Chapter Five

PARIS

No one has the right to be ambivalent about Paris. The city, as Elliot Paul wrote, was inexhaustible, as was its memory. But as the TGV sped northward past Chartres and then Versailles, my feelings about the visit were indefinite, if not mixed.

The night before, I called Lily to tell her how excited I was. I had three very different experiences penciled on my dance card: working in the kitchens of two of the city’s most renowned restaurants, and taking an intimate class in someone’s home. For the last few weeks, I’d been working my way through the minors; now I had a shot at the big leagues.

There is little I can add to the enchanted lore of Paris, other than to say that I go there every chance I get. The beauty and the romance seem fresh every time. It would be an understatement to say I’ve made twenty-five pilgrimages, the highlights so numerous they tend to melt into one another.

My memory, on the other hand, was very sharp about the last time I had been there. It was just a few months earlier, with Carolyn, whose only experience with the city had been a rainy one-night layover more than twenty years before, and we spent a week soaking it into our skins so that it might never wash off. And so an edginess overcame me as the train pressed across the city line.

There was also a hotel problem I hadn’t anticipated. A friend had booked me into Le Meurice as a favor so I could work in the kitchen under its heralded chef. But the reservation was canceled at the last minute; the prêt-à-porter and auto shows were both in full swing, and every courtesy room was reclaimed for the bloat of latecomers. There wasn’t a room in Paris, I was told, that hadn’t been scooped up for conventioneers. In a pinch, Expedia came up with the All Suites Hotel Plazza St.-Antoine, which, as luck would have it, was situated on the Rue du Faubourg. The double zs in the name, of course, should have been a dead giveaway, but I was too relieved to have a room confirmed and figured it couldn’t be that bad, considering the location. The hotel was on the same street as the Ritz, right by the Opera, and it had three stars next to its name: a little bauble among jewels.

It wasn’t until I got into a taxi at Gare Montparnasse that I realized my Zirconian error. The driver wanted to know which Rue du Faubourg, as there were several in the city. It took him some time paging through a Plan de Paris to sort out the problem. The one I was looking for, we determined, happened to be the Rue du Faubourg St.-Antoine, a little detail Expedia forgot to mention. And where was the Rue du Faubourg St.-Antoine? If you are a New Yorker and you’ve ever been to Jackson Heights, you have a pretty good idea. It was in the eleventh arrondissement, which is about as far as you can go in Paris before you hit the next town. It’s where trolls live under the bridge. I had been hoping to check out a few great bistros while in Paris, but the cuisine in my neighborhood was limited to Indian, Turkish, Sudanese, and Bangladeshi. The only decent possibility—and that was stretching the point—was called the Extra Old Café. If ever a name said it all, this one did the trick.

The hotel was practical for a certain kind of tourist. There were many American guests who had never before visited Paris and were seeing the city in a day-and-a-half sweep. Others had decided that any place was central, no matter where they stayed. And some viewed the all-Indian staff as a way of not patronizing the French. In their view, the hotel wasn’t pretentious, it wasn’t hoity-toity, it wasn’t…French.

There was certainly nothing charming about the facilities. My room was an ugly airless cell, cramped and tatty, with a badly stained carpet and 1950s dormitory bedspread, which I pulled off and stashed in the closet. A bouquet of Eau de Lysol hung in the air. A sad little refrigerator stood in a corner, and when I opened it the shelves were empty, except for a plate of chicken bones under plastic wrap.

“Is this the mini-bar?” I asked a porter who helped with my bags.

A huge grin of acknowledgment lit up his face. If I wanted sanctuary, somewhere to unwind, he suggested a bar on the corner, across from Place de la Nation.

I made a beeline for the place, which was filling up with people who met there regularly. It was a little before five, what the French call purgatory: too early for dinner, too late for lunch. Groups of men were sitting quietly at postage-stamp–size tables, drinking Campari and eating handfuls of pistachios. From my seat near the door, I could watch the strange, eclectic sideshow streaming from the Métro, a mix of swarthy North Africans and Middle Easterners, along with thick sorts in corduroys and clunky shoes, the backbone of working-class Paris. At the table next to me, a stubby little man lit a cigar and sucked at it like a nursing calf.

He must have seen me wince. “If it bothers you, I will put it out,” he said, in perfect English.

“Pas de problem, M’sieur,” I lied.

He smiled slit-eyed, as if he’d caught me with my pants down. “You can speak English to me,” he said. “I worked in New York for three years—and loved it.”

He was a garmento by the name of Maxim, which seemed rather grand for such a feral old man. His clothes, while not shabby, revealed a disdain for Seventh Avenue. They were dated, conventional-looking knockoffs worn with a flamboyance meant to camouflage their age. Already there were shiny streaks on the elbows of his sport coat where the fabric had worn thin. There was dark stubble on his cheeks where he had forgotten to shave, and a few raw patches where he hadn’t forgotten. But in every hair on his finely combed head there was a reminder of style. He had an air of sorrowing endurance. The skin at his temples pulsed as he sucked that cigar.

He’d been waiting eagerly for someone with whom he could reminisce about New York. “I loved it,” he repeated, “loved how aggressive it was. The people there would eat you rather than let you get the upper hand. In Paris, everyone is a pussy. No backbone here at all. The boss looks at you funny, you roll over. In New York, you tell him to go fuck himself. Hah!”

He broke into a few bars of “I Love New York” and polished off a stiff shot of whiskey.

“You obviously love Paris, too,” I suggested.

“Paris has its interesting points.” He relit the cigar and sent smoke signals into the air. “See that truck over there?” he asked, pointing to an idling Hertz van that advertised a day rate on its panel. “You take the Métro out to Porte de Vincennes and you’ll see hundreds of them parked by the bois. It’s like a little city. They are called cabinettes, and if you knock on any one of them, you’ll find whatever you want: women, men, young girls or young boys, young girls and boys, transsexuals, Africans, Asians, chimpanzees, whatever your heart desires. I could take you out there and show you around.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve sworn off chimpanzees.”

He fired off a too-loud guffaw. “I like you, Mr. New York. I’m even going to buy you another one of those sissy wines you are drinking. Or would you rather have something more manly?”

“No, a sissy wine would be fine. And I’m going to buy you another shot of those depth charges that will kill you before you’re sixty.”

“I’m already sixty,” he said, grinning triumphantly.

I thought he was seventy but had opted for flattery. Jesus, sixty—he looked almost dead already.

We spent a few hours talking about the precarious world situation—American politics, which seemed to be every European’s favorite subject at the moment; French politics, which Maxim considered as dull and toothless as his country; German politics, which intrigued him because the old Communist regime seemed to be on the upswing; and British politics, which he described by making little doglike whimpering sounds.

“America squandered so much goodwill,” he said, between shots that were coming faster than automatic-weapon fire. “After nine-eleven, everyone wanted to be an American, even the Algerians that pester us like fleas. Even my mother-in-law, the French purist.” He spat on the sidewalk in her honor. “Then, Bush invades Iraq and America is shit. Everywhere, not just in France, which you whip like a dog. All of Europe is disgusted. You should be ashamed.”

He waited for me to defend my country and grew irritated when I refused. There was nothing I could say that would justify such a mess. It had been like that since I’d landed in Europe. Everyone I met wanted some kind of explanation. They weren’t anti-American, as Maxim implied; rather, they were disappointed, embarrassed. They’d expected something better from Washington. America had been their last best hope.

Maxim’s voice clawed. “What are you doing in Paris, Mr. America, scouting for the next invasion? Perhaps your president intends to ban French toast.”

I explained that my dream was to learn the secrets of great cooking. “But even if I have good teachers in Paris, being stranded in this neighborhood won’t help. There is no place to eat, no imaginative French food. My presence here is as contingent as that of the refugees. I feel like a gourmet adrift in Nebraska.”

Maxim contemplated me impersonally over the rim of his glass. After a reflexive cough, he stood up abruptly, the glass light in his hand, while trying to remove a cell phone from his breast pocket with the other hand. In the jumble, he sloshed some whiskey on his lapel. “Wait here,” he said, dabbing at it with a napkin. Then he stalked off toward the bar, presumably to freshen his drink.

I don’t know why, my first night in Paris, I wasted time sitting there for another twenty minutes. At some point, I gave up thinking that Maxim would reappear. My thoughts had shifted to tomorrow, to a cooking class that sounded promising.

The hour was getting late, and by the time I shaved and showered for dinner and took the Métro to a decent bistro, it would be almost midnight, which was too complicated. Going back to the hotel was an even more depressing idea, but it seemed like the most sensible alternative. Perhaps I should grab a good salad somewhere nearby and then hit the sack. But as I got up to leave, Maxim corkscrewed his way through the crowded bar and motioned for me to stay put. He had called his wife, who just happened to have dinner waiting on the stove, more than enough to include a hungry guest from America, and if I didn’t mind a little hike up five flights of stairs, he promised a meal, by God, I would never forget.

It was as lovely an invitation as anyone could expect, and it made me feel welcome and alive in the midst of this ugly but diverse neighborhood, knowing that a stranger had offered me a home-cooked meal. At the same time, I couldn’t help remembering an episode of Law and Order in which an ostensible dinner guest wound up a corpse in a maniac’s stairwell. I cut a sidelong glance at Maxim, who looked about as wholesome as Hannibal Lecter.

We walked a few blocks to a stately old Haussmann-era building with graffiti slashed across the front doors. There were flowers in the window boxes and enough lights in open windows to reveal a pattern of silhouettes though the curtained gaps. Competing strains of music helped to ease my fears. In all honesty, a fire-snorting beast couldn’t have driven me from Maxim’s flat. As we entered, I was hit with a blast of a richly scented braise so intense, so powerful, redolent of wood smoke, that my saliva began to run. Dogs don’t drool as readily, I thought. I stood without moving, filling my lungs with the aphrodisiac, struggling to identify the source.

Maxim sniffed the air with his bulbous hound’s nose. “Ah, a veal roast,” he said, shrugging indifferently. “Eat some, just to be polite, even if it tastes like shit.”

He said it deliberately, of course, to antagonize his wife, Solange, who sighed as if in resignation. She was a small, stooped, aristocratic woman with a European sense of order, whose vexed expression seemed compressed around long sufferance. I could tell that she was used to Maxim’s blustering, which appeared to have no effect on her whatsoever, and she treated him with the kind of parental scorn lavished on a habitual mischief-maker. It wasn’t clear whether she enjoyed this role or was simply inured to it. Even so, she must have been made of something very hard to endure such treatment.

