THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF PEOPLE in the world: diehard Francophiles who simply adore Paris and everything French, and those who don’t. I used to be in the former camp, believing that I’d end up living happily ever after in a lovely Left Bank apartment in Paris, madly in love with a Frenchman named Jean-François or something equally stereotypical and doing my daily shopping at the local marché after sipping a café au lait and reading Le Monde at the nearest café. Then I actually went to France to study during my junior year of college and learned the truth: Paris, while unquestionably beautiful, is gray and gloomy for most of the year and is populated by Parisians, a clan of snobbish people about as open and friendly to outsiders as, oh, Germany’s National Socialist Party in the 1940s. Okay, so maybe they weren’t that bad, but the experience had left a bad taste in my mouth, and my love of Paris quickly dissipated.
But it’s really hard—if not downright impossible—to be in the food industry and not appreciate the culinary mastery that’s come out of the French gastronomic tradition. So even though I still had some latent dislike for Parisians, my culinary ambition shone brighter than my personal sentiments. Paris was where I’d find the culinary Holy Grail. And I needed to be specifically at one of Paris’s grand restaurants, the type of place with three Michelin stars reserved for diners with expense accounts (or really, really rich husbands), steeped in elegance and tradition. This would be the last stop on my cooking adventure, so I reasoned that I’d better go big or go home.
But finding a Parisian restaurant willing to take me on proved more difficult than I’d anticipated, despite my fluency in French and new restaurant stripes. Clearly, Parisians still had it in for me. After no success with three-star restaurants, I zapped off e-mails to a majority of the two-star restaurants and finally received one response, this one bearing good news. I translated: “Miss Shockey, we have received your letter of interest and are happy to inform you that Senderens will be happy to take you as a stagiaire, under the conditions that you understand that this is an unpaid position and that you must have insurance in case of an accident.” I immediately accepted their offer and told them I would call them to confirm exact dates once I was in Paris. I found an apartment to rent through a friend of a friend (and confirmed this time around that it was in good condition!), booked my plane ticket, and said shalom to Tel Aviv and bonjour to Paris.
AFTER THE LAID-BACK vibe at Carmella, I had expected a change of pace at Senderens, but the second I crossed the threshold on my first day of work, I knew I was about to experience a whole new ball game.
The kitchen was the largest one I’d worked in, with a huge rectangular stove in the middle separating everyone’s workstations. A floor-to-ceiling shelf next to where I stood was weighted down with stacks of copper pots and saucepans engraved with the restaurant’s name, while white china plates, bowls, and saucers were hidden underneath the workstation in front of me. Everything was well organized and immaculate.
I was five minutes early for my appointed nine a.m. start time, but the entire kitchen staff—about thirty cooks, give or take—was already hard at work, their faces blotchy and sweaty from steaming pots and their aprons spotted with sauce and animal blood. The mood was tense and hurried, with baby-faced line cooks rushing from station to station. I caught a whiff of chicken stock simmering in an enormous pot at the back of the room, and for a fleeting moment its rich aroma enveloped me like a security blanket. Although I had brushed up on some French kitchen vocabulary—words like “peel” and “wash” and “mince”—my brain went blank as I scanned the room. What was the word for “scale”? “Strainer”? “Whisk”? “Cutting board”?
I approached the head chef, Jérôme, whom I had met a few days before to confirm the dates of my stage. He was huddled like a coach with another chef. He and Jérôme resembled each other, both in their late thirties. His blindingly white, spotless chef’s jacket read “Arnaud Jeunet” in cursive across the left breast. All the chefs wore different types of jackets, but each had his name embroidered in the same place. The only people who weren’t dressed in white were the two dishwashers, who were sectioned off in their own area.
Jérôme and Arnaud greeted me. “Get her a toque,” said Jérôme to Hélène, one of only two female cooks in the testosterone-heavy room. At least I’d now bring the tally of women to three.
The white cotton baker’s cap I was wearing, which had served me well at all the other restaurants, didn’t cut the mustard here. The cooks all wore tall white paper toques that shot up into the air authoritatively, looking at once impractical, uncomfortable, and ridiculously French. Hélène handed me a toque, and I removed the tape and fitted it to my head.
“You’ll be with Etienne at the fish station,” said Jérôme, indicating a cook at the other end of the kitchen. Etienne looked young but focused, and he waved me over.
“Salut,” I said.
“You can put your knives in the oven,” he said.
“The oven?” Was this a joke they pulled on new stagiaires?
“Yeah, the oven. This one is for storage; we do most of the cooking on top of the stove here, and when we need an oven we use the large one in the corner.” He opened the oven, revealing several plastic containers and another knife roll, with a little room left for mine.
After I got organized, Etienne told me to remove the hard outer shells from three trays of langoustines in front of him. “Hold the langoustine with two hands and, using your thumbs, press the underbelly until the shell cracks. And gloves are over there.” He pointed to a cardboard box of gloves marked “Large” in English.
“Are there any small gloves?” I asked.
“No.” Go figure. I thought wistfully of the extra box of gloves that I had left behind in Vietnam.
I slipped on the loose gloves and began cracking the langoustines’ shells, which was much harder than Etienne had made it look. He worked next to me, slicing tomatoes into quarters at a frenetic pace. After struggling for ten minutes, I succeeded in shelling five langoustines, while he had whizzed through half the tomatoes. A skinny Japanese chef peered over my shoulder, then turned to Etienne and said authoritatively in accented French, “No, Etienne, you do the langoustines and she can do the tomatoes.” I quickly gathered he was the chef de partie, or station chef.
