In Robuchon's kitchen, everything was done just so. You didn't just grab a few mushrooms from the refrigerator and carry them to your station in your apron. Instead, you placed them on a tray and walked to your station carefully, because those mushrooms were sacred. He had an appreciation for quality that bordered on obsession. He believed that flawless raw ingredients were as valuable as the rarest diamonds. He may have ordered only four limes, but they all had to be the exact same perfect size and color. If only one of them was good, the driver for the produce company had to return to Rungis, the major food hall outside of Paris, and come back with ones that matched. If only two of those three were right that time, he would demand a third delivery, and sometimes a fourth.

At La Tour d'Argent, we had beautiful products, but I'd never seen anything like this. Then again, I had never seen a restaurant send a guy back to Rungis four times because the tarragon was not right (first the leaves were too big, then they were too small, and then they were too dark around the edges).

The purveyors must have spent hours going through crates and crates of mushrooms in order to be able to present a basket of ones that were all the same size. Robuchon would order three pounds of carrots and demand that each one be a perfect one-by-six-inch cylinder. He inspected the nails of every chicken to make sure it had been freshly killed, the color of every veal kidney to make sure it wasn't too rosy, the length of the rougets down to the millimeter. But people were so honored to be selling to Jamin (and so afraid to lose the accounts of any of his chefs who'd gone on to cook in big hotels) that they rose to his demands. They respected his encyclopedic knowledge for and love of quality, and it didn't hurt that he would pay any price for the best.

In season, the truffle company Pebeyre from Cahors sent a kilo of black truffles the size of golf balls every single day. In spring, an old woman would show up with a case of morels, and Robuchon would treat her like the queen. He made her feel he was so in love with her mushrooms that it was an honor for him to touch them, a privilege for him to be able to serve them in his restaurant. Every ingredient was a treasure in that kitchen: our job, he reminded us, was to take what was humble and transform it into something noble.

I felt it too. So when he would catch me trying to use Friday's vegetables on Monday, he would yell, "You don't appreciate the product!" because he knew it cut to my heart. I wanted to rise to Robuchon's standards, but taking these kinds of shortcuts was the only way I could stay ahead.

And then, fifteen minutes later, he would start up again: "Ripert! You see? For you it doesn't matter, right? It could be shit."

He was funny that way. Once you'd upset him, he'd keep coming back at you. An hour later, three days…"Why would you do that to a truffle, Ripert? I cannot understand." My wounds were always fresh, because Robuchon never gave anyone time to recover.

I lived for the moments in which he said nothing. Once he'd wiped the rim of one of my plates clean and sent it to the dining room, my stress seemed to melt away. But the alleviation was temporary. Everything at that restaurant had to be perfect, from the service to the food. The final test was when the client sent back the plate. If anything remained, we were all doomed. The waiters knew it. Even the regulars knew it—they made sure to eat every bite.

One day a lobster salad plate caught his eye.

"Ripert, come here! Look at your salad!" I looked at the plate in horror: one piece of lobster and a single dot of apple remained.

"Oui, Chef."

"Ah, are you happy with that? Huh? You sabotaged my dish, Ripert! Is this what you wanted?"

"No, Chef." I went back to my station and stayed silent, praying for him to stop.

Five minutes later: "Ripert! How could you do that? How could you send me this lobster salad like that?"

A half hour later: "I cannot believe—I cannot believe the shit you send me! I cannot believe we are serving that to our clients. Where did you learn that shit?"

Even two hours later: "Where did you learn to serve that shit, Ripert? Where did you learn?"

Incredibly, some stations were even more stressful than mine. The poor guy on entremets could never make the perfect mashed potatoes, which probably existed only in Robuchon's mind. One day they would be too starchy, another day too buttery; one day too thin, another day too thick. Too sweet. Too salty. You could tell that the potatoes were becoming an unhealthy obsession for that cook.

There's a reason that line cooks are often so young: the young are more trainable but, more important, they also have the energy to put into the job. Our task was to produce quality and precision for sixteen, eighteen hours a day. There was no Red Bull back then and in Paris, we didn't have Diet Coke, so we powered ourselves up with coffee. I was drinking ten espressos a day. The espresso machine at Jamin was in the back, near my station, and I pumped myself full of double espressos, heavy on the sugar. Like all the other young cooks in the kitchen, I was completely wired. Whatever it took to get the job done.

Because, really, we lived to please Robuchon. His happiness with the food was far more important than the client's: he was a true artist, but to run a team of cooks requires patience as well as vision. We were all challenged ultimately by the demands of Robuchon, but mastering that level of craftsmanship takes years of practice and we didn't have that; we were too young.

We all knew what was driving him. It wasn't anything as base as money: he was determined to get a third star. And his obsession became ours.

Everyone dealt with the pressure differently. Some guys shook all the time. Some went downstairs and cried in the stairwell. I saw a few guys punch the walls. Some guys suffered crippling anxiety attacks.

The only way that we could survive that environment of intensity and rigor was to have a sense of humor. Cooks rarely had time for lunch, but in the late afternoon, when Robuchon went home to have dinner with his family, we had a window to grab coffee at a café. There we made relentless fun of Robuchon. We were obsessed with his status as a Freemason and speculated about all the conspiracy theories. He became this all-knowing, all-seeing being. Was it true that he got so-and-so the job at that big hotel because he's a Mason too? Did he have microphones recording us in the kitchen?

We also vented about some of the petty grievances that drove us nuts. Every day we were required to make dinner for his French poodle, as well as a salad course for his family's dinner, which fell to me, since I was on salads. And every day he called to complain about something: The lettuce had been gritty. His dog didn't finish his dinner because the meat was too tough. What kind of cooks were we that we couldn't even make a meal that a dog would enjoy?

When it came to dealing with the pressure, my chosen coping mechanism was to feign indifference, a technique I had honed during the years of living with my stepfather. I used my body language as a form of passive rebellion. Even when Chef was dressing me down in front of everyone—telling me that I wasn't passionate enough, that I didn't care about the quality, just my little shortcuts—I got as close to him as I could and looked him in the eye, standing straight and proud. No matter how panicked I got, my resolve never wavered. Unlike with Hugo, I couldn't use words to win. But I could draw upon my experience of pretending to be unharmed by abuse—flexible, resilient, and determined to succeed.

I reminded myself of La Fontaine's fable about the oak and the reed. The mighty oak makes fun of the reed for being so scrawny, but the reed doesn't say anything. When a big storm comes and knocks down the oak, the reed bends in the wind and grows back stronger. "See?" he tells the tree. "Now you're broken and I'm still here. I bounce back every time."

Within the team, I had to make believe that I wasn't stressed out. My nickname became the Tourist: I was always the last to arrive in the morning (just fifteen minutes after everyone else, but it didn't go unnoticed) and I would calmly, deliberately make my coffee and toast in a way intended to telegraph that I wasn't in the terror game like them. I was extremely careful never to cut or burn my hands, keeping them impeccable, and to appear as clean and creaseless and relaxed as possible at all times. I hoped that my calm appearance, in addition to the food that I was slowly learning to master, dot by dot, would see me through the service.

I was willing to endure anything just to be able to learn from him. I wasn't there for the money, though he paid us much more fairly than other restaurants. I was there for the passion of cooking and because Robuchon was magnetic: he literally attracted talent. What we were making was so exceptional, so out-there compared to what every other restaurant was doing in terms of presentation and unique flavor combinations, that while I worked I was always thinking, This is unbelievable. The quality of the ingredients and the harmony that he created between them was unlike anything I'd ever seen, not to mention the revolutionary visual impact.

I still remember the first time that Robuchon taught me how to make a lobster gelée, which we served carefully layered, caviar first, then the lobster gelée, then cauliflower cream, in a tall Japanese bowl lined with brilliant dots of chlorophyll that I had extracted through a complex process that began with puréeing herbs in the Robocoupe. When I first tasted it, I literally scratched my head and said, "I have never seen or tasted a dish that good in my life." Diners would ask if he had a machine to create such meticulous dots and get them to stay in place just inside the rim of the bowl—they too had never seen anything like it. Neither had anyone in that kitchen. What Joël Robuchon created was terra incognita. It would be years before I'd say the words out loud, but Robuchon—flawed and exacting as he was—was my hero.

Though they were hell to execute, the world was taking notice of the masterpieces Robuchon was thinking up. One afternoon, I noticed he was in an unusually good mood. It was as if the slate of our collective transgressions had been wiped clean and he'd met us each for the first time, and was excited to have us join the team. He patted each of us on the shoulder as we arrived and changed into our kitchen whites. He beamed as he asked us to gather for an important announcement.

"Today I am proud to say that thanks to all of your work, Jamin has just received its third Michelin star," he said, and our band of twenty broke into cheers. "This is the first time in the guide's history that a restaurant has achieved this in just three years."

I don't know who popped the first bottle of champagne, but soon corks were firing like cannons. We were part of culinary history. We had helped Robuchon achieve the near-impossible, becoming one of twenty-two restaurants in France, the restaurant capital of the world, to bear the honor. And in such a short time! At thirty-eight, he was the youngest chef ever to win three stars.

"I would like to reward all of you guys for making it happen. I will have to find a way to celebrate the three stars in style," he said. A few weekends later, he took us all to Burgundy for lunch at a restaurant of one of his protégés. Christophe Cussac had held Maurice's position on the fish station. Now, at his restaurant, L'Abbaye Saint Michel in Tonnerre, he had a Michelin star of his own. We had a fantastic day, eating great food, drinking Chablis, and appreciating the generosity of a man who couldn't possibly have been making that much money yet.