Dismissing her dinner as “a veal roast” was like calling Krug’s Clos du Mesnil a fizzy wine. It was a masterpiece…a tour de force…. If I’d been born with Cyrano’s eloquence, I might have rattled off a litany of platitudes. But of words, I only had three: “This is incredible.”

In all my travels, I had never been served such a meal. Even my friend Sandy’s food was…different…refined. This was down-and-dirty, as if it had been dug out of the ground, and it reminded me of my Hungarian grandmother’s goulash, honest old-country fare. There were grease stains branded on the pot, and bits of meat stuck to the side, and a certain smell, elusive and smoky, that went with something long simmered. It had the earmarks of home cooking all over it.

The veal seemed to float in a dense trough of rich brown stock infused with white wine, spices, and fresh herbs. It was surrounded by mounds of garlicky sautéed onions and sweet carrots. Meaty roasted cèpes the size of handballs filled another bowl, along with fork-smashed boulangère potatoes crisped with bits of bacon and caramelized onions.

I looked at Maxim to see if he appreciated the food, but it was impossible to tell. He was preoccupied, expounding fiery views on Jacques Chirac’s economic indiscretions, and he ate like an animal, gums bared, teeth gnashing like a trench plow. His hands with their tobacco stains never stopped moving. Le Pen…the skinheads…the thirty-five-hour work week…. Every so often, Solange leaned over and, wordlessly, refilled his plate, but she might have been serving lime Jell-O for all his obliviousness.

Dinner stretched on into the early hours of morning, filled with conversation and bickering and tankards of wine. I was delighted by the situation and relieved to be traveling alone, to be able to interact, to be myself. There was something hideously appealing about these characters, Maxim and Solange. They had an unusual repellent charm. They were smart and wickedly cynical, with convoluted good humor, but infuriating, like cats. At times their behavior was difficult to parse. Was it cruel or harmless teasing? An act they replayed for strangers? Sitting with them made me appreciate the complexity of marriage, all of its demands and considerations, and the compromises that are made.

I was confused to have felt this way in front of strangers. But I was also very grateful for their hospitality, which had saved me from a night of certain loneliness and self-examination.

Around three o’clock, I felt my residual energy give out and asked for directions to the hotel. Maxim walked me back to the hotel entrance, and when we shook hands, he looked at me dolefully and said, “I wish we had stayed in New York. There was much less there for me to despise.”

We said goodnight and good-bye, and I promised to call before I left Paris and give him an update about the cooking. Then he walked slowly along the pavement in the opposite direction, cutting as sorrowful a figure as anyone I had ever seen.

I grew more confused than ever. I have to do something, I thought, otherwise I’ll wind up angry all the time, like Maxim. Being alone like this in Paris was far too anguishing. Much as I loved the city, all I wanted was to go home. I took the stairs up to my room and found myself back on my trusty Expedia home page. No Rue du Faubourg for me this time. It was the Plazza Hotel or nothing.

There wasn’t enough time the next morning to finalize arrangements for a flight to New York. Arrangements require initiative; I needed resolution.

In the meantime, I’d already arranged to take a cooking class with Samira Hradsky, who offered intimate one-day seminars in her Paris flat. According to a brochure, she claimed to teach students how to whip out a five-course meal in a few hours’ time, which seemed preposterous in a city where cooks struggled for months to perfect a simple demi-glace.

This sounded like a kitchen version of the poetry slam. I grew even more skeptical after a phone conversation with Chef Hradsky confirming my enrollment. “Meet me tomorrow morning at the stairs by the Argentine Métro,” she said, with an air of cold-war intrigue. “I’ll have a blue shopping cart and a cast on my left hand.”

At the appointed hour, the four of us waiting there, all strangers—Penny and Howie from Vermont, and Stephanie from California—converged on a woman with a cast, who subsequently threatened to call the police. Fortunately, Samira came along a few minutes later to defuse the situation. An exotic, dark-haired woman as high-strung as a Pekingese, she looked like any Parisian housewife on her daily shopping rounds. She was in her mid-forties, I’d say, with a small pear-shaped body and a fine, proud face, with dark eyes and skin so olive that it revealed an obvious Middle Eastern heritage. Her English, which she spoke with a kind of breathless alacrity, was perfect, without any trace of accent, and she moved with the same kind of breeziness despite the cast.

“Here’s the plan,” she disclosed, leading us around the corner into the Poncelet Market district, a warren of shops and outdoor stalls along the Rue Bayen. “We’ll see what looks good, then decide what to cook, after which we’ll head back to my flat and get started.”

We went along the bleak, crowded street, intermingling with the everyday shoppers. This was one of the local marketplaces where Parisians bought their essential groceries. Women with straw baskets slung over each arm picked through the stalls in as routine and impersonal a manner as they might select socks. For them, this was no more unusual than a tour through the aisles at Stop & Shop, but to me it was pure romance. There were fruits and vegetables of a quality I had seldom seen—tomatoes that actually smelled like tomatoes, pears bursting with perfect ripeness, eggplants whose skins shone like the finish of a new Saab. Bouquets of clumsily tied herbs spilled from baskets, and the variety of beans and berries was extraordinary. Daringly, when no one was looking, I palmed a few of the tiny fraises des bois and gobbled them with silly pleasure. The taste shocked my mouth with a kind of tart, anesthetizing sweetness, which lasted an unreasonably long time, until I blunted it with some bread.

In the stores behind the stalls, vendors tended counters of fish and chickens and smoked meats and cheese and bread right out of the oven. Each gave off a smell as identifiable as my own skin, but it was invigorating to walk down the street and inhale the lush combination of scents in the morning city air. The smells were fruitier and more pungent than what I was accustomed to, from the lack of packaging or refrigeration, especially in the summer months when freshness was insanely volatile. Even so, the straw baskets filled up fast. Women who’d arrived empty-handed left the market loaded down like pack mules. I gazed with envy at their bulging baskets, imagining the simple meals they would yield.

As soon as we hit the market, I scampered up and down the stalls, gaping at the embarrassment of riches, while my classmates took pictures of mussels and tender lettuces and cradled vegetables as if they’d been handed Fabergé eggs. “Oh, just look at these,” Penny cooed, fingering a crate of black figs. Her husband tickled her neck with fennel fronds. Everyone ogled the langoustines.

I felt a flash of mortification. We behaved like goddamned…rubes…tourists…Americans. For a moment or two, I became self-conscious and drifted a few steps behind, pretending to be on my own, lest anyone mistake me for a comrade. When Samira explained how to differentiate between male and female eggplants, I wandered away on the pretext of inspecting radishes. But almost at once I realized my mistake. There was nothing shameful about exuberance. We had come to Paris with the spirit of discovery and fun.

“This looks promising,” said Samira, holding up a plump piece of fish with a blue-gray skin as snazzy as a Missoni weave. “Anyone have an idea what it is?”

I had a sneaky feeling it was cod. In fact, it was dos de cabillaud, the thick, sweetest fillet of cod from the part not touching the stomach. But I hesitated a few seconds before blurting out an answer, lest anyone think I was a know-it-all. I kept it to myself, looking sideways at the keen, joyful faces of my classmates, who stared with fascination at the meaty, milk-white surface of the fish.

“What about the salmon family?” I asked Samira. “Is salmon caught around this area?”

“Not even close!” She sounded pleased. “Salmon is usually smaller and has a more colorful, reflective flesh. This has a big, white flake and is less oily. Most of you should be able to recognize this because, at one time not too long ago, it probably fed more Americans than beef or chicken.”

She was wrong in that respect, but I wasn’t going to queer her credibility. “Then it must be cod,” I said aloud, as innocently as I knew how.

She patted me tenderly on the head, teacher’s pet, and marched off to have our aquatic treasure skinned and cleaned.

The menu took shape as we made the rounds: a citrusy salmon appetizer; cream of artichoke and Armagnac soup, followed by fruits de mer à l’armoricaine—a Brittany-style fish stew starring two kilos of that gorgeous cod—fingerling potatoes perfumed with olive oil and herbes de Provence; saffron basmati rice; arugula salad with raspberry vinaigrette; and, for dessert, a deadly chocolate Grand Marnier tart. It was an ambitious program, loaded with challenge. An hour later, steering Samira’s swollen shopping cart through the streets of the seventeenth arrondissement, we tromped into her flat, ready to cook.

The place was tastefully posh, somewhere on the fringe of the sixteenth, near the Bois de Boulogne, in a building that had been commissioned by Napoleon III. A young Russian maid dressed in jeans and an obscenely skin-tight T-shirt unpacked our groceries while we waited in a room that had been recently enlarged by combining an adjoining apartment. A postcard view of Paris glistened in the picture window, whose curtains had been drawn to make an impression. Samira’s food must be pretty sumptuous, I thought. She sure played to the crowd.

The three-hour class, held in a commodious, fully equipped galley kitchen, was more like a cooking party than formal instruction. In situations like these, where everyone was new, there was always a feeling-out process, like a blind date, when the personal baggage gets unpacked and you begin to realize who and what you are up against. There were a few awkward moments. But a camaraderie developed from the get-go as we gathered around a granite-topped island, sipping sauvignon blanc, trading kitchen-disaster stories, and gaping at the food. In the meantime, Samira cleaned and arranged an array of equipment in preparation for our lesson. I eyed a razor-sharp mandoline with extreme prejudice.

“The main thing I want all of you to do is to relax,” she said, wielding a gizmo suitable for a pelvic exam that turned out to be an olive pitter. “I’m going to make things easy for you. We’re going to have fun, so that you’ll enjoy cooking. This isn’t LeNôtre, where you have to measure every ingredient to a fraction of a gram. And my food isn’t haute cuisine intended for royalty. But it tastes and looks great, and you can make it in your own home.”

For the most part, Samira lived up to her promises. Within half an hour, she had each of us chopping, slicing, dicing, and grinding faster than a Veg-O-Matic. We learned the proper way to fillet a salmon, removing the minuscule pinbones with a needle-nose pliers, and to skin and seed tomatoes. Piping out whipped cream from a plastic bag—a task I’d always equated with quantum physics—was conveyed with calculable ease. Eventually, individual assignments were handed out to speed the process, while Samira hovered, critiquing and offering tips. Squeamish Penny, who refused to touch the fish, was assigned to clarify the butter; Howie, who refused to touch alcohol, reduced the stock; Stephanie, who refused my advances, prepared basmati rice; and I rolled out a sweet pastry for the tart.

