PORK RINDS, GREEN FAVA BEANS, PIGEONS
Mauro wanders. He’s looking for something. Waiting patiently. I lose track of him for a few weeks, then he resurfaces, and each time we see each other he is in a different job, a different position at a different restaurant, as if he plans to learn everything, to experience every position there is.
I hear a rumor that he’s a butcher’s boy in Vanves, apprenticed to a man who is proud of his art; that he’s learning to bone carcasses, to carve meat correctly, to prepare the different cuts; that he’s learning to gut and clean poultry, rushing all day long between the cold room and the store, accompanying his boss to Rungis some nights—standing at the bar with the other butchers at five in the morning, drinking coffee and eating pork rinds on toast—and that he is learning the names and uses of the different blades with the seriousness of a Japanese samurai.
I locate him a few months later, working as a line cook in a three-star restaurant in the seventh arrondissement, hired by a big star chef. Under pressure, adrenaline pumping, he finds the experience interesting. He cooks vegetables grown especially for the restaurant in kitchen gardens in Sarthe or Eure, but he is definitely not a fan of the tension that reigns in the kitchen, nor of the fifteen hundred euros per month that he earns for his seventy-hour weeks. He lasts six weeks and then splits.
The following year, Mauro works regularly as the assistant chef in La Comète, a fashionable restaurant near the Paris Bourse. This time, he stays longer. The place is a rising star in the world of fooding: the chef is young and media friendly, and he worked in a famous restaurant after graduating from culinary school; the cuisine is in vogue, with its Scandinavian influences and its ingredients sourced from handpicked small organic producers. Seventy covers, twice a day. The concept of La Comète inverts the classic restaurant model: there is no fixed menu, and the dishes are directly inspired by the available ingredients: the three-course lunch menu is 45 euros; the six-course carte blanche menu is 75 euros; the same six-course menu is available in the evenings for 140 euros, with wine included. The interior architecture is open plan, with no separation between the kitchen and the dining room: a way of making the invisible visible—turning the cooks’ work into choreography, a theatrical performance. A way of sharing what they do. The atmosphere is relaxed, a pared-down elegance composed of neutral colors and high-quality materials.
I want to see my friend at work, so I turn up one morning to attend the shift, the way you might attend a show. The team is young, international, a mix of male and female. The atmosphere in the kitchen is chill, hip, a little bit rock ’n’ roll. Mauro told me about this: the people hired by La Comète had the means to create their own gastronomic culture; they are passionate about cuisine, a far cry from the mass of restaurant workers, who are essentially high school dropouts, kids who had to choose between being a boilermaker, a mechanic, and a cook, and who drifted toward the latter option. Mauro is paid twenty-five hundred euros per month for what are often seventy-hour weeks.
At eight in the morning, when work starts, nine, in addition to the chef, are in the narrow kitchen, divided between four workstations (one on meat, two on fish, three in the pantry, two on patisserie, and Mauro, the assistant chef). No one speaks. Everyone knows what he or she has to do—peel mushrooms and beans, hay-smoke the beef for the carpaccio, boil (but not blanch) the fava beans. At ten o’clock, the tempo accelerates in a way that is barely perceptible. Voices are raised—Have you gutted the fish yet? How’s the turbot? Can you bring me six pounds of cream?—and the cooks chat about the latest news: who’s leaving, who’s just joined, an assistant chef who’s got a chef’s position down south, that brilliant sommelier who’s quitting his job to live in Chile, that new restaurant opening in Ménilmontant—So? What’s it like? They compare jobs, wages, hours, contrast the reputations of different restaurants, different chefs. At eleven, everyone stops: it’s time to clean up. The kitchen is made beautiful again, ready for the lunch shift. The employees assiduously scrub an area of their workstation, leaning over the stove top, stretching an arm across the stainless-steel surface, exposing the top of their underwear and a strip of flesh if possible. Perforated rubber mats are laid out everywhere. After that, the pace accelerates gradually, and when it finally starts, it’s a thing of beauty: rapid and fluid, rhythmic and precise, the plates whisked away one after another with each announcement. The rush starts around one thirty and the intensity goes up a notch; concentration is at its height; this is the moment when the precisely calibrated choreography most impresses the watching diners. When at last it slows down again, it’s nearly three. The dishwashers have cleaned nearly 420 plates because the restaurant was full, and I hear a familiar voice ask out loud: So, what are we going to cook tomorrow?