That was the honeymoon. When we returned on Monday, the pressure to keep the three stars turned out to be even more taxing than the pressure to get them. Robuchon was a bit more touchy, but then again, his vision of perfection had never been attainable. He pushed us to our limits to get us to achieve it. We became superhuman in that kitchen, constantly surpassing ourselves. When he told us that he wanted every single pea peeled to reveal the tiny germ inside, we thought it was madness, but we did it. If you were to peel a fresh pea right now, you would see that inside the shell, there is a very tiny sprout attached to every pea. Robuchon wanted us to take off that tiny sprout, because he believed it would add just a hint of bitterness to the dish. When the restaurant's sudden popularity spurred him to open private salons upstairs to accommodate twenty additional guests, we thought it would compromise the quality. But we did it.

Despite the deceptions about the terrine, I believed that I had integrity and dedication, which I hoped that Robuchon could detect. Through relentless hard work and hundreds of thousands of dots over the course of nearly a year, I had developed another level of craftsmanship and precision. (I knew this only because fewer of my dishes were sent back from the pass, and Maurice, now sous-chef, thank God, was sent over to shake his head at me less and less.) Even though I wanted nothing more than to become a great chef like Robuchon, I was terrified of the next step: I would be moved to the next station and have to learn everything all over. And again. And again. I didn't think I could handle it. Not there, at least. The stress had gotten under my skin. I wanted a normal life—not that I knew what that was. But I didn't want to spend my waking hours in fear. I didn't want all of my dreams to involve dots.

My love life was nonexistent. After service, when I should have been trying to meet women, I was often just sitting in the bar, memorizing some new recipe that Robuchon had thrown my way, working out how to get a better taste for my sauces, wondering how I could plate faster with fewer errors. I could easily spend an hour at the bar, nursing a warm beer, going over the evening's service in my head, wondering where I had gone wrong and how I could make it better. That far-off, glazed look in my eyes, unsurprisingly, did not make me popular with women. If one of my buddies from the restaurant punched me in the shoulder and said, "Hey, Ripert, that girl with the curly hair is looking at you," I could make a move: say hello, buy her a drink, ask her a few questions that might give her the illusion that I was obsessing over something other than how not to get my ass handed to me on a platter at work the next day. But to seal the deal? To wow her, woo her, convince her that she had nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking me to bed that night? That was beyond me. I was too tired, too distracted, too young to be good at that game.


One weekend, a few months after I started work at Jamin, I went home to visit my mother and ran into Madame Amparo.

"Eric, you've grown up!" she said, proudly.

I opened my jacket to show her the necklace she had given me. "I still wear your cross, and I live in a city surrounded by water. You were right."

She nodded. "You will always be happiest surrounded by water. It is where your spirit sails, where you will be most free."

"Madame Amparo, if you ever come to Paris," I promised, "I will make you a meal that you will never forget." I smiled as I imagined Madame Amparo at Jamin and the predictions she might have for my mercurial boss.

If I ever doubted Madame Amparo's ability, all doubt evaporated as she seemed to read my mind.

"Your boss, he's very tough," Madame Amparo said. "When we look up at the night sky, stars appear to be silver and we imagine them to be cool to the touch. But stars shine bright because they are on fire. The closer you get, the more likely you are to get burned."

I nodded and thought of Robuchon, of his genius and his temper.

"But this is the thing, my child," Madame Amparo continued. "You are headed for the same night sky. When it's your turn to burn brightly, remember where you have been. Be careful not to harm all of those in your orbit."

One spring afternoon, almost a year into my work with Robuchon, I received the letter that every twenty-year-old Frenchman dreads: I was being called for military service. Usually guys tried to get out of it, or managed to get sent somewhere easy or beautiful to serve out their term. I'd been able to delay it for a bit because of my job, but as I read the letter, I realized that I was thrilled to have an excuse to leave. Well, that's not entirely true: I wasn't excited to have my career put on hold just so I could go clown around with guns for a year. But still, it was a break.

When Robuchon came in the next morning, I knocked on his office door and asked if I could sit down. He put down a stack of bills and tried to smile.

"Of course, Eric. What is it? You want to move stations? You think you're ready?"

"No, Chef. I'm sorry, but I've been called to do my military service. I'm giving notice."

His smile disappeared. I could see him calculating. "That's ridiculous. I'll arrange for you to cook at the Elysée. I know the chef there. It will be so easy, cooking for Mitterrand! That way you can stay with us for a little longer." My smile disappeared. If I cooked for the president, I would owe Robuchon. He could force me to come back when my service was finished.

"Actually, I've already been helped by a friend with a good connection," I said as politely as possible. I was hoping to end up in the south of France where the weather would be nice and I'd be only a three-hour drive to Andorra.

"Well, then. You'll finish up here through June?"

"Of course, Chef."

"Congratulations, Eric. I wish you the best."

And with that, I was free. The army was going to be a vacation. When I was finished, I would find another job.


I went home and waited to be called for my military service. I was told it would happen in a week or two, but I got lucky. It was four whole months before I was called. I spent my time home in Andorra, climbing mountains during the day and dancing all night in the local clubs. Sometimes I'd drive a few hours to Barcelona or fly to Ibiza and party there, since the music was better and the chances were higher that one of many dark-haired beauties would talk to me. I was almost twenty, and less shy. I wanted to get all the partying out of my system before going to live in yet another dormitory with a bunch of guys.

I was stationed with the 31st Regiment in Castel Sarrasin, a pretty little riverfront village near Toulouse. Established in 961, Castel Sarrasin has a long military history, from being the site of twelfth-century skirmishes against the British to the Crusades and the Hundred Years' War. The base was from the 1800s, but my recently built dormitory reminded me of hotel school.

The point of our service seemed to be more about teaching us to be young men who could follow orders than actually crafting us into soldiers who could fight in a war. We spent two months on drills that had no discernible point. We moved piles of rocks from one side of the road to the other, then back again. Then we put the rocks in our backpacks and marched miles in one direction, turned around, and returned.

I tried to point out the stupidity of our exercises, but no one listened. They'd drop us in a forest and say, "You see those guys behind the trees over there? That's the enemy. Attaque!"

"Wait a minute," I'd interrupt. "They can see me!"

"That's right. You have to find a solution."

"But there's not a solution!" Finally I'd give in. "You want me to attack? Okay. On attaque!" I started running toward them in the open, my rock-filled pack thumping on my shoulder blades as I tried to hold the gun out in front of me. Inevitably, those of us who weren't blown up by pretend mines were mowed down by the pretend enemy's guns.

The tasks felt so meaningless that it was hard for me to respect the men giving the orders, or try to learn from what was being asked of us. They just wanted us to obey, not to think. Okay, but why did we have to walk together like geese? One-two, one-two, with half the men unable to keep time while the officers screamed at us to stay synchronized. Sure, it showed discipline and organization, but would it really help us win a war?

I liked to provoke the career officers, who were a few years older than us. When I was assigned to guard the munitions at night, I'd wear forbidden civilian clothes, like my mountain-climbing coat from Andorra, under my uniform to stay warm. When we had to go on long marches, I put on my Ray-Bans, blasted David Bowie on my Walkman, and put Ricard in my canteen. (It was so cheap in duty-free Andorra that I brought back six bottles at a time and sold them, when I wasn't offering it around during aperitif hour.)

We spent the first few months on basic training, les classics. It seemed like we never stopped cleaning guns, old rifles that were impossible to get clean enough to pass the white-glove test. Whenever an officer held up a greasy, accusing finger and told me that mine wasn't clean, I threw up my grimy hands and said, "What do you want me to tell you? First of all, these guns are from World War II. Second, you have to oil the chamber, so of course your glove is always going to come away with black smudges. Can you tell me how to be a good soldier and a white-glove soldier at the same time, sir?"

The entire base specialized in génie, which meant mines, explosives, bridges, and roads. I immediately recognized that the training we were receiving in spotting imaginary mines was a futile undertaking. "Mines are hidden, random, they defy logic," I told my officer. "In a real combat situation, you'd get killed almost instantly."


I was part of the last generation of men in France who served a mandatory military service. At the time, I think the government believed that because you received a free college or vocational education and got free healthcare, mandatory military service was a way of paying back. In retrospect, I'm happy I did it. I have the utmost respect for veterans. My paternal grandfather, Antonin, served in both world wars. My mother's father, Fernand, was imprisoned in Morocco and escaped the Germans. But I think as a young kid who served in France during a time of peace, I didn't really get it.

After the two months of weapons training, because of my résumé as a chef, I was assigned to the kitchen of the mess. I was happy to go to the kitchen because the food was pretty good, and I was looking forward to contributing to that.

On my first day cooking in the mess, my boss announced, "Today we will make calamari and sauce Americaine. Ripert, you can take care of it."

Sauce Americaine is like a lobster bisque, very technical. You have to crush the heads of the lobster, for one. But I was up for it, even excited about it.

Then he handed me a box of frozen calamari. I nodded. It wasn't ideal, but I'd make it work. This was the military, not Jamin. I understood that not all of the ingredients I'd be cooking with would be fresh.

"Where are the lobster heads to make the sauce?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Make a béchamel, then add ketchup and brandy."

