentleman about my mistake and he sat there patiently while I patted his back dry.

Monsieur Moccan hurried over to the scene of the disaster and pulled me aside, supportive as ever. "Don't get stressed. The guy's going to be okay. He knows it's the restaurant of the school." At the same time, he wasn't going to let me run away from the problem either. "Go and fill up your tray again, come back, and serve them," he instructed. "You have to finish the job."

So I got the drinks again and came back as fast as I could. It turns out I came back too fast because they hadn't had a chance to clean the floor well. As I approached the colonel's wife, I slipped on the ice cubes from the first disaster and upended the tray on her. I expected her to start screaming, but I think they were all in shock at this point. Nobody said a word as I did my best to clean the table and help her dry herself off.

Once again, Monsieur Moccan whispered to me to gather myself, return to the bar, and finish the job. I remember thinking, Finish? I was finished before I started.

When I went back to the bar for what was now my third attempt to fill the same order, the barman could barely contain his laughter. But, with a sigh, he replenished my tray once again and I gingerly made my way back to my little table of horrors. I delivered three of the drinks without incident, then turned to the colonel. He nodded slightly to me. I nodded in return. And as I reached for his drink, the tray tipped, spilling a few drops of water—which I hadn't wiped off the tray—on his head.

That was it. The colonel shot up out of his chair and, in his commanding baritone, boomed, "That's enough! Get this person out of here!"

I flinched, taking a few nervous steps backward. But he wasn't yelling at me: he was yelling at Monsieur Moccan, who was suddenly nowhere to be found. Then I spotted him, through the little window of the kitchen door, laughing uncontrollably, unable to compose himself and return to the dining room.

"As for you…" the colonel shouted at me. And I stood there while he dressed me down in full view of the customers, who watched in awe, my mother slowly turning green, struggling to understand why the school so desperately wanted her son to become a waiter.

I never made it to my mother's table that day and I'm sure I didn't impress her, especially with where I ended up next: demoted to dishwasher. But at least I had found my way back to the kitchen. I never came out again.

Luckily, the kind principal, M. Blaize, and the teachers who decided about internships recognized my ambition and secured me an internship at Le Sardinal, one of the most "gourmet" restaurants in the region. It also had the reputation of being run by the toughest chef. Two months there was supposed to test my determination, solidify my skills, and cure me of any prima donna–ish behavior—or so they told me later. Meanwhile, my less ambitious classmates were sent to cafeterias, chain-hotel restaurants, and tiny restaurants in tinier towns.

One of the teachers drove me an hour to the coast, winding through the seaside town of Collioure (known for its anchovies) and past the treacherously steep vineyards of Banyuls until we reached Banyuls-sur-Mer. The seaside village was made up of pink buildings with aqua shutters and terra-cotta roofs, and a few tall, cream-colored apartment buildings whose wrought-iron balconies looked onto the gray-pebbled inlet and the flat sea beyond. Families walked along the short boardwalk, stopping in waterside cafés. Compared to Perpignan, it was the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Except I probably strolled that boardwalk only once that summer. I don't think I even swam.

My teacher took me down an alleyway behind the main street to show me to my room, informing me as we neared the door that I would be sharing it with a waiter and another intern. I couldn't decide if the term "rathole" or "shithole" was a better description of that hot, dank, windowless box, which smelled like booze and night sweat. I threw my suitcase under the camping cot that would be mine for the next two months and followed my teacher to the restaurant.

Le Sardinal wasn't a two-star, or even a "Bib Gourmand." It looked like a restaurant where vacationing couples came for moules marinières when they could get a sitter at the hotel. The long, narrow room had a nondescript bar on the left and simple tables (at least they had tablecloths) on the right. There was a piano set up near the kitchen entrance. It was beyond basic. My teacher saw the disappointment on my face. "Don't be a snob, Ripert. There are no dessert trolleys, but you're still going to work harder than you've ever worked in your life."

The chef, who was about thirty, had a ruddy face and wild eyes tinged with exhaustion. He sized me up without a word and led me into the kitchen the size of a phone booth (of which he took up about half), where four of us would be sharing space. The signature dish of the restaurant was a classic anchovy preparation called anchois à la crème de vieux vinaigre de Banyuls. For the dish, the plate would be smeared with a mixture of aged Banyuls vinegar and crème fraîche. Then we'd top the mixture with twelve anchovies and serve it with toast.

My job, I learned, would be preparing pounds and pounds of anchovies for the lunch rush. Next to my sliver of counter was a bucket containing about twelve kilos of anchovies packed in salt. Chef informed me that my job was to carefully remove the bones from each tiny fillet, then put the deboned anchovy into another jar filled with olive oil. By lunchtime, my hands had gone from tingling to numb.