“I always do the desserts first,” Samira said, “so that if it’s a disaster, there is still plenty of time to come up with something suitable in its place.”

Her crust skipped a few steps that were part of every classic pastry preparation, but she insisted they weren’t necessary. Later, when it was time to peel and seed six plum tomatoes, she stopped me from making little slits in their skins before plunging them into boiling water.

“I don’t bother with that,” she said, taking them out of my hands. “I just put them into a bowl, cover them with boiling water, count to eighteen, and then run them under cold water.” Incredibly, her method worked. The skins peeled neatly away from the fruit, which remained firm to the touch.

“What about an ice-water bath afterward?” I wondered.

“Nope. Feel this.” She cut one of the tomatoes in half and held it out for my inspection. “The inside is still cold. All that stuff about making slits and ice-water baths—forget it!”

Samira Hradsky, as it turned out, was the Rachael Ray of the French cooking-school circuit. But it was hard to fault her shorthand methods. Somehow they worked, worked without fuss. Besides, she knew exactly how to keep things on track, with the right mix of instruction and giddy encouragement. When the situation threatened to overwhelm us—at one time we juggled six dishes in various stages of preparation—she summoned her young housekeeper to help with things like debearding mussels and washing the lettuces.

Through it all, I couldn’t help noticing the dining room across the foyer from the kitchen, where a long antique table had been set with a gorgeous hand-embroidered tablecloth, bone china, and heirloom silverware. Napkins were folded like swans above each place setting. Sterling knife rests were placed to the right of the plates, long tapers were positioned in silver holders, with enough glassware to stock a bar. A cross section of fine wines stood at attention on the sideboard. This was going to end well, with a lovely meal, and I picked up my pace a notch in anticipation.

We worked all morning and through much of the early afternoon without coming up for air. As the lesson progressed, Stephanie and I seemed to take more interest in the work and broke down the recipes, often on our own, while Penny seemed a little bewildered. This type of cuisine was way beyond her ken. Certainly she never cooked this way at home, and I doubted she ate in restaurants where gastronomic food was featured. From what she told us, she had no palate to speak of. She was determined not to put any unusual food in her mouth, especially the mussels or anything with fins or animals that might have been raised in a dark pen. But our excitement was contagious, and after much grimacing and eye-popping, she found everything “just fabulous…oh, just out of this world.”

Samira knew exactly how to deal with a student like Penny, taking great pains to make sure that a lack of sophistication, if that’s what it was, didn’t spoil the experience for her. “Look,” she told me in a private moment, “you’ve got to hand it to Penny. It took a lot of courage for her to enroll in this class, considering she knows practically nothing about food. She did this to expand her horizons, and to have fun. If anyone wants to apply some snobby standard to her, that’s their business. But I know women like her. They go home, they head for the kitchen, and they begin to experiment, even if it just means eating more daringly.”

She was right, of course, which contributed to another aspect of my education. I was so quick to judge people, typecasting them by what they ate and how they behaved around food, that I feared becoming what I dreaded most: a self-righteous food snob. And something of a show-off, to go with it. Earlier, in the throes of prep, I had suggested to Howie that he chop some onions and peppers into a mirepoix, suspecting that he wouldn’t know the term (just as I hadn’t when the journey began). It confirmed every suspicion when he returned a helpless blank stare, and I might have made something more of it, thrown him a snooty biscuit or two, until I looked up, over his shoulder, at my reflection in the kitchen mirror, and thought, “Only an asshole would do something like that.”

The truth was that Howie, Penny, and I were on the same track. Unlike me, however, they had never regarded food as an obsession, most likely not even a passion. But this experience—for all of us—was transforming, in one respect or another. Here we were in Paris, preparing fruits de mer à l’armoricaine on a day when the rest of the world was on a meat-loaf trajectory. (At least we imagined it that way.) If you consider that Penny and Howie had never tasted fennel or monkfish, never prepared a mayonnaise from scratch, their presence here was quite remarkable. Their sense of a travel detour—taking a cooking course in the home of a serious international chef instead of a Bateau-Mouche down the Seine—was pretty adventurous. I had to hand it to them, they surprised me.

Their openness was refreshing, a wonderful thing. It was unconnected from the effluvia of urban pretensions, trained noses, and jaded palates. They had no expectations, other than a kitchen safari into the unknown.

“This is a good group,” I muttered, looking at my hands and mincing some garlic that was already chopped too finely. “Isn’t it funny how everything tastes better with a good group? A good group, for cooking—or afternoons in Paris.”

“All right, everyone, let’s concentrate—let’s finish the tart,” said Samira.

She stood across from us at the counter, with a pale-yellow pastry wrapped around a porcelain rolling pin. She unfolded it over the tart pan and pressed it snugly into place. She gave me a murderous stare when I offered to prick the pastry shell with my fingernails, as I had seen Kate Hill do during a similar demonstration.

“Not in my kitchen, buster,” she said. “It’s not elegant. I don’t want your dirty fingernails in my pastry, no matter how scrubbed they look. It’s disrespectful toward the food. We’re going to do this with a fork.”

For the tart, Stephanie had made a thick, fudgy filling of melted semisweet and dark chocolate beaten with sugar, eggs, cream, and more than a snootful of Grand Marnier, all of which she scooped into the shell and smoothed with a spatula. Howie piped fancy rosettes of whipped cream around the edges before his wife punctuated each white swirl with a raspberry. As an afterthought, I shaved curlicues of Belgian chocolate over the top, using a vegetable peeler. Then we popped it into the refrigerator to set for a few hours.

Samira fussed with each twist and turn we made, pulling us steadily, assuredly, toward the grand performance, when our haphazard preparations coalesced into a spectacle of gorgeous dishes waiting to be served. The dessert and salad were already spoken for, as were the herbed potatoes, roasting slowly in the oven. The artichoke soup, which needed to be finished with crème fraîche, gave off a wonderful nutty aroma, but it was the fish stew simmering on the stove that tantalized us most of all.

One of the best things about it was the simplicity of its preparation. As with most stews, it called for a quick sauté of vegetables with the right mix of herbs, followed by a reduction in some combination of wine and stock. This could be simmered and thickened as much as necessary, as long as the liquids did not cook out. If meat happened to be the primary ingredient, it would have to be browned in advance, but with fish, all you had to do was add it a few minutes before serving, simmering until the flesh was cooked through. Conveniently, it could be made in one pan, which is satisfying in a pinch, and we threw it together in no time at all.

FRUITSdeMER À L’ARMORICAINE (BRITTANY-STYLE SEAFOOD STEW)

4 Tbl. clarified butter (or half butter, half olive oil)

8 shallots, chopped finely

5 garlic cloves, minced

3 Tbl. fresh tarragon, chopped

¼ tsp. cayenne pepper

4 Tbl. Cognac

1 cup dry white wine

1 cup fish stock (or clam broth)

1 lb. plum tomatoes, seeded and chopped

1 Tbl. tomato paste

½ cup heavy cream or half-and-half

salt and pepper to taste

4 large fillets cod, halibut, sea bass, or fleshy white fish (about 2 lb.)

chopped parsley for garnish

Melt the butter (or butter and oil) in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add the shallots and sauté 3 to 4 minutes, stirring constantly until softened. Stir in the garlic and cook 1 minute; stir in the tarragon and cayenne and cook a few seconds more.

Carefully add the Cognac off the heat, then boil until it is evaporated. (You can also flame the Cognac, which heightens and enriches the flavor.) Add the wine and let boil until it is reduced to about 4 tablespoons. Blend in the stock (or broth), tomatoes, and tomato paste and bring everything to a ferocious boil. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer gently 30 minutes.

Add the cream and simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes, tasting to correct the salt and pepper. Increase the heat to medium-high, add the seafood to the sauce, bring it to a boil, and simmer until the fish is opaque, about 5 minutes. Cover, reduce the heat, and cook 10 minutes more. Transfer to a large, deep serving dish and garnish with chopped parsley. Serve with rice on the side.

Serves 6

We improvised a bit with the stew, adding a handful of mussels, shrimp, and scallops to the pan a few minutes before it was due to come off the heat, slapping on the lid just long enough for the mussels to open. Stephanie had noticed them on a shelf in the refrigerator, and Samira, as giddy as a schoolgirl, urged us to experiment—experiment!—indulging our creative imaginations at will. The shellfish added something richer and slightly fatty to the dish, giving it a hearty southern twist; you might see a stew like this served in Marseille or Nice. I’ve made it both ways many times since then, and I prefer the pared-down version for more elegant affairs, adding the shellfish when friends crowd around the table and the mussel shells start to fly.

By the time we brought it to the table, the place looked like one of those feature spreads in Bon Appétit in which an impossibly handsome couple entertains impossibly beautiful friends at their impossibly picturesque chalet in Aspen. Suddenly everything seemed possible. We were no longer peons with our faces pressed to the pane. The four of us—strangers only a few hours earlier—knew that we had pulled off the perfect dinner party. We knew that no attack of pretense, no fear of insecurity could exclude us from this elegant scene.

The ride back to the hotel was a long, oppressive, forty minutes on the Métro through a succession of dreary stops. The car was practically empty, and its emptiness made me even lonelier than I’d felt on the platform. The day’s cooking class had been a huge success. But being alone here in Paris, as I have indicated, felt strange. It wasn’t a good place to visit with a broken heart. Everywhere I turned, there was romance of some sort, from the way the sun hit the red-tile rooftops at sundown to the handsome couples crowding cafés on the Boulevard St.-Germain. It was impossible to walk ten feet without feeling the unyielding grip of love. An odd mix of resentment and sorrow filled me as I realized that the only role here for me was that of envious observer.

It was difficult keeping my eyes open on the train back to Nation. I felt listless and a little wasted, no surprise considering all the wine that had been consumed. The shuffle of songs on my iPod kept me alert and amused. No deejay in his right mind would follow Jimi Hendrix with Peggy Lee, then Bryan Ferry, as compatible as guests at a Balkan mixer, but somehow it worked in this context. There was something deliciously absurd about the mix, even more so in this era of focus groups and play-lists. I shrugged, thinking that maybe machines were smarter—better suited to entertain. Perhaps there was a machine that could sort out my dinner parties.