I was in shock. Meanwhile, the other cooks in the mess, who had been tasked with making spaghetti, had managed the unthinkable: they burned the spaghetti while it was cooking in the boiling water. Because they did not stir the spaghetti, or time it, the pasta stuck to the bottom of the kettle and burned. I had never seen—or smelled—anything like it in my life.

I was so horrified that I decided to go and talk to the colonel. He agreed to see me. One of the things I liked about him from the start was that he was a cool customer, slow to anger, very elegant. I was nineteen years old and I had a mouth on me, so I gave it to him straight. I told him, "I cannot cook shit food the likes of which I have seen today. I'm going to be depressed and get sick. I cannot perform the mess hall duty."

The colonel smiled at me.

I didn't realize how ridiculous I must have sounded, but I was young and I had just come from Robuchon, a place where we worshipped every mushroom, every fava bean, every potato. I believed with all my heart that the appalling behavior passing for cooking that I had witnessed in the mess hall kitchen was a sacrilege.

"You don't want to be in the mess hall. Should I send you to the commandos?" He was being sarcastic, but it was lost on me.

"Sir, I can't do the commandos." Those were the guys who were being prepped to fight in the hot spots of the day, Chad and Lebanon. This, needless to say, terrified me. "Look at me!" I said, pointing at my skinny frame. "Do I look like a warrior? A top-secret killer?"

He threw up his hands. "Do you want to be my waiter?"

It was perfect. I waited on him and his guests at lunch and sometimes at dinner in the dining hall above the canteen, which happened to be next to a poultry market. I gave them three-star service—if there had been food to carve tableside or crèpes to flambé, I would have done it happily. Because I worked with a high-ranking officer, I was given privileges that my fellow soldiers envied, like the ability to leave the base after work and get most weekends off. Unfortunately, I still had to go through the program.

Most guys had never experienced discipline like this. For me, I felt like I was on vacation, just with shorter hair. (And even that I didn't mind. What, they were going to break my spirit by shaving my head? Did that actually work?) Because I'd been a part of a professional kitchen, I understood the hierarchy and discipline of the brigade—and why it's necessary. You work at the level to which you are assigned, performing set tasks within a designated space. You do not think for yourself; you take orders only from the person in charge of your station, and ultimately from the sous-chef, that revered and feared individual who runs the kitchen under the orders of the chef and is the only person allowed to talk during service. Failure to follow orders could result in injury or, worse, a ruined meal. It was just like the military, from which the system was taken. Yet, I have to say that I never felt fully at home during my training.

Back in Andorra, Jacques, who had been Special Forces, seemed to understand my plight completely. "It makes sense that you are bored with your training," he said. "Your battlefield is in the kitchen. The soldiers who know your struggle best are back in Paris, at Jamin."


Waiters and chefs were given special privileges, like being allowed to go out every few nights. I took full advantage of my privileges. My friends and I went to the nightclubs in Toulouse as often as we could to meet college girls, or hung out at Le Sunbeam Café or Le Tout Va Bien restaurant in nearby Moissac. There was a little club along the canal there called Nirvana that played cool music—New Wave, disco, and reggae—where I also spent a lot of time. Soldiers weren't allowed there, but with my silk Smalto shirt, ultraslim Levi's cuffed at the ankle, and Sebago leather loafers, no one thought I was from the barracks.

One night, a girl came up to me and said, "I know who you are. You're Eric Ripert." I thought, Who is this girl? She's not even flirting with me.

"My name is Patricia. I have to introduce you to your sister. You look like twins."

"My sister's in Andorra with my mother," I said, turning to walk away.

"No, your father's daughter. We're friends; she lives nearby."

I was shocked. My half sister was six months old when my father died. When Francine, my stepmother, disappeared, she'd taken my sister with her, and I'd never heard from them since.

"Do you want to meet her?" Patricia asked.

I did.

The next weekend, I went to the Café de Commerce, a little place in Moissac owned by a guy we all knew and liked named Fissou, to meet Stéphanie. It was like looking at the female version of myself. No, more than that: it was like looking into my father's eyes again. For the first few minutes, we were both too moved to speak. I felt like the shocked eleven-year-old crying in my room in Andorra. Eventually, we started talking. "I grew up around here," she told me. When Francine ran after my father's death, she and her daughter ended up in Moissac, where Francine married another bank director. There was some real estate that hadn't been settled—apartments my father owned around St. Tropez—so my grandfather had gotten fed up and hired a private detective to track down Francine and get what was owed to me. But I had been protected from all of that, so I never knew that this was where she lived, and I would never have guessed that one day I would live in a barracks a few kilometers away.

Stéphanie had no memory of our father, so I told her about his gardening and his jazz, his vinegar making and his trumpet playing, how much fun he was to be around, and how sad I was to have lost him so young. I couldn't resist asking if her mother was still a terrible cook. Marika was, in my mind, so closely paired with Hugo that it was difficult to feel close to her. Stéphanie, who was my father's daughter, who looked so much like me, was like the sister I never had.

Patricia was thrilled to have been able to connect us, and it turned out that she had another girl she wanted me to meet, this one a colleague at the gift shop where they worked across from the Café de Commerce.

Bernadette was petite and curvy. She was what we call chatain, with hair that was a beautiful ombre color between brown and blond. Even though she had a certain maturity and sophistication, I could tell right away that she wasn't used to going out to clubs or having twenty-year-olds flirt with her. Maybe that was because she was only eighteen, but she intrigued me much more than the knowing, made-up girls who were outgoing enough to make the first move. When a slow dance came on, for once I wasn't feeling shy. I took a chance and kissed her. She kissed me back with such passion that I called her the next afternoon and the next.

Working at Jamin I felt I could never get it right, but during those early days with Bernadette, I felt I could do no wrong. To her, my opinions were always the worldliest and best thought out. She laughed at my jokes and took my proclamations about life and politics as encyclopedic fact. I was just a few years older than her, but I spoke French and Spanish. I had lived and worked in Paris. She thought I was sophisticated and worldly, and I loved the reflection of myself that she presented.

Before I knew it, I was spending the night at her parents' farmhouse (me in one bedroom, her in the next), and speeding back to the base before I had to serve breakfast. Her parents were conservative, and they pretended not to hear the old farmhouse floorboards creak as I crept into her room at night and back again in the morning.

I liked being around her family. Bernadette's mother, Denise, was an orphan who had been hired as a maid in the home of a rich man. Her boss, Georges, was one of the biggest fruit farmers and landowners in Moissac, an agricultural region famous for its fruit and sunflowers. He treated Denise like family, so when she got married, he sold her one of his neighboring houses at a price she and her husband, a fonctionnaire, could afford. Bernadette and her brother, Jean-Claude, referred to Georges as their uncle. Denise was warm and gracious. Her father liked me too, and he was always telling some sort of tall tale about the elusive game he'd shot and enormous fish he'd caught. I just nodded and went along with the tales as I ate Denise's delicious food, which she made with ingredients from the surrounding fields. Jean-Claude was about five years older than me. He was an attorney and was very strict with his little sister. He wanted Bernadette to study and do well in school and get into a university, even though she wasn't interested. Jean-Claude saw me as the distraction that I was; he was courteous to me, but nothing more.

After Bernadette and I had been dating for a few weeks, her family took me with them next door to have Sunday lunch chez Georges. I remember thinking that his tall stone and brick house wasn't as grand as I expected for someone who owned more than three hundred acres. The door opened right into the kitchen, which was centered around a formidable antique table with elaborately carved legs, at which one of the housekeepers was peeling potatoes for the deep fryer.

I could tell from the smoke coming out of an adjoining house that most of the cooking was being done over there, in the fireplace. When I stepped into the winter kitchen, which was obviously in use all year, my breath caught. On one side was a massive wooden refrigerator from the 1920s. A meat slicer sat on a counter nearby, a silver platter layered with thin slices of sausage and ham balanced on top. But the focal point of the room was the wide, blackened fireplace with an automated spit where chickens were roasting. On the unembellished mantel, between a row of antique jars, wooden crosses, and statues of the Virgin Mary, rested a forgotten juice glass of wine.

Georges smiled as I came in. He tipped off his bowler hat, straightened his raggedy brown cardigan, and grabbed my hand. The connection was immediate.

"This is the great chef from the city?" he said with his strong southern accent. "Come! You must help me carve the birds. I killed them myself! I wish you'd been here to help me pluck them. But look at your hands: they're much too soft for a cook's—or a soldier's."

He was tall and slim, with white hair and mischievous blue eyes, like a little boy's. All the youth and vitality that defined him could be seen in his face: the eyes that were always laughing and the sly, sideways grin when he made a joke, which was often. His voice boomed with that unmistakable Gascony accent with its big R's: every R in eve-R-y wo-Rd was articulated. There was a singsong quality to the rhythm of speech in that area, and when Georges spoke, it sounded like music.

He raised his hands to show me his meaty, gnarled fingers. "You need a little farm life to toughen you up! Next month, come help us pick artichokes. Then you'll know what country life is all about. We farmers might not be smart like you, but we can teach you something."

As we prepared dinner for Georges's guests (a mixture of friends and family from the surrounding town), I sliced up two of the birds while Georges hacked at the others with a battered cleaver. I could tell that he was only pretending to be clumsy; to my eye, he took great pride in the food. The family gathered under the shade of the chestnut tree in the little gravel courtyard outside the cooking house, where we spent the rest of the afternoon eating and drinking, our voices rising and our laughter increasing with each platter that was carried out of the house. Georges proudly told me about the provenance of each antique and where he'd found it. Between courses, he had me kneeling in front of a cabinet in the living room and looking through box after leather box of ebony-handled knives, hefty silver serving spoons, and elaborate salad forks. "Not bad for a farmer, eh?" he asked with a wink.

