JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES, CHUCK STEAK
It is eight in the morning, sometimes seven, when Mauro crosses the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Then he is in sight of the Aligre market, carrying his basket or pushing his cart. The day begins; the vendors with stalls in the covered market and those with stands outside hail one another as they unload their goods and the first customers appear—shuffling old ladies who come for a conversation and their daily meat, three ounces of calf’s liver or a chicken breast; busy mothers or fathers who quickly do the shopping on their way to work; and guys such as Mauro, who will serve about fifty meals in a day.
Mauro walks here every day now, come rain or shine, to buy meat, fish, and vegetables. It’s the biggest moment of the day, the instant when the restaurant’s menu is decided, depending on what the young man finds that is good and affordable—Changing the menu daily, that’s the fun part: you invent something new every day, you choose an “ingredient of the moment,” so there’s really no routine, for the customers or for me, Mauro says, chewing on a matchstick while pointing with his eyes at some beautiful creamy white asparagus spears.
As a poor chef with no overdraft protection, constrained by a tight budget and with loans to pay back, Mauro still has to think about keeping his costs down, about haggling over prices. He can’t go wild with his purchases. He has to exercise common sense.
This shopping is, more than anything else, the construction of a network of relationships essential to the smooth running of the restaurant, and from the beginning Mauro sees this daily outing as a form of learning, an endeavor that requires him to take his time, prove his credentials. He explores the perimeter, deciphers the circuits, identifies the different actors and the connections that link the places—who supplies whom—knowing that a restaurant such as La Belle Saison is a niche market of only marginal interest.
So, to begin with, he pays visits. He wanders along each aisle of the market, scans each stand, compares prices, assesses the merchandise, before finally spending time deciding who will supply him with fruit and vegetables—You get a lot more bargaining power when you buy all the vegetables one guy is selling, he tells me as we walk side by side. We push the shopping cart that has replaced the large basket he used to carry, but which became full too quickly, forcing Mauro to make two visits; the cart spares his back while increasing his purchasing capacity and strengthening his abs, shoulders, and arms—in the first days he will grimace with pain when he stretches and I will bring him some Tiger Balm, warning him to be careful: he’s not supposed to cook with it. After a while, he ends up getting along well with a fruit and vegetable vendor who works hand in hand with a guy in Rungis whose task is to find him the best fruit and vegetable producers and to supply him with specific quantities of particular quality—forty-five pounds of new carrots for Mauro, small and preferably pointed, along with those rarer vegetables that he likes to cook with: Jerusalem artichokes, New Zealand spinach.
Beginning in 2010, Mauro works increasingly often with a new kind of grocery store whose raison d’être is to cut out the middleman between producer and consumer. The result is better prices and a rapid rotation of products, ensuring optimal freshness. Supplies arrive daily, precisely chosen. The products—fruit and vegetables, cheeses, charcuterie, fish and seafood—are collected by the grocer himself during regular trips to selected farms: he goes to Saumont-la-Poterie, in Seine-Maritime, to source the farmhouse Neufchâtel cheese; to Sarzeau, in Morbihan, for the filet mignon of smoked pork; to the La Croix de Pierre butcher, in Rouen, for the boudin blanc; to the Ferme de la Grange orchard, in Jumièges, Seine-Maritime, for Melrose apples and Conference pears; he will even drive all the way to the breeding ponds of Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, on the English Channel, for the oysters. When he’s not driving his van, he takes a cart onto a train and rides it to the last stop so he can fetch yogurts made with unpasteurized milk from a particular farm in Eure.
Meat is trickier. You have to join forces with a butcher you trust, team up with a supplier. The first one Mauro starts to work with closes in August, so—lacking funds—he decides to go to the Beauvau market to talk to one of the last few artisan butchers in Paris, a butcher with a stall whose prime rib, rabbit rillettes, and game meat are renowned throughout the capital. The man doesn’t work with restaurants, as the quantities of meat they demand are too high—he refuses to put himself under a client’s thumb and immediately makes clear his desire for independence, his determination to work the way he likes. I don’t need you, you know, he seems to tell Mauro, who remains patient, going back to see him every day, getting to know him, hanging around the stall for a long time in the hope of an audience, a few words, a look of trust. It is like taming a wild animal. Mauro’s stubborn persistence bears fruit: at the end of the summer, the butcher agrees to supply meat to La Belle Saison, an important step that will have implications for the restaurant’s reputation. From this exchange, Mauro gains not only chuck steak that has been matured for seven weeks or fresh sides of veal, but a sort of symbolic anointing.
Lastly, there’s the wine. It’s difficult to come up with even a simple wine list when you have no culture of wine, that special knowledge that, it’s said, takes more than a lifetime to acquire. Thankfully, in the daily socializing that often forms the first network of relationships in a neighborhood, Mauro will meet two guardian angels: Michel, owner of the Envolée wine bar, whose menu offers a good selection, and Fabrice, a sommelier from Bristol who works there. Together, they organize blind tastings one Friday every month—They’re my education, Mauro says as he beckons me closer so I can see in daylight the color of a Loire wine that he is turning slowly in a glass. Fabrice helps him choose the wines for his cellar. For Mauro, this is the moment to acknowledge that he is half-Italian: the wines of La Belle Saison will be organic, by small producers from his mother’s homeland.
The question of supplies—a key one for any restaurant—is gradually fine-tuned. The trick is to combine freshness and reasonable prices with the available storage capacity—which, in the case of La Belle Saison, is extremely limited, with the mini-fridge already filled with all the dairy products. Annoyed by any wasted food, Mauro now works hard to find the exact quantities he needs. He tweaks the amount, tweaks it again, tweaks it until it’s almost perfect, the evening tapas providing a tasty solution for the lunch leftovers. In this way, he does the shopping for only three meals, and no matter what, he is in the kitchen by ten o’clock.