It was just after eight when I arrived at the top of Rue du Faubourg St.-Antoine. The streetlights had just come on, and the processional to and from dinner destinations had shifted into gear. I’d decided to pass on an evening meal. I thought of going to Pierre Gagniere, as a treat, or back to La Régalade for the umpteenth time, but getting anywhere from here was such a schlep, and anyway the food at Samira’s was enough to hold me for the night. We’d done a hell of a job in that tiny kitchen of hers. The class was first-rate, jam-packed with useful tips and instruction, and the dishes we prepared were excellent, as good as any restaurant food I’d eaten since arriving in France. The fish stew was a cross between bouillabaisse and bourriade, loaded with chunks of moist, succulent cod, and a thick, rich sauce that everyone lapped up with spoons. It surprised us how we’d brought it together so fast, without much fuss.

The same with the potatoes, which we’d roasted with copious herbs. At the last minute, Samira gave them an extra-large splash of olive oil and a handful of bay leaves—there must have been a dozen, at least—which released an extravagant, tropical perfume into the room. Nothing to it, but the result was wonderful, incorporating a greater intensity of flavor saturated with spice. “A nod to my Middle Eastern heritage,” she said, claiming “half Lebanese, half Saudi, and a quarter Kurdish” ancestry (to say nothing of being mathematically challenged). There was a wonderful bluntness about Samira; she was gregarious and warm and exhausting, perhaps in response to a rigid upbringing that confined her to Mama’s kitchen, especially during summers, when all her friends went off to camp. That, according to Samira, was where she learned how to cook—a prelude to marriage—which her mother enforced by browbeating her with a doctrine meant to prepare her for the future: Burn it in my house, instead of your husband’s house.

In any case, there was no burning that afternoon, not even any singeing by her impetuous students. The cooking had been intensive, a thorough five-hour marathon covering all bases, and the meal a celebration of our collective effort. I only really began to appreciate how productive we’d been when we were finally seated and took an overview of the table. The amount of food was stunning, a feast—nine or ten dishes spread around like artwork on display. Everything looked and smelled sumptuous, handled with a skillful touch. Even the rice, generally a throw-in, had been adorned for the occasion, unmolded from a rounded pan and dressed with fresh herbs and pimiento slices.

The touches were subtle and real. You can’t learn how to cook in such a short-term class; that is, you won’t leave Samira’s having mastered a full repertoire of recipes. But it went a long way toward demystifying the process, along with staging an enjoyable cooking experience, and for all of that I was grateful.

The lobby of my hotel was as deserted as those onrushing Métro platforms. The desk clerk, an elderly Sikh with a dark purple bruise on his cheekbone, gave me the once-over when I asked for the room key. After he pushed it very solemnly across the counter, I told him I would appreciate it if he would send up a half-bottle of Champagne, some cheese, and a slice of the apple tart that I had spied in the coffee shop earlier in the morning. He said nothing but wrote it down, with the tip of a stubby pencil scratching across the paper like a scurrilous cat.

It took me a long time to crawl out of the shower. I didn’t want to leave the cleansing warmth but was pleasantly surprised, if somewhat suspicious, to find the refreshments on a tray by the bed. Even more incredibly, the Champagne was very special, one of the best of its kind. As I tore off the foil, the phone began ringing. It was a representative from Delta calling to say they’d found a seat for me on a flight from Paris to New York. Home…

I hesitated, glancing out the window onto a nearby flat. I became hypnotized, bewitched by the rhythms in the surrounding courtyard, conjuring up a replay of the day. My mercurial, offbeat mind kept returning to Samira’s kitchen, to the reward of solid instruction and vibrant social exchange.

“Thanks,” I said into the phone, “but I’ve changed my mind.”

After hanging up, I popped the cork and muttered an appropriate toast, wondering, in fact, whether the glass was half empty or half full.

I had no business being in the kitchen of the Meurice. A friend had persuaded its executive chef to take me under his wing for a day, but I could tell from the moment I entered what a mistake had been made. The place hummed with precision; it was a citadel of culinary perfection, with standards of discipline right out of the Koran. It reminded me of a bottling plant, if you’ve ever been to one, except that it was two rooms instead of one. Besides, it was Le Meurice, the chilliest joint in Paris—all Brioni suits, Chopard jewelry, and a lobby with the coziness quotient of Versailles. On the way in, I’d already passed Warren Christopher, Sting, the entire ministry of an emerging African nation, and that ladies’-apparel big-shot from Long Island, you know, the one who stays at all the five-star hotels and regards them as if they were discos. There was a stiff unerring orthodoxy to the Meurice that I could appreciate from afar, but as far as cooking there went, it intimidated the hell out of me.

The real reason, though, for putting myself through such an ordeal was that the chef, Yannick Alléno, had the reputation for being the most talented cook in Paris. You couldn’t walk into a serious restaurant that season without hearing his name. When he took over the kitchen in the summer of 2003, Le Figaro proclaimed it “the gastronomic event of the year.” I happened to have dinner there the night of his début, and it was the kind of mouthwatering experience that surpassed the hype. The food was just brilliant. The most jaded pickle-faced epicureans twitched like marionettes in their seats as one dish after another appeared like the highlights at Sotheby’s spring auction. I overheard someone at a nearby table say Alléno’s menu charted the crossroads of French gastronomy, but if so, it was the kind of crossroads Robert Johnson sang about. Waiters served wild duck in a crust of Indian spices nesting on a plump roasted peach half. Mounds of puffed potatoes studded with girolles had been sweetened with dried apricot. Alléno presented a sea-bass fillet with aromatic herbs, sweet-pepper fondue, and sardine cream. If you were lucky, there was room for one of his signature desserts. I did hand-to-hand combat with crème brûlée ice cream swaddled in an orange-flavored biscuit and decorated with tiny wild strawberries that someone had shipped from Andalusia.

Alléno bagged his first star faster than a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard. By the time I walked through the door again, he’d received a precious second, with rumors of the third being withheld simply to stabilize his ascent. (He has since hit the trifecta.) Some said the Michelin judges were influenced by reports of fiery tantrums, which were legendary. In any case, the starriest object in the Meurice was Alléno himself, a ridiculously handsome character, so suave and utterly French, with an ever-ready smile that was more like a fixture than a warm embrace.

He charmed me from the get-go, which was his manner, and I was duly taken in. It took a certain style to run such a fabulous establishment, and he had it in spades. He knew how to set a room in motion just by walking into it. There was something commanding about him. It had nothing to do with the way he cooked or his exquisite suit or the fine bones of his face. It was the aura, the star power he radiated that made people react so spiritedly.

He gave me the first-class tour, including a peek at the process he used for “a new creation” that involved alternating slices of grilled eggplant, cèpe, boudin noir, and Granny Smith apple in an apple-basil vinaigrette.

I was beginning, though, to feel like a politician on a fact-finding tour. I’d met the mastermind, seen the kitchen, and glimpsed the creative process. Now, if I guessed correctly, we’d probably go play golf.

Next best thing: Alléno turned up his smile, patted me on the head, and stashed me at an out-of-the-way station to clean a tubful of cèpes. This was his lame device for letting an outsider feel like part of the kitchen crew. It almost felt as if he were making fun of my pursuit. Well, I’d be damned if I would give him the pleasure of seeing my abject disappointment. Not a flinch or a hesitation showed on my face. Smile frozen in place, I slipped into an apron, cursing my luck, and wishing I had gone somewhere more sensitive, more willing to play. I was serving a purpose, and even a worthwhile one, but I resented it.

It is amazing how many shapes and idiosyncrasies you can attribute to a cèpe. After an hour brushing those babies, I’d identified half the animal kingdom; in the third hour, I discovered one in the image of the Virgin Mary. If I called the tabloids, it occurred to me, vengeance would be mine.

I wasted the whole day doing KP at the Meurice. Around six, during dinner prep, I spotted my friend Claudia talking to a waiter and waved her over.

“You’re getting very special treatment,” she said, without a trace of irony. “Few mortals ever spend an entire day with Yannick.”

“I can only imagine,” I mumbled, wiping the cèpe doo off my hands. “Most, if I’ve guessed correctly, die of boredom. Am I right?”

Somehow I managed to convey my frustration and begged her to intercede with Yannick on my behalf.

“I need to learn something constructive,” I pleaded. “Anything—a recipe or a preparation. But, please—no more scut work. I don’t iron, clean blinds, vacuum carpets, or clean fucking cèpes!”

It worked. A half-hour later, Yannick walked over with that smile fixed on his face.

“So I hear you want to learn how to cook. Okay,” he said, steering me toward the stove, “let’s see you make an omelet.”

I must have stared at him, blank-faced, for an impudent length of time. Finally, I muttered: “You son of a bitch.”

It was a trick, and his delighted laugh told me I had caught him red-handed. Making an omelet was a litmus test in practically every good kitchen in France; it determined whether or not a chef got hired. Stories abounded about seasoned cooks who bungled once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, scraping omelets off a cast-iron pan while a stone-faced chef harrumphed in disgust.

“If you have the skills to make an omelet, it means you have decent hands,” my friend Sandy once told me. “A cook has to make his hands do what his mind wants them to do, without thinking about it. That’s what makes a cook so valuable working the line. When you’re under huge pressure like that, you need to have skills that you aren’t thinking about. Chefs are always saying to each other, ‘I’ll send you this guy—he’s got good hands.’ It means that he is a real craftsman. Everyone is always talking about the art of food. Well, if you can’t be a craftsman, you’ll never be an artist.”

An omelet took skill; it was an accomplishment, a work of art. At my best, I turned out a Greek diner special.

As if to prove a point, I whipped out a fluffy three-egg specimen that never failed to satisfy my daughter. Yannick sat behind me in a chair, with one leg crossed over the other. I could feel his smug grin burning into my back.

“What’s this?” he asked with mock disdain when I presented my omelet.

I stared at him, refusing to answer.

“I thought you were going to make an omelet. So?”

The weight of the pan felt good in my hand. I could kill him with one well-placed blow.

I clapped a hand to my heart. “I suppose I don’t get the job.”