His lighthearted humor and outgoing southern warmth reminded me of my grandparents in Nice and put me completely at ease. Even from that one meal, I could tell that he knew about good ingredients in a way that would impress even Robuchon. By the time his daughter, Monique, brought out a warm tart made with just-picked apricots, I felt as though I had been adopted. I wanted to spend every Sunday cooking in the fireplace with Georges.

It had been a long time since I had felt so at home with a family. My father would have loved Georges, I was sure of it. My father was not a real paysan; he was a Sunday farmer in his little garden. But his parents had been farmers, and although my father was a sophisticated bank president who loved fast cars and beautiful women, there was a part of him that prized the simple pleasures of life above all else. As I sat at the fireplace with Georges, many of my most beloved memories of my father came rushing back: My father changing from his suit to a T-shirt and khakis and tending to the vegetables in our backyard. My father teaching me how to swim in the ocean and how to gallop a horse at faster and faster clips through the woods. My father grilling kabobs by the beach in St. Tropez. The country fireplace in Gascony and the beach fires my father made were different, but the warmth was the same.

A few weeks before I was set to be discharged, a clerk approached me. "Ripert, you've got a message."

I looked down at the scrap of paper and the familiar phone number. Robuchon.

No way, I thought. This guy is fucking with me. Even with his Masonic superpowers, there was no way Robuchon could have found me in Castel Sarrasin. How did he know?

I called Joël Robuchon from the phone booth on the base.

"Hello, Chef. What a surprise!"

"Hi, Eric, how are you? Did you like your military service?"

He told me about some of the goings-on at the restaurant. He'd undertaken a small renovation and he was looking forward to my seeing it. Then finally he got to the matter at hand. "Listen," he told me, "I need a chef poissonier. Are you interested?"

I was stunned. Whatever I expected Robuchon to say, it wasn't that. "Chef poissonier? But, Chef, I was only on garde manger! I can't make hot sauces yet. Not the complicated—"

"Eric, you can do it. We'll teach you."

"Um, I have to think about it." I could already feel the familiar sense of panic swelling in my chest.

"Of course you can think about it. You have one minute."

I couldn't go back. There was no way. If I had to go back, I would die. Or kill someone. Or at least have a nervous breakdown. And yet…Robuchon didn't call just anyone. This was a huge honor. My terror was joined by pride. Even though I knew I wasn't the best cook in Robuchon's kitchen, he thought I could do it, which must mean that he saw some talent. Besides, I began to reason, the fish station was the most interesting one at Jamin, at least in my opinion and taste as well. I thought what he was doing with fish was so incredible and refined. The sauces and garnishes were so complex and varied, they made my rabbit terrine seem like a roast chicken with a sprig of parsley. Oh, God. I had never done hot sauce at Jamin! Even Maurice could barely make it through service some nights. I would never survive. Come on. Be realistic. Save yourself! Tell him no. You may never work in Paris again, but at least you'll be sane.

If I learned fish and sauce from Robuchon, I would be able to do pretty much anything I wanted after that. Robuchon was impossible, but he was an impossible genius, and I wanted—needed—to learn from the best. What stayed with me, night after exhausting night, was the criticism, but I knew that he would not have called me out if he didn't believe I was capable. The kind and joking voice on the phone did not fool me this time. Life at Jamin would continue to be a living hell, but I would learn—a lot.

"When do I start?"


All I could think about was ending things with Bernadette. The relationship was becoming more challenging because Bernadette was young and prone to jealousy, and I was so focused on my career. A plan began to take shape: I would tell her that I was going back to work in Paris, and that she had to stay and finish lycée. I would promise to come back next summer, saying that we'd figure out what to do then. Or better yet: I was being sent to Chad as a secret commando. We must never speak again, for the security of the country….

Her brother had another suggestion: over breakfast a few weeks before the end of my service, he leaned close and whispered, "Bernadette's jealousy is consuming her. The two of you will never work. Just leave. We won't tell her where you've gone." I knew he was right, and I should have accepted his help. But I still liked Bernadette, and there was something about her that I found hard to let go.

Then, right before I finished my military service, I went to a movie in Toulouse. The film was An Officer and a Gentleman. At the end, all of the officers leave their girlfriends behind when they change bases, callously breaking the women's hearts. But not the hero. He blows back into town on a motorcycle because he can't live without the woman he loves. It seems so silly now, but I left the theater inspired. So much so that I developed a serious case of amnesia regarding the dynamic of our relationship. I decided that I wasn't going to leave my girlfriend, making her just another jilted sweetheart in a military base town. Instead, I invited her to come live with me back in Paris. I was twenty-one, Bernadette was nineteen, and we were playing house in an uninsulated, definitely illegal plywood shack that had been rigged together on top of an old apartment building next to the Porte de Versailles. (I told my mother it was a penthouse.) It meant a serious commute to the restaurant, but it was all I could afford.


5:55 A.M. The dread returned before I even pressed the intercom button marked JAMIN. Now that I was here, I couldn't fathom why I had ever agreed to come back. Did I really think that, after more than a year away from the line, I could cook fish for Robuchon?

From my first day back at Jamin, I knew that I was doomed. At the restaurant, I recognized quite a few of the faces in the locker room, including Eric LeCerf, my friend from garde manger; Benoît Richard, who'd been the chef on meats when I was there; and of course Maurice, who was now running the kitchen at Jamin.

My stomach tightened when I heard Robuchon's car pull into the garage at nine. Then a few minutes later, an affectionate slap on the back of the head. "Eric! I see you have returned to the fold. Bienvenue! You have much to learn. Philippe Braun here will be teaching you everything you need to know about fish. It's not like garde manger, where you had a week or two of instruction. No. You and Philippe will be working closely together for the next three months. Perhaps by then you will begin to understand. Bonne chance."

And so my education began. Robuchon was determined to offer the diners the best quality and freshest product available. The fish we cooked was so expensive, Robuchon ordered only as much as was needed for the day, and even then it often ran out. The waiters were under strict instructions to make sure that none of it went to diners who might not appreciate it. With a shudder, I remembered a night during my first stint at Jamin. We were down to just six portions of rouget left when a table of five Texans decided to give it a try.

"They're not going to eat it," Robuchon snapped at the captain when he saw their ticket. "Rouget is too fishy for Americans. I don't want them to have it. Tell them to order something else."

A few minutes later, the captain returned, pale and trembling, to apologize. As hard as he'd tried to convince them, the gentleman ordering for the table insisted.

"If they don't eat it, you will see," said Robuchon. We braced ourselves.

Five beautiful plates of rouget went out. Four beautiful plates of rouget returned, barely touched. The captain tried to imitate the Texan's voice as he shrugged his shoulders and said, "Don't worry about it! I'll pay for it." This poor tourist had no idea what the waiter and the kitchen were about to endure.

"You see! I told you, but you didn't understand a word!" he barked at the captain. "Look at this fish! Now what do we do? Do you know how much this fish cost? Do you?" The captain hung his head and practically crawled back to the dining room.

Despite the fact that the client paid for the fish, Robuchon was distraught. He hated not pleasing the client. He hated that the beautiful, expensive pieces of fish were going straight into the garbage. For him, it was a failure coming and going.

"What do we do with the fish?" Robuchon cried every half hour for the rest of the night. "Why don't you ever listen?" he said each time the waiter came in to pick up a plate.

The fish dishes weren't as technically exhausting as the ones I'd labored over on garde manger, but the cooking required a precision that was much more harrowing. And the sauces, well, it would be months before I was allowed to make those on my own.

For the first few weeks, I watched and worked with a mixture of fear and determination as Philippe Braun, the current chef poissonier, did his work. Robuchon respected Philippe because he came from a culinary family. Philippe's uncle owned a famous three-star Michelin restaurant called Au Crocodile in Strasbourg. What I liked about Philippe was that he was very artistic, almost poetic, in his description of the sauces. He would explain that some sauces were very masculine—bold flavors, dense in texture. Other sauces were more feminine—subtle, delicate, refined. For so long, my time with Robuchon had been about executing the boss's vision. But with Philippe, I began to see that you could still have a vision of your own. It was up to each of us to imbue the work with our own meaning and style.

The fish station was, in the most ideal circumstances, manned by three guys. Philippe was in charge. He handled the most delicate elements of the fish station and was the master of the sauces. The sauce is everything. It's hard to learn how to make a sauce—to capture flavors in a liquid and anticipate how they will behave requires a lot of craftsmanship. What will expand? What will fade? It's a process, and it takes a long time before you can play with flavors and really begin to execute the magic of making the sauce. During that year after my military service, Philippe was slowly mentoring me on the art of the sauces.

As his second in command, my job was to cook the fish—under Philippe's supervision—and to prepare the garnishes. Philippe, as the head of the station, plated each dish, but I was there to help him.

Depending on the season and staffing, there was sometimes a third guy under me—a commis who did some of the prep and helped keep the station clean.

I immediately understood why garde manger was considered vacationland compared to being on the line. The fish station worked at a constant disadvantage, since the fish was the last delivery to arrive each morning. We had practically no time to clean and fillet it. Once the orders came in, we almost always had to get help on our station to keep up, which meant that we had even less room in which to work.