Within the first hour of service, we'd sold more than forty plates of anchovies. I could barely keep up with the demand. It was a little stunning to see how hours of prep could evaporate within minutes, leaving you behind and in the weeds for the rest of service. Le Sardinal was apparently the spot, judging by the lines of people waiting in the plaza for a plastic table on the terrace. The chef was slamming out an impossible amount of food with his commis, a Perpignan intern-turned-employee (the other intern and I were only allowed to do prep work at first). From eleven o'clock on, there was no room for error—no room for anything—and the mood was incredibly tense. By two on my first afternoon, when the maître d', clearly drunk, told the chef to hurry up on an order, the chef simply picked up a stack of heavy serving platters from the pass and whacked him over the head. After just one blow, forehead muting the sound of the metal, the maître d' passed out.

The chef packed up his knives and left through the front door, the owner screaming after him.

Somehow, he'd returned by dinner.

Many times that summer at Le Sardinal, I felt like I'd been hit in the head with a stack of platters. Six days a week, I worked from 8:30 in the morning until midnight. Most of my time was spent preparing the mise en place or peeling the eighty pounds of potatoes we'd need for fries, pommes purée, and duck fat–roasted pommes sarladaises. Then lunch service, then an hour off before dinner preparations began. The real battle started at night, as orders flew over the pass and the four of us worked back to back in furious silence to keep up. When it got too busy, the chef simply pushed us away so we didn't destroy everything. Even though I was more of a spectator in the whole process, the adrenaline in the kitchen was addictive; I was fascinated and terrorized and excited, and I wanted not only to survive but also to succeed. I wasn't learning haute cuisine, but I was learning speed, discipline, and, perhaps most important, stamina—things they hadn't taught us in school. My teacher was right: I'd never worked so hard in my life…or so I thought at the time.

When my mother visited, she was shocked by the restaurant's, shall we say, rustic charm. (The owner himself played saxophone during dinner, accompanied by a pianist.) She was even more upset by my living quarters and threatened to call the school to complain. "It smells like booze and vomit in here!" she said when she saw where I was sleeping. "What have you been doing?" I reassured her that it was my drunk roommate, who often threw up in his bed. Before she left, she gave me money and made me promise that on my rare days off, I'd go stay in the closest three-star hotel. Instead I used the money to take the chef to the hotel for drinks.

The chef was tough and relentlessly focused on the kitchen. At first I could tell he was pissed that the school had sent him a spoiled rich kid. But as the weeks went on, he saw my determination, one kilo of potatoes and anchovies at a time. Eventually, I was allowed to help with salads and desserts. As proud and grateful as I was, I still made stupid mistakes. Once, Chef dragged a box of twenty-five duck carcasses into the kitchen and told me to butcher them and freeze the breasts. With each magret, I slowly gained speed and dexterity. It took me about ten minutes per duck, which is a lot of time for a restaurant kitchen. Four hours later, I put the fifty breasts in one stack, loaded them into a giant freezer bag, and went home to take a quick nap before service.

Two days later, his head in the freezer, Chef screamed my name in a tone that made me fear for my life. He emerged holding a frozen tower of duck.

"Ripert, you bagged them all together?" he said. Everyone in the kitchen stopped and stared at me. Even the waiters came to watch. "How the hell am I supposed to pull one out and cook it? Didn't they teach you to wrap them individually? What kinds of morons are they turning out at that dump? Now get a knife and try to cut off three breasts without killing yourself."

My punishment that afternoon was to wash down the kitchen, including the dreaded salamander, which was used to broil dishes just before they went out. The thing was so crusted with heat-baked food and grease, I could have scrubbed until dawn just trying to remove the first layer of glazed-on muck. "Whatever you do," Chef said on his way out, "don't use water on it."

As soon as he was gone, I turned the high-pressure nozzle from the sink on it and had it shining in no time. So much for punishment.

When Chef came back for dinner, he nodded and pursed his lips, impressed but clearly skeptical—there was no way I could have gotten it so clean without water. He reached up to turn on the switch and froze, stuck to the metal. His face turned white and his big body slumped to the floor. I'd electrocuted the son of a bitch. He looked up at me silently, too stunned to be angry. However hurt he was, I was sure I was dead. But he gradually roused himself and managed to make it through service in la-la land. The next day I learned a lot about scrubbing toilets.

By the time my two months were up, I had learned a year's worth of lessons. But that still left me a long way to go.