“You wouldn’t get the job in a brasserie. But you’re in luck.” He stood up and took off his jacket. “I am going to teach you how to make an omelet.”

Big fucking deal, I thought. You get to show off and put me in my place at the same time. At least I had the sense to keep this to myself.

A transformation came over Yannick as he collected a few utensils for the demo. I watched him with bemusement as he combed the fringes of the room, picking up this and that—a whisk, a metal bowl, a fork, a dozen eggs. He was no longer the debonair two-star impresario but a journeyman cook, eyes hard and focused, all business, with a steady, sure touch. He clutched a scratched-up nonstick pan, not a pretty thing, but well seasoned. With all the instinctive moves, he poured a little straw-colored oil in the bottom and swirled it around. I stepped back to allow him more room.

“Let’s start with the base,” he said, breaking three eggs into a small metal bowl. He beat them with gusto, dipping a fork deep into the bowl and lifting the egg high in the air. “You have to get underneath it, getting a good amount of air into eggs, beating until the mixture forms a mousse.” A fine spray of bubbles frothed along the surface. He sprinkled a pinch of salt into the bowl, followed by a grind of white pepper. When the oil began to sizzle, he turned up the flame.

“It has to be very hot. You wait for a moment until the oil separates in the pan.” After a few seconds, he dropped a half-tablespoon of butter into the pan and immediately poured in the eggs. “Now watch carefully. Everything happens very fast.”

The process reminded me of a choreographed dance routine. His whole body moved with fluency as he swirled the egg around the pan, hands, shoulders, hips, back, tilting the pan this way and that, bent over the stove like an evangelist. There was a flow and authority in the way he worked. Order reigned. Standing before his steamy pulpit, he conveyed the impression that the stove’s heat was his heat, and if the burners ceased to function, he would conduct the body heat he generated to finish the job.

“It’s all in the wrist,” he said, transferring the pan to his left hand and using his right to run the flat end of the fork back and forth across the bottom, slurrying the egg, as it firmed, toward the center. “Now we change,” he said, gripping the handle in his right hand and tilting the pan away from him. The omelet began to slide a bit, just an inch or two toward the edge. He changed hands once more, holding the handle with his left and hitting his wrist three times—“Boom! Boom! Boom!” he intoned—causing the omelet to roll gently his way in three neat folds. Grabbing a plate, he took the pan handle in his right hand, tilting the pan at a forty-five degree angle so that the omelet simply rolled over itself onto the plate.

“Voilà!” he said, as if it were the most natural outcome.

As far as omelets went, it was a masterpiece. There was nothing to it but egg and expertise. It had a beautiful, unblemished texture, glistening with a faint perspiration of butter on its brow. It was everything an omelet should be—downy, creamy, with a slight spring, almost like pastry in your mouth. After my first delicious bite, Yannick grabbed the plate from me and slid the omelet into the trash.

“Now you make one,” he said.

I nodded brightly and took up the metal bowl. I tried to seem confident, a little cocksure perhaps, especially when it came to breaking the eggs, which I did one-handed like a pro. Even the mousse produced an approving nod from Yannick.

“Okay, here you go…,” he said, winging a chunk of butter into the pan.

He stood over my left shoulder, gently barking out directions. “Good, good,” he said encouragingly, when I scrambled the egg on the bottom of the pan. “Now, begin to roll. No…no! Change hands. No—hold the pan differently. Okay, good. Now, hit your wrist—Boom! Boom! Boom!”

I didn’t know omelets were alive. Mine jumped out of the pan and landed on the counter. He picked it up with a thumb and forefinger, holding it to the light. My cheek flushed under the discipline.

“Okay,” he said flatly, “now we do another one.”

The second, third, and fourth weren’t bad. I was particularly fond of the ninth one, which seemed to scroll at will. From the eleventh omelet on, Yannick took over the Boom! Boom! Boom!—pounding me on the wrist with an open fist. After the sixteenth, a red strawberry formed on my forearm where his knuckles made contact. Finally, the eighteenth was perfect. I gazed up at him with pride, handing over the sweetest, purest, smoothest omelet that I had ever seen.

He studied it expressionlessly, his pedagogic spirit spent, and, after a moment, he nodded: “Now let’s make an acceptable one.”

Once we edged into the twenties, I was like any other torture victim lapsing into delirium. Nothing of consequence mattered anymore. I would even tell him where Jimmy Hoffa was buried.

“Boom! Boom! Boom!”

“Beneath the visitor’s goalpost at Giants Stadium…the Secaucus toll booth on the New Jersey Turnpike…the pilings under the Verrazano Bridge…”

“Boom! Boom! Boom!”

Wasn’t this covered under the Geneva Convention, I wondered, as omelet number twenty-three hit the pan with a splash.

“Ah…,” he sounded impassive. “Voilà!”

“What do you mean—voilà?”

“You understand French. It is an omelet, as I have taught you.”

“You’re kidding, right? What about doing another one? What about Boom! Boom! Boom?”

My pleas blew coolly on Yannick’s face as he took the plate from me and decorated it with chervil and a few slices of fruit. With the flick of a hand, he signaled a cook’s assistant.

“Where are you going with that?” I snapped at him, slightly louder than I had intended. Lowering my voice, I said, “That’s my omelet,” in the way a parent says, my baby…my first born!

“One omelet,” Yannick said scornfully, taking a small slip of paper from his shirt pocket, “Room 609. We are sending it up.” He put the paper on the plate and handed it to the assistant.

With Yannick’s firm, dismissing nod, the omelet disappeared on a tray down the hall. Jarred by the speed with which it was gone, I wanted to race after it.

Suddenly, Yannick began to chuckle in a soft, sly, satisfied way and draped a brotherly arm over my shoulder. Like Louie and Rick after Elsa’s quick departure, we walked off, shoulder to shoulder, in the direction of the freezers.

“Now,” he said, “let’s see what you do with sweetbreads.”

After cooking at the Meurice, what do you do for an encore? That was easy for me, considering I was so good at courting trouble.

The next morning, just after ten, I wandered out of the garden at the Musée Rodin, walked across Rue de Varenne, and knocked on a warped, unmarked door that opened into a busy kitchen. It was Arpège, where they were expecting me: the frying pan into the fire.

If the Meurice was a new shining sentinel in the gastronomic universe, Arpège was a longtime superstar. The best French cooking was often conducted on its queue of stoves. The restaurant had soared into the three-star galaxy under Überchef Alain Passard, whose menus famously pared down overwrought traditional dishes to their most essential ingredients. Vegetable consommé replaced cream, herb emulsions stood in for butter. No effort was spared to create brilliant compositions with lightness and clarity. But Passard was known to get weird. In 2001, he announced a culinary fatigue with meat and fish, pledging to cook only vegetarian dishes from then on. Sandy D’Amato had eaten there soon after the reformation and told me, “The place was in the shit.” A turf war raged among members of the waitstaff. It angered him to see Passard camped out by the door, chatting and autographing menus for pensionnaires while the kitchen was plunging down a slippery slope.

Among the Michelin aristocracy, there were a lot of places like that, grotesquely overpriced and riding on a reputation. They were big, stuffy rooms, with white-glove service at the tables and mâitre d’s whose ghoulish smiles softened you up for a proper roasting. If you were careful with the menu, you could still eat well; there were always one or two dishes that stood up to the glitter. But most people couldn’t see past the VIP treatment and paid dearly for it.

Arpège, from what I could gather, never really suffered for its decline. The knowledgeable clients stopped coming, but there were more than enough high rollers willing to take their places. The status of eating there, the name, still gave off enough steam. In the meantime, the kitchen managed to work through a lot of internal strife. A kind of innocent excitement crept back into the food. Word on the street was fairly promising. By the time I hit Paris, I was excited about the opportunity to spend a few days there, hoping Passard would be back to form, newly inspired and creative and generous.

I knew enough not to interrupt the lunch prep and stood motionless in the doorway for several minutes, hoping for an invitation. The kitchen surprised me. It was small, shockingly so, in a way that had been dictated by history; the building must have been here, in the same condition, for hundreds of years. It reminded me of the cafés in the storefronts of Greenwich Village brownstones, those funny knock-kneed little places where every last inch was pressed into service. There were four stations with fourteen people shoehorned in, and a lot of touching, turning, and bumping in the lurch. A surprisingly young staff, in their mid-to late twenties, performed the line dance with panache, and there was an ambitious intensity in the bustle of prep.

I took off my sunglasses and replaced them with regular frames, wondering where Passard fit into the picture. I was curious about him—how he operated at the three-star level with a seemingly inexperienced crew. Restaurants like this usually maintained their culinary excellence with a strong personality at the helm, someone who ran the kitchen with a mix of discipline and fear. But I could see nothing of that here.

A door opened behind me, and I was greeted by Frédéric Le Clair, the restaurant’s longtime manager and mâitre d’, who was handsome enough to play Ralph Fiennes’s father. He certainly had the polish and personality to command the big screen. I can’t remember much about what he told me except that I should enjoy my visit to Arpège and not hesitate to ask him for anything I might need.

“I’ll try to stay out of everyone’s way,” I promised. “But I hope Mr. Passard will allow me to participate in the prep in some small way and possibly walk me through a recipe or two in a spare moment.”

Frédéric threw me a most poignant look of condolence. “I’m afraid Mr. Passard doesn’t cook much anymore,” he said, bowing his head slightly.

I felt my exasperation surge back, anticipating yet another setback to my plans.

“But his son, David, is an excellent chef,” he went on. “Perhaps you will find him a little more approachable than his father. In any case, you will have lunch in the dining room at the end of service, and there will be a chance to meet Mr. Passard.”

Lunch…meet…It sounded like a brush-off to me. For the next hour, I did nothing but watch the kitchen at work. It flattened me. I felt forlorn, but I said nothing to Frédéric. Besides, there wasn’t much I could do to insert myself into that tiny space. Lunch prep was breakneck, like a military exercise. The room spun in a perpetual blur, everyone performing specialized tasks, and there was no time for anybody to stop and teach an amateur. But I learned a great deal just by watching—how cooks held their knives and chopped, handled food, organized their mises-en-place and cooking agendas, and used such basic ingredients as butter, cream, and oil. Even the most basic enthusiast could absorb some of the kitchen confidence that the cooks had and develop a sense of organization, especially when it comes to preparing five or six things at the same time.