Philippe showed me what I would be responsible for making: two sauces with lobster, one with shrimp, another with verjus, and a few other complex sauces, including a fennel sauce, a lobster coral emulsion, bouillons, and more mise en place. Once again, I found myself being pushed to my limits to deliver impossible things. Each of the eight or nine sauces had to be made fresh twice a day, which demanded endless cutting and slicing. I couldn't have kept up if I hadn't prepared some of my mise for dinner while getting ready for lunch, hiding it in the back of my fridge. When it got really busy, I sometimes saved a little bit of the sauce from lunch for dinner. But Robuchon could always tell.

"Is it fresh?" he would ask, reaching for a tasting spoon.

"Yes, Chef. I just did it."

The lids of his eyes drew halfway down as he frowned. "You're a liar. Do it again."

Sometimes my deceptions would have been comical had they not felt so vital. One day I was supposed to be making a saffron sauce for canapés, but Philippe hadn't taught it to me yet. He was downstairs having a cigarette when I heard: "Eric! Fais-moi goûter la sauce du canapé."

Shit, I thought. What am I going to do? I have nothing. Okay. It will take Philippe three minutes to have his smoke…

"Oui, Chef!" I yelled from my corner.

"So, aren't you going to get a pan?" Robuchon asked.

"Oui, oui, Chef!" I grabbed a saucepan and a whisk and started moving the whisk back and forth in the empty pot. Clack-clack-clack! Where the hell was Philippe?

"Alors, is your sauce coming or not?" Chef inquired.

"Chef, one more minute!" Clack-clack-clack.

"That's enough! I want to see your sauce."

Philippe was nowhere to be seen. I didn't have the courage to say that I didn't know how to make the sauce.

"Come here and show me!"

I moved through quicksand, bringing him the shiny-bottomed pot.

"How could you do such a thing?" he said. "Do you know nothing? Has Philippe taught you nothing? Why are you such a liar, Ripert? You with your fake terrines and your ghost sauce?"

It was always like this. He called me Eric when my work was tolerable, but it was Ripert when he was mad. And, man, was he obsessed with the rabbit terrine I had ruined almost three years before. As for the ghost sauce, it was aptly named, because Robuchon would no doubt make sure that story followed me to my grave.

When I sent dishes to the pass, I heard my share of "ça va pas du tout, Ripert. Take it back." After a few months, though, Robuchon began to say nothing when he saw my plates—that golden silence! I thought I might finally be getting the hang of it, until the night I saw one of my entrées return to the kitchen.

My heart fell through the floor. It looked nicely cooked, but the one piece that had been cut away showed the fillet to be raw.

Worse: Robuchon had let it go out to the dining room.

"Who made this fish?" he asked with an eerie calm.

"I did, Chef." He took the plate from me and I thought he was going to smash it over my head. But Robuchon was never violent with us. He rarely even swore.

He threw the fillet into a pan and slammed it on the stove.

"Did you see that? Bravo!" he shouted.

No one in the kitchen was breathing.

"That's excellent. Ex-cel-lent! Did you see? It's raw!" and then he went into his office and slammed the door. I finished cooking the fish and sent it back to the pass, where Maurice was standing there, shaking his head. I couldn't meet his eye.

Two hours later, Robuchon returned to drive the point home again: "Did you see that? It's not good! It's raw!"

An hour later, he came back and screamed it again. "Raw!"

This went on for weeks, an endless loop of disappointment and indignation.

The kitchen was set up so that each station faced Robuchon, who stood on an elevated platform, almost like a conductor stands over an orchestra in the pit of a theater. Each dish had to pass his watchful eye before making it out to the dining room. At my station there was a big work table where I would do the day's prep. It was a stainless steel table and the drawers beneath were refrigerated so I could keep the ingredients nearby and cold. The stove where I cooked each day was actually behind me. Standing with my back to Robuchon did a number on my nerves like you wouldn't believe. From where Robuchon stood, he could watch your every move and you never knew where he was. He could be standing at his perch, like an eagle ready to swoop in for the kill. He could be over in pastry, paying you no mind at all. Or he could be hovering right over your shoulder, about to snap at you for overcooking the expensive loup de mer. Part of the peace of the early morning was that Robuchon was not in the building yet. I could face forward and prepare my mise en place and hope that today was a day where my mistakes were so minor that he focused his ire elsewhere.

The relentless fear and intensity of our environment began to transform us mentally. Once I saw a chef heat his tasting spoon over an open flame and then hold it against his cook's hand to punish him for not doing his job correctly. Some guys would come up behind you and kick you in the ankles. Fear creates fear, and cruelty follows. But Joël never knew; he would never have accepted such atrocities.

Philippe never cowered under the pressure. He was the French chef equivalent of a California surfer dude, always laid back and ready to enjoy the thrill of the ride. Although I didn't see it at the time, Philippe's passion, focus, and Zen-like attitude would have a long-term effect on both my career and life. He loved making sauces. He liked beautiful women. Outside of that sacred dyad, nothing much got under his skin. He was immune to Robuchon's rants largely because he was so good at his job that he gave Robuchon very little material for the cutting remarks that were his main weapons. But even when Robuchon managed to find fault in one of Philippe's dishes, he never collapsed under the criticism. I longed for Robuchon's approval and when I didn't get it, I felt crushed under the weight of his disappointment. Philippe was different. He was confident enough that he could separate the useful part of the critique from the withering abuse that Robuchon heaped on top, then go back and make the dish better.

My time with Philippe was important because he wasn't just teaching me how to cook: he was teaching me how to be. When you're on the line, every shift is a fight to the end. Handling forty covers at Jamin felt like twelve rounds in a boxing ring. Sometimes you knocked it out, sometimes you went down in the third. Either way, you took your blows and you went home at night, bruised and exhausted. It's hard—nearly impossible—to see the big picture when you're a young chef because all the orders coming at you, and all the technical intricacies you must master, they feel like a punishment. But when your time finally comes to be in charge, when you get to call the shots and it's your job to make a kitchen full of young up-and-comers execute plate after plate of flawless dishes, you draw from all of your training. You think of all those who bossed you, trained you, frightened you, impressed you, and you must decide: How will you act?

Philippe planted a seed in me that would take years to fully form: that maybe there was a way to lead without using anger and fear as the primary tools. Maybe I could love the sauces, love the ladies, love my life—the way Philippe did. Maybe there was a way to control the heat so that, like Philippe, I could keep my cool.


The pressure of working for Robuchon was taking its toll and too often the stress of work followed me home. At least once a week I awoke from a nightmare in which I had screwed up my mise and Robuchon was about to open my fridge. One night, after a particularly rough service, I came home, took one look in the refrigerator and yanked Bernadette out of bed.

"Look at this fridge!" I yelled. "Look at this fucking mess! I want you to fix it right now. How can you be so disorganized? Who treats their lettuces like that? What did you do to my mushrooms?"

She stared at me in frightened disbelief. "You're going crazy!" she said, beginning to cry. "What's happening to you at that place?"

What was happening was that I was losing it. And so were the guys in the kitchen around me. We were buckling under the pressure and the constant barrage of criticism, and we were becoming mean. No matter where I was, I felt like I was constantly under siege.

Bernadette was miserable as well. She wasn't used to living in the city and stayed alone in the apartment all day. The only time she left or spent time with anyone else was on the weekends when we saw Maurice and his girlfriend, or went to the occasional neighborhood bistro. Even if she'd been comfortable enough to go to a great restaurant, we couldn't afford to eat there, since I spent all my money on rent, métro tickets, and groceries. For me, there was no such thing as a sandwich or a bowl of spaghetti on the weekend. When I cooked at home, I shopped for the same quality of ingredients that my mother or Robuchon would buy, and always prepared an appetizer, entrée, and dessert, which meant that our little dinners ended up being much more expensive than dining out. Finally, after a year, we moved to a slightly better place in the 13th arrondissement and Bernadette got a job working at a hotel trade magazine, which helped for a while.


Before my military service, Robuchon had decided that we were using too much butter, so he posted a book on the pass. We had to sign out for each slice of butter we cut from the giant block that in French is called motte de beurre. Then, I guess because he thought we were spending too much time in the restroom, he put a red bathroom book outside of his office. We were to sign in and out for bathroom breaks. Libération, a Paris newspaper, got wind of the "pee-pee book" and made fun of Robuchon, so the books disappeared.

A few months after I returned from my military service, the bathroom book reappeared. It seemed crazy to me, knowing how hard we all worked, how we needed every second to get the service right, that he might think that we'd waste time in the bathroom. But there it was, a log to keep track of how we spent our time in the loo. You had to write down what time you went into the bathroom and what time you returned to your station. I thought it was bullshit, so I started penciling things like:

 Ripert / 8:55 pee-pee /8:57, bring back the key

 Ripert / 11:00 am caca / 11:03, bring back the key

It seemed like such a small thing, but I wanted him to know that things had changed since my military service. I wasn't a kid anymore. He never said anything about my insouciant comments, but a few days later, the log disappeared for good.

A year into my second stint at Jamin, Philippe Braun took another job and Robuchon announced that I had been promoted to the saucier for the fish station. It was an honor, but I was paralyzed by the thought of what lay ahead. It was a really tough, physical job, making a series of complex recipes from scratch twice a day. Robuchon was especially demanding of his sauces, and while they relied upon strict technique, which I'd learned at La Tour d'Argent, what made them great could not be taught. You can't truly measure ingredients for a perfect sauce—there's no such thing as an inch of rosemary flavor. It's in your head and in your palate, and the only way to get there is through experience. Consistency and color alone require years and years (and years) to master. I knew that it would be at least a full year before I would start to get the hang of it.

I was promoted to Philippe's position, but things didn't get better or easier. The sauces were hard to master and my instinct for assembling flavor in a delicate liquid form was still developing. In the fish station, you had to be extremely cautious. Fish, by nature, is delicate. Time is of the utmost importance. You can braise a piece of meat for fifteen minutes and it's no tragedy, but that would ruin a piece of fish.


When I became the head of the fish station, I was struggling so much each day and with each dish that I could never have imagined that fish would eventually become my specialty, my passion. But even then, amid all the stress, there were moments of fascination: I was intrigued by how delicate it was, how refined the sauce and garnish had to be to enhance the quality and flavor of the fish. I grew to love how cautious you had to be with technique in order to cook the fish well, and how essential timing was.

It wasn't that I fell in love with a particular style of cooking, a dish, or an ingredient. But there is a way of working with fish that began to speak to me. Cooking meat brings the soul out of you; when you cook a steak or a stew, you don't have to be so precise. But fish brings elegance out of you. You must be intensely focused, and you have to use all your knowledge to elevate the fish.

The fish station was where Robuchon was more innovative, less tied to classicism. The way Escoffier was cooking meats is much the same way we cook meat today. The way Escoffier was cooking fish? That way of cooking is now totally obsolete. He would cook a piece of salmon for two or three hours. Robuchon and his generation of chefs obliterated the old thinking about fish. We barely cook salmon now; we are very cautious and gentle. That was all new when I was the fish chef at Jamin, and that was exciting.

My assistant in the fish station was a talented young chef named Guillaume Brahimi. We had a good dynamic together. He was smart, a strong line cook, and loyal. Unlike in many other stations, Guillaume and I had each other's back. When Robuchon found our plates lacking and began to berate us, we didn't throw each other under the bus.

Once I began to run the fish station and plating the dishes became my supervisory responsibility, I began to understand that cooking is not about architecture first. It's about the flavor and harmony of the ingredients you put into each dish. Robuchon presented these almost 3-D plates with complex mosaics of color and ingredients and yes, he was pushing the design to the limit. But he was always thinking about the flavor first. The painting was the food and the flavors. The presentation on the plate was the frame.

Every kitchen shapes you, and with Robuchon what I learned was attention to detail, rigor, passion for beauty, precision, and discipline. It was craftsmanship at its finest. There was, at the time, no creativity on my part; I was just duplicating his vision. But in duplicating a dish like the fanned baby red mullet with an olive oil emulsion and tempura-fried celery leaves, I learned through imitation what I could not have learned in any other kitchen in Paris.


The whole kitchen staff got a reprieve when Robuchon took an extended trip to Japan. Things were so peaceful when he was away—busy and intense, yes, but it was so much easier to focus on making sure my execution was perfect without his intimidating presence. And then suddenly he was back, determined to sashimi our egos down to size.

"You think you guys are champions and that you are the best because you work in a three-star restaurant." He stalked around the kitchen, making sure to lock eyes with each and every one of us. "You all suck! In Japan, the chefs are ten times better than you. They're more humble than you. They are more skilled, more precise, more gifted. Better, better, best! They are better, and they are the best!" It was crushing at the time, but when I traveled to Japan myself years later, I understood. In Japan, the restaurants had the precision and the unerring commitment to excellence he was always aiming for. It was his dream: the Japanese perfection of Western cuisine.

Robuchon was one of the first chefs in France to be influenced, and mesmerized, by Japanese cooking. And it's perhaps in his cuisine that the Asian influence has been felt the greatest. That influence was mostly felt in the fish station. In technique and in presentation, Jamin began to represent a bridge between French culture and Japanese culture. Robuchon was creating that bridge and we were all a part of it.

Though fear and pressure in some ways defined my time at Jamin, there was also a tremendous amount of pride in working there. It took months to get a reservation, and just to say that you worked with Robuchon was like saying you played guitar for a world-famous rock band: people didn't necessarily know you, but they knew you were big-time.


By the time I returned to Jamin, I was twenty-two, and I knew that I was receiving the best possible training for the levels of cooking I dreamed of doing. And yet, each Sunday my stomach would start churning with anxiety. I would feel too sick to eat. I didn't sleep Sunday nights because my brain was flooded with fear about everything that might go wrong. Starting a new station from zero was taking its toll. Each night, when I thought I was going to die (or lose my mind), I would begin counting the hours until I could leave: "Okay, it's seven now. Even if he keeps us here until one, that's only six hours, max! I can do it."

I knew I still wanted to get to the top of the mountain, but I couldn't see it anymore. I put my head down and staggered ahead. Through repetition and determination to be great (or at least better than good), I began to understand the sauces I was preparing. I started to allow myself to feel my way through them, not just assemble them by rote. I knew when a sauce I had made was delicious—perfectly balanced and deeply flavored. And if I was lucky, Robuchon would choose that moment to demand a taste. Benoît Richard knew that my sauces had finally gotten there, but he wanted Robuchon to think that he constantly had to help me out. He wanted the credit for my hard work. One of my worst moments at Jamin was when, after hearing the chef call for my foie gras truffle sauce, Benoît ran over, grabbed my pan when Chef's back was turned, and brought it to the pass himself.

"Ah, Benoît. Ça c'est de la sauce," he said, his expression temporarily slackened with pleasure. "C'est délicieux." In that kitchen, it was the highest praise anyone could ever hope for. And I never got it.

When Robuchon was upset with me, he'd say, "You'll never be a saucier." It was like a knife in the heart. Never mind the irrationality of it—I was the saucier on the fish station!—I was desperate for him to recognize my progress. "You have it or you don't," he would tell me. "Too bad you don't."

Day after day, my life in that kitchen was like a psychological experiment to determine the precise combination of pressure, pain, and fear it takes to make someone lose it completely. We weren't afraid of physical violence. It was purely psychological—a heavy torrent of bad weather that never let up, making you doubt whether clear skies existed at all. Robuchon wasn't a pan thrower like so many chefs of his generation, nor did he curse like them. Instead, we were terrified of disappointing him, of hitting the switch that caused him to spend hours going over our failures again and again, striking our weak spots until we were raw with shame.

Some chefs survived by taking credit for others' work. I strove to be one of the most laid-back in the group, but even I could be extremely selfish about my comfort in that kitchen. I began to look out only for myself: if my commis made a mistake, well, he was on his own. We were all hard on our commis because we were always afraid, and cruelty is one of fear's most common by-products. It would take me a very long time to unlearn those methods of surviving under pressure.

Some chefs simply couldn't handle it. There was a kid who came to Jamin from Alain Chapel, one of the most revered restaurants in France at the time. He never made it past his training on garde manger. Already skinny to begin with, he had no time to eat and he was too stressed out to sleep when he went home. On his second Friday, he fainted and fell down the stairs. By the following Wednesday, he was gone.

One of the guys we worked with, who had struggled with depression, tried to commit suicide. I wasn't on the edge myself, but I knew that something bad was happening to me at Jamin. I was, increasingly, beaten down and frustrated, miserable and angry. But Robuchon was king and I could not imagine leaving him. And yet, I didn't know how it would ever get better if I stayed.

Bernadette's constant jealousy only compounded the stress I felt at my job. I would come home from a seventeen-hour day at the restaurant and she would accuse me of having spent the evening in some girl's bed. I began to forget what it was like when we first got together—how lucky I'd felt to have such a beautiful girl be so head over heels for a guy like me.

Most nights when I came home, I was too tired to defend myself. Bernadette would take my silence as a confession, getting more and more worked up until she would start throwing at me whatever she could get her hands on: glasses, plates, books, bottles. It was exhausting, and I didn't have the time or the ability to give her the attention and reassurances she needed.

When Bernadette and I finally moved into a better apartment, Maurice and his wife came to help us with the heavy lifting. To this day, Maurice still talks about carrying my sofa up five flights of stairs because my new apartment had no elevator! But what I remember most from that time was how in love Maurice and his wife were. How she always seemed to encourage him and believe in him and how every decision, from which jobs they would take to how they would spend the holidays, was undertaken as if they were equal members of a team. Maurice's wife, Brigitte, was beautiful and the attraction between them was clear, but what impressed me most was the deep sense of trust and friendship. I wanted to have that in my own relationship, and I began to doubt that I ever could with Bernadette.

A few days later, I sat Bernadette down and told her that maybe she needed to go back to Moissac for a while. We were making each other miserable. Besides, she hated Paris. She needed the country and to be around her family.

Miraculously, she agreed. Under one condition: "I want you to promise that you'll never leave me," she said, crying. "I'm going to tell Maurice to keep an eye on you. Maybe you could stay with him while I'm gone?"

"Whatever makes you happy. And I'll tell Georges to keep an eye on you to make sure you don't run away with a handsome soldier that you pick up at Le Nirvana." It was meant as a joke, but she just nodded at me solemnly.

Even with Bernadette gone for a few weeks, I was breaking down at work. The only thing that got me through was the awareness that my skills were getting stronger. Each sauce was a struggle, but one that I could work through with increasing confidence.

I still hid a little bit of everything I needed to have ready as backup in case Robuchon decided my sauce was shit just before service, and because I had to be prepared when inspiration struck. Out of the blue one morning, he decided he wanted to try something new. So he asked me to prepare a bunch of cockles for him. I steamed the cockles in the couscoussier and brought them to him.