Months later, after I returned home, there was an opportunity for me to cook dinner for a few friends, but without enough time, really, to labor over the recipes. It was supposed to be a casual get-together, but, of course, I was determined to put on a show. An hour before they arrived, I felt the nerve-racking surge of adrenaline, the charge that churns in your gut and turns your hands into clumsy, defective machinery. More often than not, this was usually the point at which I’d begin to lose it—storming around the kitchen, rushing steps, getting sloppy, regretting the whole frantic affair.

Instead, I remember putting down my knife and taking a few steps away from the counter. There was a bottle of wine, a pretty good Chinon, that I planned to serve with the meal, and I poured myself a glass. I sipped it with care and closed my eyes, allowing the warmth to wash over me. Relax, I insisted. Picture the kitchen at Arpège.

I felt a sweet smile of recognition spread on my face. The entire cast of characters danced behind my eyes: Frédéric, David Passard, the cooks from Mali, Spain, Japan, and the young guy with the perfect hair from Sweden. Kurt? Klas. Head of the klas. As systematic as a smorgasbord. There was a tempo I was searching for in the dreamy memory, a particular rhythm that syncopated the energy at Arpège. It wasn’t high-strung or florid. If anything, the pace of work there was constant, metronomic. Precise. Nothing at all manic to disrupt the easy flow.

Water began boiling in a kettle, and I allowed its whistle to break the dreamy spell. As a rule, I keyed in on sounds and movements to help settle any anxiety I felt, the vibration of a crowd, the mechanics of a bricklayer. Something about their regularity had a soothing effect on me. It also worked when I focused on Arpège. As the hour wore on, I used the rhythm in that kitchen as a cushion against adrenaline. Chop the vegetables, check the pan, whisk the dressing, lower the flame, mince the herbs, reduce the sauce—every detail of every recipe handled meticulously and dispassionately, calibrated to fit in the overall scheme. Turn, check the sauce. Okay, wash the lettuce. Good. No hurry. Now, blanch the broccoli rabe. Umm-hmm. Keep your eye on that sauce. Mince some garlic. Easy does it, watch the fingers. Thinking, always thinking, that a little composure kept everything in check. Don’t rush it. Maintain a calm, steady pace. See what happens? Nothing to it at all.

I definitely benefited from watching them, but I coveted the distinction of belonging. Of course, I couldn’t take my eyes off David Passard, who worked the quad of burners just off to my right. He seemed impossibly young to supervise such a kitchen, much less tackle the dogma of French cooking. (I assumed he was in his early thirties; months later, someone told me he was only twenty-two.) But there was no doubt about his stature. He was the master of the kitchen and moved from station to station in an unobtrusive way that seemed more supportive than demanding, while leaving nothing to chance.

It looked to me as if he’d been raised in the kitchen. His skin had the pale, chalky pallor of a photographer who never left the darkroom. His expression was guarded and he never altered it. It was almost spooky the way he worked with an unspoken peripheral awareness of the other cooks on the line. Passing to the freezer, at the end of the tiny room, he wove among them without any kind of exchange. No one acknowledged David. A balloon-shaped steaming saucier caught his eye, and he stopped to dip a spoon into it.

“The sauce is too thin,” he said, without looking up, “and the color is wrong—it’s not bright enough.”

The cook, a young Spaniard, nodded imperturbably. Without any to-do, he puréed a bunch of coriander with some olive oil and salt to bring up the color of the sauce.

“Yes—perfect,” David agreed as he helped to dress the plate. As he worked, his eyes scanned the kitchen, an attribute of accountability that seemed to alienate him, or at least set him apart, from the camaraderie in the downtime.

This time, his gaze fell on me, then it shifted toward a young American named Alice, from New Jersey, who was in training at Arpège. A few minutes later, she walked over and motioned for me to follow her.

She placed a little bowl filled with haricots verts next to her on the counter. “Do you know how to snap off the ends?” she asked.

I stared at her with something less than kindness before answering. “I’m a quick study,” I said finally. While I blazed through the task, Alice went to fetch a container that looked like the footlocker my mother used when packing me off to summer camp.

“This is the reward for your good work,” she said, flipping open the lid.

The trunk was filled with green beans, thousands of them piled like some smuggler’s personal stash. So…this was how they intended to keep me busy and out of their hair.

“Can you do this?” David Passard asked me in French, dead serious, as if offering me a Mission Impossible assignment.

I found it hard to keep a straight face, but I threw him a nice, crisp, “Oui, Chef,” and set about the work.

The first hour was Zen. I settled into a meditative swoon and felt good about my contribution to the essentials of gastronomy. But no matter how fast I worked, it hardly made a dent. The amount of beans seemed infinite, like autumn leaves. Eventually, sore spots developed under both thumbnails and my index fingers cramped.

I was beginning to feel almost victimized, invited here under false pretenses and pressed into slavery. Ostensibly, Arpège participated in the Relais et Châteaux École des Chefs internship, but the program was bogus. There was no cooking school here, as far as I could tell. No facilities, no teacher, no lessons. The carte du jour, if you will, allowed an outsider to hang around the kitchen and watch. That’s all. And while you’re standing there…can you snap the ends off 16,000 beans?

Fortunately, I knew how to sulk. I’d learned this as a preschooler and had refined it over the years, developing it into an art form. The trick is the shoulders. You can wear the best hangdog expression and mumble like a malcontent, but if the shoulders don’t slump at exactly the right angle, there is no use even showing up for work. I was so good at it, so glaringly pathetic, that David Passard picked up on it right on cue. He felt guilty, I could tell—it was all over his face.

“You should see this,” he said, beckoning me to his station. I walked away from those beans faster than an illegal immigrant from a cop. In a bowl, he was mixing five pounds of gray sea salt with a little egg white to form a glutinous paste. Instead of packing the paste around a leg of lamb, as Madame had done, David selected a four-and-a-half-pound chicken that had been brushed with oil. That was the extent of it, aside from a rosemary sprig stuck decorously in the top. “It roasts for one hour and twenty minutes in a 325-degree oven, which keeps the chicken perfectly moist. Nothing else. Voilà!”

I smiled weakly at him as I described Madame’s lamb misadventure. For a second, his lips twisted into a smirk before recovering a professional pose. I knew that he had heard this before; it had somehow justified his noble pursuit in a personal and private way.

“The secret to a perfect recipe is in here,” he said, tapping with two fingers above his heart. “And in here.” He repeated the gesture on his forehead. “Intuition—but no guesswork, like a doctor who delivers babies. The dish arrives perfectly every time.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged with comical nonchalance: “Really, there is nothing to it at all.”

He gave me a bite from a finished bird. I assured him, rather obsequiously, that I was impressed with the results, that I had never tasted such a moist and succulent chicken. He reached back across the counter and picked up a smaller, salt-encrusted orb.

“I forgot the most important ingredient,” he said, palming it like Dontrelle Willis before throwing a splitter, “—imagination. Why, with imagination any cook can perform miracles.” He pushed his thumb through the surface of the salt ball, cracking it open like an egg. Inside was the most dreadful-looking lump.

“It is nothing but a beetroot, you see. Something as ordinary as that has no right to taste so heavenly. But, believe it or not, it is the specialty de la maison.”

I bit into it carefully, expecting a rather bitter, nose-tickling flavor, completely unprepared for the mouthful of buttery sweetness. Feeling almost deceived, I asked him with fascination, “How do you get it to taste like that? Do you marinate it for a long time in advance?”

“I do nothing of the sort.” He sounded offended. “That would be what you Americans call overkill. If anything, in addition to the salt, only one ingredient gets added, and that, as I have tried to explain, is a kilo of imagination. Without it, you have nothing but a scrubby beetroot.”

I was about to beg for the source of this imagination when a man walked into the kitchen dressed as a chef. His face was an actor’s, luminous and handsome and charismatic, with eyes as powder blue and piercing as Paul Newman’s, to whom he bore a close resemblance. A neckerchief was tied expertly under his chin. He moved from station to station, shaking hands with everyone, right down to the dishwashers. Only David Passard avoided his embrace by leaning halfway into the oven. When he came to me, he turned on a hundred-watt smile and said, “Bonjour, bonjour—je suis Alain.”

Actor, indeed. This was none other than the star of the Arpège extravaganza himself, Alain Passard. He appeared just in time for lunch service. In fact, lunch was already prepared, the restaurant achingly full, when Passard veered into the dining room, arms outstretched like angel wings. Not veered, but bounded, the way Jay Leno bounds on stage each night to exultant fanfare. I half-expected theme-song music, applause, and a follow spot. His aura, such as it was, lit up the otherwise dark, shaded room.

The whole thing happened so fast that I didn’t know what to make of it. Curious, I glanced over at David, who wore the blank stare of a defendant awaiting a jury’s verdict. He seemed vigorously dispassionate, although a chemistry of unrest churned in his body, and I wondered how he dealt with it day after day. It must have frustrated him no end to inhabit his father’s long shadow. All morning, David had run the kitchen with distinct personal style, expressing his jaw-dropping talent in every phase of the cuisine, only to have his father turn up to take the bows. It didn’t seem fair. Alain Passard, for all intents and purposes, was retired. He had no right to claim the glory when he hadn’t contributed so much as a grind of pepper.

I neglected the pile of green beans in front of me and watched the master work the house. Out on the floor, every silver hair neatly lacquered in place, he held himself poised to oblige the giddy idolaters. Every table demanded his presence: a hand on the shoulder, just a word or two, a small measure of recognition. A comforting warmth infused Passard’s greetings as he waltzed through the clutter of tables, switching from language to language according to each client’s need. Something in German led to a clinging handshake. House secrets concerning the risotto were passed in…Spanish? No, Portuguese. Even the nodding old couple from St. Louis got the full treatment.

“He’s in his element,” I said, as David plated a lobster braised in a wine broth infused with hazelnut oil.

“Who?”

“Your father.”

“Ummm.”

I could tell by the way he worked that he was deliberately engrossed. I have behaved this way myself when it was prudent to mask churlish feelings, staying coolly, purposefully steady for as long as I knew how. After a while, perhaps because it is impossible to hold it in any longer, or because you get weak, or because you just don’t give a damn, or because something inside finally snaps, you let the feelings leak out, just enough to make your point. That was the place David had reached. He remained preoccupied with the food in a cross, tense way, and then, looking up from the plate as I watched his father perform, injured eyes betrayed him.