"Where is the jus?" he asked.

"The jus?" He hadn't mentioned it. In fact, he hadn't mentioned anything, just said, "Prepare these."

"The jus! Why didn't you steam them and save the jus?"

I would have saved the jus if he had explained just a little bit more what he was looking for. But he hadn't asked for the jus, he'd asked me to steam cockles without explaining the purpose of the task. I tried to explain this, but he just cut me off.

"Why are you always sabotaging me?" And off he went. Forty-five minutes later, he'd escalated to screaming. "Have you no respect for the product?" He knew I worshipped those ingredients, but he kept jabbing me exactly where I was most sensitive. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore.

Underneath my breath, I said, "Shut the fuck up, asshole."

I didn't mean for him to hear me, but he did. "What did you say?" he asked, looking at me incredulously.

I looked at the ground and said nothing.

"Repeat what you said!" he bristled, challenging me.

Again, I said nothing.

He was sputtering now, in shock and furious because no one ever, ever talked back to Robuchon.

"If you're not happy, Ripert, just say the word," he said.

I thought about it for a second and for the first time, I answered truthfully.

"I'm not happy." I took my apron off and handed it to him.

I walked all the way to the end of the kitchen, every second lasting an hour. As I got to the top of the stairs to the locker room, I wondered what the hell I was doing. In that kitchen, we all believed that Robuchon was God: He knew everything there was to know about cooking. He knew everything that we did, no matter how well we thought we could hide our mistakes and shortcuts. And he knew every chef in Paris. He could truly make or break someone's career. Staying in that kitchen for as long as we could handle it was a sign of toughness and superiority that we all prided ourselves on.

And now I had thrown it all away. I'd worked for him for almost three years, and I'd just committed career suicide.

So I turned and walked back. Robuchon was in my station, finishing my dish.

"No, no," he said, pushing me away. "I don't need you."

That may have been true, but in that instant, I realized that I needed him. I needed my job. I could have done without the tactics, but I needed the instruction. I wanted the challenge of his elaborate dishes and his impossible sauces; I wanted to work in a place where chefs were breaking old rules and breaking new ground.

"No, I'll do it," I said and put on my apron.

He didn't say no. In fact, he didn't say anything. He just stayed there with me for a few minutes to make sure I finished the fish properly and returned to the pass. I could feel his eyes on me for the rest of the morning.

He didn't speak to me for three weeks. But wondering when he would use this transgression against me was punishment enough.


That January, I got an offer to cook in Puerto Rico. The salary was amazing. The perks were fantastic and I would be living in an island paradise. I made plans to leave Robuchon when the restaurant closed in June for the summer holiday. I gave my notice six months before. But by June, the offer—which had always seemed too good to be true—had fallen through.

Robuchon called me into his office. He was a chameleon, and when he wasn't in the kitchen, where he felt that his reputation was always on the line, he was approachable and warm.

"Eric, I heard you're not going to Puerto Rico," he said. "Why didn't you tell me?"

I shrugged. "The deal fell through."

"Do you have something else?" He seemed genuinely concerned.

"No."

"Where would you like to go?" he asked.

"Brazil," I answered, honestly.

He shut that idea down immediately. "No," he said. "I am not sending you on a tropical vacation." I mentioned Spain, and he shook his head. "You live right next to Spain. Why don't you go somewhere new, somewhere farther away? We're closed in July, so take a few weeks off, get your head straight, and when you come back, I'll help you find a job."

Somehow, I made it unscathed until almost the end. And then, leading into the final lunch service before the restaurant closed for vacation and I left for Moissac, I prepared a sauce that I knew wasn't good enough. It was a really difficult recipe for a dish that had just been put on the menu: John Dory topped with delicate fried rings of fresh onion and served with a refined sauce based on onion jus. It wasn't his best dish, but I was still responsible for it. I had foolishly decided not to chop all of the onions I needed for the reduction—and I could taste it in the weakness of the flavor. I began to panic, but there was no time to start again.

"Show me your sauce," said Robuchon, suddenly behind me. I handed him a spoonful, meeting his gaze as he tasted it.

His eyes sparkled as he said with a friendly smile, "See, Ripert? I told you so." Meaning: you'll never be a saucier.

Then, he softened. "It's okay. You can send it."


I went home to Andorra for vacation, with a fun side trip to Spain. Shortly before I was to return to Paris, I got a call from Robuchon. True to his word, he had found me a job.

"So. I received a call from a good friend in Washington, Jean-Louis Palladin." I knew about Palladin: he was, they said, playful and passionate, energetic and fearless, a great French chef who had a very American verve. He had landed in Washington, D.C., opening a place at the Watergate Hotel and becoming a kind of rock star in the States. "He needs a chef de partie with the potential of becoming sous-chef, and I recommended you."

"America? I don't think I'm ready. And besides, I don't speak English."

He smiled—kindly, I thought. "You have proven yourself to be a fast learner. And you have certain skills. So it's decided?"

"I would be honored, Chef."


Leaving Robuchon was unexpectedly bittersweet. I knew from the moment I finished my last shift at Jamin that I was leaving my mentor behind. He taught me discipline. He taught me technique. He taught me skills. He taught me flavor. He taught me speed. He taught me how to be a cook. Maybe I'm biased or even brainwashed, but I believe that Joël Robuchon is one of the defining chefs of not only my generation, but of the twentieth century. In terms of excellence, there are no standouts who can compete with what he did and the influence he wielded.

The longer I was away from him, the more I could see that Robuchon had a quality of wabi-sabi about him: the beauty of imperfection. Just like the beautiful tea bowls that Japanese artisans purposefully nick or chip at the bottom as a quiet reminder that there is no such thing as perfection, so was Robuchon flawed with his frustration and his temper. His food was divine, but the chef was a man, with all of the nicks and chips that make us human.

Georges was retired and so was I, at least until my visa came through. I decided to spend the time waiting for my travel papers at the farm in Moissac, with short trips to Andorra and Spain. Supposedly I was there to spend time with Bernadette, but every morning at dawn I'd slip out of her bed and walk the dirt road to Georges's house. After drinking a terrible cup of coffee—the ninety-year-old housekeeper brewed it in the fireplace, using an old sock for a filter—we'd drive to the market in Moissac in his beautiful Mercedes. In those days, you still bought your ingredients for the day, not the week, which meant that we always had the perfect excuse to get out.

No matter how shabby his sweater or how thick he liked to lay on his rural accent, Georges was the king of the market. Everyone in town knew exactly how much land he owned and what his farm had yielded the year before. He was stopped at every stall to chat with old friends or answer questions about this year's crops. His route always began at the covered vegetable market in the town square, buying whatever he didn't grow and pointing out produce that he could tell had been trucked in from other regions.

As soon as Georges entered the market, the vendors pulled their best items out of crates that they kept under their tables. He was truly committed to quality. He'd spend thirty minutes talking to the woman selling beans about how she grew the haricots Tarbais and how she liked to make cassoulet, taking a deep interest in her methods—or so it seemed. The knowing looks that women gave him as we passed from stall to stall and on to the café made me think of stories I still heard from my cousins and uncles about my father—what a ladies' man he had been. I was too young to remember my father as a flirt, but I took a kind of familial pride in watching Georges in action.

After the café, we'd make our way to the bakery, the butcher, the cheesemonger, and occasionally the fishmonger. I never set foot in the fishmonger's, due to an incident with a man selling oysters while I was in the army: when I'd gotten back to the farm and opened them for our lunch, they were no longer moving. I immediately asked Georges to drive me back to town, where I quietly told the vendor that the oysters were dead and asked for my money back. I thought I was doing him a favor by letting him know he had a bad batch. But he refused to take them.

"You don't know anything about oysters," he said, waving me away as he would any skinny twentysomething.

I looked to Georges to make sure it was okay to argue with the guy.

"Sir, believe me: I do. I have worked with beautiful oysters in the restaurants where I've cooked. And I have never opened a dead one until today."

"He cooked for Joël Robuchon!" Georges interjected, trying to be helpful.

"Ah, a Parisian. Well then, you really don't know anything," the man said. At that point, I got so angry that I upended the sack of oysters and dumped them on the floor before storming out of the building.

I called the sanitation services from the phone in the café, where Georges had ordered us wine to celebrate.

"You were right, Eric," said Georges as he clinked my glass. "You should always stand up for quality." I was glad to know I had Georges's support, but the whole ordeal ruined the fishmonger's for me.

My favorite part of going to town with Georges was our visit to the foie gras market. In Gascony, foie gras was something that you prepared at home during the winter and ate for Sunday suppers and special occasions. At least a hundred farmers carefully displayed their ducks and geese, arranging them on white tablecloths as though they were presenting rings at Cartier. And they were definitely valuable—at least, their livers were. The foie gras market is where Georges truly became a legend in my eyes.

"Le foie est petit," he'd say after barely caressing a freshly plucked mallard or goose. "Le foie est gros," he'd murmur, lightly running his hand along another. I still don't know how he did it. He didn't press them or prod them or even pick them up. He just brushed his fingers against their cool, nubby carcasses to feel how plump the liver was. Sometimes he could tell simply by looking. Bluish-black skin meant that the animal had been brutalized and the liver would be damaged too. And he was never wrong. He bought only the most impeccable foie.

We never made it home before eleven in the morning. The doméstique would unload the car as we set about making lunch in the fireplace. Georges's wife, Guillemette, would sometimes braise a hare in one corner of the fireplace. She'd cook it for two whole days and when she was done, it fell right off the bone. The pleasure of the smell, the pleasure of lifting the lid and seeing the evolution of the dish—to cook that dish gave you the illusion that you had all the time in the world. It was very different from restaurant cooking, where you were always working against time to make each dish perfect—and fast as you could. That hare could've cooked for two days, or five. There was no rush on Georges's farm.

The ceiling of the house was hung with hams and saucisson, which collected the smoke. When it was summertime and the small house smoldered with heat, the preserved meats would be moved into the cellar dug below the house. This was where the confit was kept.


In the kitchen, Georges also liked to prepare chou farci and braised pork neck with green olives, adding a little bit of flour to thicken the rich sauce. I cooked whenever I could, sometimes adapting Robuchon dishes for fun. If we were making moules marinières, I would take the mussels out of their shells and arrange them on each plate in the shape of a snail, dressing them with a sauce made from mayonnaise, crème fraîche, mussel juice, and lemon juice. But mostly I kept it simple. Although the last four years had taught me craftsmanship and instilled an appreciation for quality at the highest level, it was a relief to be able to improvise, to pay attention to the true nature of the ingredients.

Georges and his family often grilled carcasses of ducks and geese in the fireplace and made the most incredible French fries cooked in duck fat. And yet, as far as I can tell, even all these years later, no one ever had a problem with cholesterol. Everyone lived to be eighty.


Just as Georges selected his birds, so did I trust my hands to tell me about the produce—to tell, from touch, if a tomato might be watery and flavorless, or thick-skinned and starchy, and then pick a better one. And then I let my instinct tell me how to prepare it, without putting all of my effort into the presentation. For once, I knew what it felt like to cook with my heart and soul, just like my grandmother in Nice. Even if I was only roasting a chicken or making a pizza à la française, this country cooking was as liberating as it was satisfying. I was making what I wanted for the first time in my life, and I was doing it for people I cared about. To be able to watch someone's face as they tasted my food was a new thrill, and something that never got old.

"You know, Eric," Bernadette's mom said one day as we ate lunch under the chestnut tree, "I heard there's a job opening in the hospital cafeteria. All you'd have to do is open cans! Imagine how much easier that would be than going to America."

I smiled, not wanting to look down on hospital cooks, but I was confident that no matter what Robuchon claimed my failings were, that kind of job would not be my fate.

In the afternoons, Georges and I would walk the fields to see what was ready to be harvested. He explained how each fruit and vegetable was cultivated to his specifications, starting with their planting during the appropriate moon. During my visits between Andorra and the ocean that summer, I watched apricots ripen to the color of sunsets, cherries get fat and sweet, artichoke plants grow tall and spiked with purple thistles. In early September, when I moved into Bernadette's full-time, the special golden Chasselas grapes were ready. Then there were the apples, red and juicy, like candy hanging from a tree, followed by the pears. Georges strolled us through the cool, corrugated-steel warehouse to make sure that produce was being properly sorted, boxed, and stored for export. After that we would stop by the animal pens out back to count the eggs and pet the pigs. When I was a kid, I gathered eggs and picked up fresh milk on the small farms where my mother and I had lived, but this was a real operation. I was in heaven.

Obviously I wasn't a farmer—these were people who could predict the weather based on which way the wind was blowing. But I tried helping out a few times, even though it wasn't expected of me. (Like Georges, I enjoyed a special retiree status.) In July I spent a single morning destroying my hands in an attempt to harvest artichokes, and an hour or two running apples through the sorter in the fall. I was invited to kill chickens, but politely said I'd rather see how they did it first. The chickens were stupid: you could just pick them up and slit their throats before they knew what had happened. But the pigs were smart. Worse (for me), the family treated them as pets, naming them and petting them right up until the minute they called them into the pen to be killed in the winter.

The first one trotted in when he heard them call "Viens viens viens!" Georges briskly slit the pig's throat while a few workers held him. The animal's cries were chillingly human. I was even more traumatized by the sight of blood everywhere—it reminded me of Hugo in my mother's bathroom. The second pig frantically looked for his friend when he heard his name called. Once he realized what had happened, he refused to go into the pen. I went back into the house, unable to watch. Later, I had a hard time helping them break down the bled-out animal for the winter's hams, sausages, and boudin noir. I knew that they respected the animals' lives, but I wasn't able to help them close the cycle.

However, I was allowed to attend one sacred ritual that the other men on the farm were not: the making of the foie gras. The men weren't even allowed into the house during the days it was being prepared, since it was feared that their dirt-caked hands and shoes would contaminate the jars and cans of confited liver that would make their meals so satisfying and be pulled out on special occasions throughout the year.

"We've never allowed a single man in here," Georges's wife said to me with a wink. "You, you're the exception." The other women giggled and put their heads back down to the serious task at hand.

For two days each week after the holidays, the women in the community turned the big farm kitchen into a preservation laboratory. The Mercedes-loads of geese and mallards that Georges brought home were methodically broken down and separated into their useful parts. First the duck legs and breasts were layered with salt and bay leaves and left overnight to cure. The next day, the salt was washed off and the meat slowly cooked in the fat that had been rendered in massive copper pots, filling the house with a strong aroma, like rasher after rasher of bacon being fried on a Sunday morning. At dinner, we grilled the carcasses in the fireplace and shared the charred bits of meat, licking our fingers with relish.

The corn-fattened livers were carefully deveined and soaked in milk to draw out any bitterness before being canned. In Gascony, it was sacrilegious to eat foie gras medium-rare, or mi-cuit: it had to be well done. The brownish-yellow lobes were sliced and put into cans, then boiled in a giant kettle, where they cooked in their own fat. Throughout the process, everything was exactingly sterilized and measured—a single crumb or missing gram of salt could spoil a valuable batch. After each jar and can had been boiled, we carefully labeled them and arranged them in the cellar. The day the pigs were slaughtered, we set about confiting and canning the pork loin, which would be sliced like ham come summer. We marked the end of our month of labor with a big celebration dinner.

I didn't realize it at the time, but my months at the farm, working with meat—the pigs and the ducks and the geese—added a muscularity to my cooking that would hold me in good stead when I got to America and the next stage of my career. Fish, which is what I did for Robuchon, is more technical, but meat is more sensual. At the time, I was more of an intellectual chef. But it's important to have both—the instinct and the technique, the elegance and the muscular sensuality—to be a great chef.

For those weeks, I felt like I was back at my grandparents' in Nîmes for the making of the conserves au tomate. My grandfather and I would harvest as many tomatoes as we could, pulling them home in a cart. My grandmother blanched, peeled, and seeded them, packing them into clean jars, while my grandfather fed wood into the stove in the backyard. The jars went into the big pressurized washtub that was used to boil the linen sheets. I spent hours going from the kitchen to the stove, inhaling the sweet smoke in the thick August air. The next day, we'd move on to string beans. In Andorra in the fall, I also helped my mother put up the wild mushrooms that we harvested in our special spots in the mountains around our home. The pop of a jar unsealing in winter still makes me nostalgic.


Every two or three weeks, I drove the four hours back to Andorra to see my mother, climb mountains, and get away from Bernadette. Things were better with her only in that I spent most of my time with Georges. She was back at her job in the gift shop in town for most of the day. When we were home in Moissac, our fights weren't as bad because her family was there. (Jean-Claude was always studying, so I said we had to respect his silence.) Also, I had adapted to the farmer's way of living: sleep when the sun goes down, wake when it rises. We didn't overlap that often, but when we did, it was a disaster. We were both so young, and I didn't know how to take the time to make her feel assured of my love, when all of my energy was poured into my career, any more than she knew how to manage her insecurities.

In Moissac, being so close to the source of the food and the rhythm of nature made me appreciate my job as a cook even more, and I was itching to get back to building my career. I didn't want to leave Georges, but the winter months had cut our market mornings and field walks short. (November through February were mostly about maintaining the trees.) As much as I loved the smell of the icy soil and hay mixing with cut branches and wood smoke, I wasn't used to being away from a restaurant kitchen for so long. I was eager to get back to work. The joke about the job at the hospital cafeteria was starting to get old. I started calling D.C. every two days, increasingly anxious to move on to the next phase of my life.


Still, even now, whenever I cook a rustic lunch over a fire I think about Georges and all he taught me about the beauty of a simple meal. I grew up in a small village, but Andorra was a little more cosmopolitan. Before Georges, I had never had any contact with a real gentleman farmer. I had no real experience with rural living. Georges and the people who worked for him were amazingly efficient in every way. They used every bit of land they owned, they used every part of the food they got.

Georges and his extended group of family and friends were—and remain—great, great people. They prepared me for my next stage of cooking—working for Jean-Louis Palladin. Palladin was from that part of the country and that's what his cooking was about: the powerful flavors of meats and innards, the transformative power of fat saved from meat and fowl. I'd just come from Jamin, one of the most refined kitchens in the world. Although I didn't know it yet, if I hadn't had those months on the farm, I would have never understood Jean-Louis.

Every time I cook on a fireplace, it all comes rushing back: the hams hanging, the grandma stewing the hare, fries in duck fat, the morning coffee cooked on an open flame. Georges's greatest gift is how this all lives on in me. It was a very happy time in my life, and that was an important lesson too: to learn how little it took to be happy, to understand from a young age that the human heart is a small and delicate vase. You must handle it carefully, but in the right circumstances, it does not take much to fill it up.