“You don’t approve, do you?” I asked boldly for a guy in charge of bean-snapping.

He turned away from me and stared at the scene for a long moment, his hands forgetting a pile of shallots on the cutting board. “It is the arrangement.”

“And what is your part?” It just slipped out. The instant the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them.

There was a brief bump of silence. David looked down sharply and took a clumsy whack at the shallots. They scattered across the board like frightened ants. As a rhythmic chopping resumed, his pallid face became very distant.

“Could you shell those pistachios?” he said, pointing to a bowl on the counter across the kitchen.

Pistachios. More diabolical than haricots verts when it came to crippling pain. What was next, I wondered, bamboo shoots under the fingernails?

I felt chastised, deservedly so, and slinked off to do penance, wondering how much damage I had done and whether I could recover my meager standing. I could have kicked myself for not holding my tongue. More than anything, I wanted to get out of that restaurant and take off across the Left Bank. There was a strong urge to cut and run, to throw in the towel on this foolish charade.

I positioned myself at the counter so that I could keep an eye on the situation. David was working busily at the far end of the room under a cloud of steam, but I could tell by his body language that he was distracted. Every so often he glanced toward the dining room, ostensibly to gauge lunch service, but there were stolen glimpses of his father’s performance. A wrinkle of pleasure flashed across his face.

This was most likely a deal they had struck, roles they had rehearsed. It was the final act of a still-vital chef who had grown bored and passed the torch as a way of avoiding inevitable decline, as well as a son’s duty to preserve his father’s interests and reputation. A rite of passage that took place in every important French kitchen, a tradition as old as cave painting.

It was obvious from David’s stare that he knew the score, that he’d made peace with his situation, and not a bad one at that, with abundant respect for his father’s legacy. There might have been envy, animosity, regret, but David shied from those ghosts. Besides, there were debts to be paid; he was cooking his father’s recipes in a restaurant his father had made famous. The old man had earned his bows. He was Arpège, Arpège was his.

I almost didn’t return for the next day’s stage. Convinced that I had profaned my welcome, I contemplated sleeping through the morning, yielding to the fatigue and languor of the seemingly endless stage. I had been on the go for nearly a month without a break. Since leaving Madame’s, I had been stumbling through the days in a kind of aimless exhaustion. In another way my willpower, the mechanism that allowed me to keep my head above water, was gently giving way.

Instead of moving on, moving on, moving on, which, so far, had worked as my defense, I flirted with surrender. There was a fragile throbbing between my eyes.

“You are so fucking soft,” I told myself, throwing back the covers and climbing forcefully out of bed.

I dressed and shaved and sprinted to the Métro. Today was supposed to bring me quality time with the chef, and I was now set on pressing the opportunity. From the train, however, the prospects seemed fairly remote. The list of hurdles was daunting. An overworked kitchen. Allotted time at a premium. Complicated recipes. Any distraction a burden. I was beginning to chalk this up as a lost cause. Another lost cause. On the Rue de Varenne, there was already gridlock outside Arpège. Beetle-shaped cars were heaved up on the curb, while deliverymen convoyed boxes of provisions through the kitchen door. Horns blared in protest. But inside the cooks, oblivious to the uproar, performed their feats of magic with God’s bounty, extracting nectars, essences, pulps, and froths from a cornucopia of seasonal vegetables.

Alice was waiting for David with a problem, a truffled salad dressing that had emulsified. He gathered me up on the way to rescue it: all apparently forgiven. He showed her how to avoid the breakdown of oil, combining the ingredients—oil, wine vinegar, shallots, a hint of mustard—with a nice economy, then beating the phlegmy puddle with short, even strokes. The trick to it is whisking only until it peaks, like so, otherwise it falls apart like a jilted lover. If he only knew.

There was nothing to the dressing, a delicate, savory vinaigrette with only the lightest notes of acidity. Since most of the restaurant’s salad greens came from the sweet, inner leaves of lettuce, the object was to focus on their natural flavor as opposed to masking it with dressing, which was so often the case. This only worked, of course, because the young greens were so exceptional, grown hydroponically and tweaked by the Passards, père et fils, to maximize flavor and character. Back home, the stuff from the supermarket, the so-called mesclun sold in ready-paks or bulk, was mass-produced and, for the most part, tasteless. I couldn’t remember the last time my lettuce outshone the dressing.

Alice, who took her duties seriously, tasted each of the greens before she dressed them. She did it automatically, but with great deliberation, nibbling the leaves with her front teeth to release the flowery juices and then letting the flavors expand on her tongue. She repeated this ritual after each spoonful of dressing. I watched David go through the same process while making blinis. Before he cut them with a mold, he selected one from each batch, smelled it, broke off a small piece, and smelled it again, before popping it in his mouth. His face never changed, it remained impassive, but occasionally, and only rarely, his eyes narrowed and that batch would be swept into the trash bin.

“You have to taste everything,” Klas instructed me later, while I was helping him with the gazpacho. “The tongue: the most indispensable instrument in the kitchen.”

We were whipping up huge vats of the soup, a creamy salmony-pink foam that was one of Alain Passard’s signature dishes. It was basically an intense, silky-smooth vegetable cocktail processed entirely in the blender. They served it icy cold, in a wide-lipped martini glass, with a spoonful of sherry vinegar to finish, waiting until the last minute to top it with a dollop of mustard-scented ice cream that melted on contact.

“So—taste,” Klas said, handing me a tablespoon.

It took a few random samples for me to realize that constant adjustments were necessary. More salt, or, when it was too salty, more tomato; more or less fennel stalk according to the strength of the bulb; striking the right balance with onion, cucumber, and garlic. Tasting, always tasting, after each ingredient was added.

“Now taste this,” Klas said, his Nordic face ablaze with mischief. He dipped my spoon into a metal saucepan and practically shoved it into my mouth.

I pulled back in anticipation of a wicked scorching. Of course, a good bowl of soup can blow hot or cold, but I hadn’t been prepared for a fruity one. Especially a broth consisting almost entirely of melon. It was made by swirling a little extra-virgin olive oil into a canister of ripe honeydew chunks and “blending the shit out of it,” as Klas so eloquently put it. We must have let that blender run for a good ten minutes, banging the sides of it like a pinball machine while adding some salt, the juice of half a lemon, and just a sprinkling of sugar before straining the liquid through a chinoise.

When we had finished, David waved me over to watch him assemble a dessert. He was putting the finishing touch on an avocado pistachio soufflé, which released a cloud of steam so sensuous that it seemed more expedient as an aphrodisiac than as food.

“You know how to make a tarte Tatin?” he asked.

Oh, shit. This was another one of those buggy tests, like the omelet at the Meurice. Anyone with a stove made a tarte Tatin. For my money, it was the perfect dessert: large chunks of firm, ripe apple caramelized to perfection in a pool of butter and sugar. The whole thing was done in a skillet, with the pastry baked on top, and then inverted onto a serving dish just before bringing it to the table. As I’ve mentioned, I’d made it often over the years, with varying degrees of success. There was always an even chance of its falling apart or sticking to the pan. Too much syrup proved as deadly as the lava at Krakatoa. But even a tarte Tatin disaster was a delicious treat.

Yeah, I knew how to make it, but I’d be damned before I’d dance around like a trained poodle, whipping out twenty-three versions of it for a fussy French chef.

I put down my notebook, let out a sigh, and struck a pose that left no question about my willingness to bark and roll over. David looked curiously at me, thinking perhaps that this was too much instruction for a gringo.

“This is something I don’t demonstrate very often,” he said, “but I thought you might like to learn one of our most requested dishes.”

“Oh, that’d be nice. Yes, I’d like that very much.”

We peeled six Gala apples, which were on the small side but juicy, and then carefully cut each one into six even wedges. The size was important so that they would cook evenly. Then we rolled out a pâte feuilletée that had been resting under a cloth, fitting it to the diameter of the pan.

I skyed an eyebrow at the renegade puff pastry, thinking perhaps it was left over from a ladies’ luncheon or some wingding that served pink soufflés. Traditionally, with tarte Tatin the pastry is a butter dough as sweet and crisp as a sugar cookie after it’s baked. Bob Ash made no pretense about it; with the remaining dough from his tarte Tatin, he whipped out a dozen biscuits, perfect for dunking in a sweet dessert wine. A puff pastry seemed so delicate, prissy. It’s true enough that everyone puts his own spin on the recipe, even though the basics generally remain the same. But I discovered that nothing at Arpège was straight off the rack—and here is David’s method of turning a tarte Tatin into a three-star extravaganza.

TARTE TATIN ESTRAGON

6 Gala apples, peeled and cored

12 Tbl. butter, divided

3 cups sugar, plus extra for sprinkling

splash of Calvados

1 ½ cups fresh tarragon sprigs

pâte feuilletée [puff pastry]

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

Cut each apple in half lengthwise, then lay each half on its cut side and slice each half into 3 equal wedges.

Put 4 tablespoons of butter and 1 ½ cups sugar into the bottom of a 12-inch cast-iron pan or skillet and melt the mixture over medium-high heat, stirring until it forms a golden syrup. Carefully add 3 of the apples cut into sixths (18 wedges in all), combine with the syrup until they are well coated, and cook for only 4 to 5 minutes, until the apples begin to soften. Splash the apples with Calvados, allowing them to flame up. When the flame subsides, transfer the apples to a bowl with all of the syrup. Repeat the procedure with the three remaining apples. Add 1 ½ cups of tarragon to the apples in the bowl and combine gently. Allow the apples to stand 15 minutes.

In another cast-iron pan, press all the apples into the bottom, removing and discarding three-fourths of the tarragon. Add all of the sugar syrup and dot the top of the apples with the remaining 4 tablespoons of butter, cut into chunks.

Roll out the pâte feuilletée very thinly and fit it over the top of the apples, tucking it into the sides of the pan and sprinkling the top with sugar. Bake 1 ½ hours, placing the pan on a baking sheet so the oozing caramel won’t trickle on the oven floor. After removing the tart, weight down the top of the pâte feuilletée with the bottom of another cast-iron pan and very carefully pour off any excess juice. Let it rest 5 minutes before inverting the tart onto a large serving dish.

Serves 8

It was almost impossible to view the result without also imagining a fist-size scoop of vanilla ice cream pinned to a slice like a corsage. There is something indecent about serving apples straight out of the oven without the inalienable scoop, much like appearing undressed in public or hearing opera sung in English. Anything but vanilla would probably compound the sin, but when I mentioned this to David, he shuddered: “That would be”—he nearly cursed, then swiftly recovered—“inappropriate when it comes to this tart.” I was skating on very thin ice.

Frédéric must have witnessed the exchange and understood its portent, because in an instant he had me by the elbow and was turning me toward the dining room. “It’s time for Bob’s lunch,” he announced, with the kind of unctuousness you learn at maître d’ school or perhaps in French politics. As he guided me toward a table, I watched his bearing lift with esteem. He seemed to unfold, like one of those flat sponges after it has been dipped in water. The kitchen was David’s; now we were on his turf. “You’ve got the best seat in the house. I’ve put you in the corner by the kitchen, so you can see the entire restaurant.”

Filled with people, the room seemed astonishingly small, less austere. It had once functioned as a stable but had been a restaurant of one type or another since 1760. Across from where I sat, horses once munched hay while their masters had a meal at one of the communal tables. New owners changed its configuration over the years, but there was no way, short of demolition, to increase the square footage. To keep the place profitable, the food had to be sensational and the prices frighteningly high. The Passards, who had cooked here since 1984, managed both tasks with genius. Lunch went for a heart-stopping 320 euros, and everyone left feeling it was more than worth it.

The food, as expected, was incredible, a culinary epiphany. I’d managed to nibble during my stage, sampling a little from each dish we’d prepared, but on a plate that had been dressed to kill, everything tasted different. Better. The gazpacho had a voluptuousness that was missing when right out of the blender; the beetroot, served atop a paper-thin sheath of its own skin and drizzled with a balsamic vinegar older than my daughter, made me laugh out loud going down. Its presentation was a showstopper, a daring bit of theater that came off with resounding triumph.

When the waiter returned, he was carrying a trio of small tartlet shells filled with cilantro mousse that Klas had been making when I left the day before. I’d watched him collect a bagful of leftover salad greens and blanch them in a bath of hot water and gelatin, before blending them with oil. He scooped the whole grassy mess into a CO₂ canister and shot a salvo of curlicues into the shells. Just before serving, Alice intercepted them and decorated each tart with a few grains of fleur de sel and a microscopic coriander flower that looked too pretty to be real.

It was delicious. I patted my stomach and smiled meekly to indicate the mounting impression, but my waiter only grinned before disappearing into the kitchen. The appetizers were filling, little meals unto themselves, but as I feared, my colleagues were only warming up.

There were more appetizers followed by more appreciative grunts: a carpaccio of langoustine covered with thin slices of raw cèpe and drizzled with basil oil and sea salt; a caramelized onion gratinée dusted with Parmesan; a red-pepper velouté surrounded by an infusion of crème chantilly and Speck (a German ham) that, because I’d made such a fuss over it, was twice the size of a regular serving; and spinach cooked with a carrot mousse in a langoustine caramel sauce and sesame seeds.

There were two or maybe three more dishes; I’d lost count. I felt practically assaulted and sat there staring in a daze at the fresh setup they were arranging on the table.

“David thought you’d like to try the scampi pan-fried with a Thai curry of lemongrass and ginger. He also suggests a cappuccino of potato mousse, and afterward foie gras grillé with citron Japonais.”

“He’s trying to kill me, isn’t he?” I asked with complete sincerity.

“Not at all.” The waiter recoiled as if I’d offended him. “Really, everything I’m serving is part of his standard repertoire. It is the restaurant’s carte dégustation, the tasting menu. You’ll have to wait until dessert.” He leaned close to me and whispered into my ear: “Then he’s going to kill you.”

The sommelier refilled my glass with a viognier from South Africa and I swirled the wine absentmindedly while fighting off encroaching blues. Dining was an exciting social pastime for me. At best, I could seem, for prolonged stretches, to exist within the contours of a warm cocoon, a small untroubled child curled up as if to nap. On those occasions, I felt something close to love. But Arpège made me lonely; it was too full of romance and intimacy. My focus slipped from the food being served and skimmed across the faces seated around me, the traits and mannerisms of total strangers, and then to a familiar figure, Alain Passard, who was sitting with three women at a table against the wall. One of them, leaning toward Alain in midsentence, dipped her creamy décolletage flirtatiously under his nose. He obediently put a cigarette into her mouth, lit it. What an operator this guy was! Meanwhile, without a place setting, he ate from everyone’s plate.

In a few minutes, he got up and began circulating around the room, doing the dance: shaking, kissing, signing. Schmoozing. I smiled at his finesse and rocked back in my fabric-covered chair, taking pleasure in the reaction of his acolytes, and an accommodating waitstaff forced to dodge the outstretched arms. There was a good feeling in the restaurant. The drone of conversation hummed under the back-and-forth.

A waiter strode over, balancing a piece of David’s tarte Tatin on a plate, his other hand folded correctly behind his back. “You should recognize this,” he said, placing it before me, and at once I inhaled the musky plume of apples laced with anise that rose off the crust. I ran a finger through the puddle of light-brown juice and licked it with delight. “But first…compliments of the chef…” And, with that, he brought out his other hand, which cradled a small decorative bowl, and crowned the tart with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Amazing: a formidable French chef with a sense of humor. I was beginning to feel almost hopeful for the world. Perhaps there was even a rubber bodysuit hanging in David’s closet. God knows, Arpège wasn’t the place to thumb your nose at propriety. Tarte Tatin à la mode—one small step for identity, one giant leap for mankind.

A forkful of the tarte made me forget everything but the combination of flavors afizz in my mouth. The marriage of apple and tarragon was brilliant, a natural.

I positively glowed with pleasure. The waiter laughed but cautioned me about finishing the entire portion. The tarte, he said, was only a teaser—“to open your palate.”

Let me admit right here: My self-control was horrible. I gobbled down the tarte and licked the juice off a spoon, worried that I’d never be able to duplicate such a treat. I’d never eaten anything so sweet and savory. If this was to be my last experience with it, I was going for broke, ice cream and all, wondering only how I might wangle seconds.

Again, a wave of sadness swept over me. An experience…a meal such as this was meant to be shared, remembered. The empty seat opposite me tugged at my heartstrings.

A bottle of Cognac and a wooden humidor made the rounds. Across the room, Alain Passard paused by a table of four dignitaries and shared a joke whose punch line rippled from man to man to man. The one sitting with his back to me laid a meaty hand on Passard’s wrist, and in reflex the chef signaled for the humidor. The box was presented, a selection made, the end guillotined as only the French know how. Way to kill a great meal, I thought. Part of me wanted to rush over and snatch that stink bomb before it poisoned the air. The man bent sideways to take a light from Passard, and in profile I recognized the florid forehead, bulbous hound’s nose, hair sprouting from the ears: Maxim.

Only…the disheveled, uncombed, pouchy-faced, slightly grubby man I’d met the other night had morphed into an ad for Vogue Homme. He was dressed impeccably in an Italian pin-striped suit that gave his well-upholstered torso a fine, tapered alignment. An extraordinary sage-green silk tie was knotted the way a sailmaker might fasten it, and—he was groomed. Someone had given Maxim the full-press makeover. His face was smoothly shaven and free of that dusky cadaverous patina. And his hands…was that a manicure?

His hooded amphibian eyes rotated from the cigar to my table, locking in place until I came into focus. Not a spark of recognition registered anywhere on his face. I winked at him and lifted my glass, conveying my delight in seeing him again.

Nothing doing. He regarded me as one might a saltshaker. With determined emphasis, Maxim puffed on the cigar, sucking on it the way I first encountered him at the café, two nights earlier. His eyes blinked involuntarily but did not change. We stayed like that, wordless, staring keenly and imperviously at each other.

From behind me, a waiter poured some Cognac into a large glass and handed it to me. I took it without looking and swirled it around. A dozen thoughts went through my mind. Perhaps he didn’t recognize me. Or maybe he was stunned. What were the chances of our both turning up here like this? I hadn’t mentioned Arpège to him. Did he think I was stalking him?

I picked up my glass and walked over to his table.

“Maxim,” I said, taking in the grand spread, “I’m proud of you. It seems you’ve overcome your petit bourgeois leanings.”

Maxim looked up at me, coolly, the surprise on his face tightening with something less than politeness. Several looks crossed at the table. He wiped his mouth and smiled impersonally: “Désolé, M’sieu’. Je ne parle pas anglais.”

Some kind of strange game was being played. I made up my mind not to let it rattle me.

“That’s odd,” I replied in French this time. “You spoke it better than me a couple days ago. What happened? Run over by a cabinette with American plates on it?”

He continued to hold his stare, ostensibly bewildered. I stood my ground. We were beginning to attract attention. Alain Passard started toward us, but Maxim briskly motioned him away. If I pushed it, there was going to be a scene. Instead, I chuckled humorlessly, contemptuously, like a politician, before turning away.

As I walked back to my table, I heard him make some lame excuse for the interruption, and he used a vulgar French word to describe me that was impossible to translate. I had heard it before, of course. But it hurt like hell to hear it used about me by someone who had shown me such unsolicited kindness.

Sitting down, I refused to look away from the table where Maxim was sitting. No one in the party cast a peek in my direction. Several minutes passed. Cigarette and cigar smoke clouded the room, but that was the norm in France. Maxim gestured animatedly while he talked, and perversely, touchingly, I recognized all of his idiosyncrasies.

I kept thinking it might be a good idea for me to hit the kitchen until he left, to cool off with the waitstaff. But all at once everyone at his table rose and waddled off uniformly like penguins, congregating in the little reception area at the front of the room. Passard himself shook their hands, one by one, ushering out each man with a soft, persuasive shove. Maxim took extra time with the chef, chatting with surprising familiarity, before hurrying through the door. Weird.

I was left staring at the newly empty space when the waiter returned. He leaned like Isadora Duncan across my table and filled a flute from a magnum of excellent Champagne. We looked meaningfully at each other as the foam edged up the slender glass. I wasn’t sure if he’d seen what had happened, but he seemed to be genial and accommodating, following the action with a mischievous smile.

“As promised,” he said, placing a set of forks at my elbow, “prepare to be killed in the sweetest possible way.”

I thanked him and declined politely. If the truth be told, I’d already been killed enough for one day.