I looked at Etienne sheepishly. “Don’t worry. Here, take the tomatoes,” he said.
“So I cut them into four pieces? Like this?” I asked, demonstrating. Having to communicate in French was also harder than I expected. Kitchen French wasn’t the same as the formal French I had learned in school, and these cooks talked a mile a minute and peppered their speech with slang that was unfamiliar to me.
“Yeah, like that is fine,” said Etienne. “It’s just for tomato confit, so it doesn’t matter as much how it looks since it cooks down in the oven.”
I managed to cut and seed the tomatoes properly and placed them on a baking sheet with oil, a sprig of thyme, and a bay leaf. Etienne explained that we had to bake them in the oven at a low temperature for a long period of time so that the water would evaporate and the flavor would become deeply concentrated.
“Now you can wash and pick the chervil, and afterward this lovage,” said Etienne, handing me two different bunches of bright green herbs wrapped in paper towels. “Put the chervil in this container filled with water so it won’t wilt and will be nice looking for service. But we’re going to fry the lovage leaves, so just put those on a plate.”
I grabbed a bowl and began filling it up with cold water. Because many herbs, particularly chervil, are delicate, it’s best to fill a bowl with water and submerge the picked leaves in it. Eventually, any dirt or sand will sink to the bottom and you can scoop out the leaves and set them to dry on paper towels. If you just rinse the herbs under water, you might miss some of the grit, and the water pressure from the faucet will be too strong for the fragile leaves. The same goes for washing lettuce or other leafy greens, though they can usually withstand a bit more jostling (for instance, putting them in a salad spinner instead of air-drying them on paper towels is perfectly fine).
“Do you want to keep the lovage stems?” I asked, handing him the plate of leaves.
“No. Only parsley stems are saved to flavor stocks. The rest is thrown away. So where are you from?”
“America,” I said, dismayed that my accent had already betrayed me as a foreigner.
“And how long are you here for?”
“Two months. How long have you worked here?”
“Not long, maybe a month and a half. So I’m new, too,” he said, winking. I was glad to be working with Etienne, since he wasn’t mean or bossy. Maybe it was his rank—commis, or junior cook—or his age; I figured he couldn’t be older than twenty. Or perhaps it was that he wasn’t Parisian!
After I had finished with the herbs, he brought over a small container of lemon zest strips and a smaller container of the zest minced as fine as desert sand. “Can you do this?” he asked.
I nodded and began thinly slicing the zest into hairlike strips, which I then gathered into a stack and minced as I had been taught to do at wd~50.
“Oh, look at that,” he said in approval as I exhaled in relief. Maybe things would be okay here after all.
When I finished, Etienne announced, “Okay, we eat. Take off your apron and toque and get a plate of food. We eat downstairs in the refectory.”
I walked to the pass, where a massive pot of mushy, army fatigue–colored green beans and a tray of broiled beef accompanied by a small pot of an oniony sauce awaited us. It was a far cry from the family meals at wd~50 or Carmella, but I filled my plate and followed my new colleagues downstairs to the basement’s storage area, where four dining tables with benches were crammed together. The room was cold, dark, and cavernous, and everyone gobbled their meal in mere minutes. I instantly longed for the leisurely meals we had had at Carmella, where everyone from the lowest apprentice to the executive chef all sat at the same large table, taking food from the communal serving plates. My broiled beef and green beans tasted better than they looked, but not by much, and I chuckled to myself that the worst family meal I’d eaten was at the ritziest of all the restaurants I’d worked.
Etienne and I then began setting up for the restaurant’s lunch shift. Lunch tends to be the most important meal of the day in France, and the restaurant was busy, with about eighty people dining over the course of two hours. Etienne was a commis for the fish station, helping to assemble components for the fish cooks, although he was also solely responsible for making and plating the langoustine appetizer, which he said we could do together.
For a mere 35 euros (a little more than $45), the diner received three langoustines that had been dredged in a mixture of slivered almonds and tiny squares cut from sheets of brik, a supple North African pastry similar to phyllo dough. We served the langoustines along with a small cup of buttery sauce flavored with slivers of lovage leaves and a spicy Thai-style condiment of bell peppers, chiles, ginger, and soy sauce. We then garnished the langoustines with half of a baby bok choy cabbage that we topped with a small mound of foam. Etienne showed me how to make the foam by pureeing the buttery sauce in a deep, narrow container with a hand blender and using a flat spoon to scoop off the foam from the top. All in all, the dish wasn’t too complicated to remember, especially with two people working together. Etienne even let me fry the langoustines and plate the dish all on my own under his supervision as the lunch service got under way. Success! I was working the line at a two-star restaurant!
Still, service was intimidating: The kitchen clattered with whisks clanking against pots, and Jérôme’s booming voice cried out every other minute, calling out new orders and demanding those that needed to be brought to the pass. “Deux langoustines, à suivre un cochon, un lièvre!” he yelled, meaning two langoustine appetizers were to be followed by the pork and hare as entrées. “Quatre menus bar!” signaled that four prix fixe menus had just been ordered at the bar, which served less expensive versions of the food in the main dining room. And two seconds later he screamed, “Au pass, un saumon, un langoustine, un foie gras,” demanding the finished plates for the salmon, langoustine, and foie gras appetizers. Rather than cooking on the line, Jérôme, as executive chef, maintained the kitchen flow, calling out orders to each station rather than forcing each station to rely on a digital ticketing system. After Jérôme’s command, the cooks responsible for each dish cried out in return, “Oui, Chef!” or simply, “Chef!” and the vocal assault jarred my ears like a rocket blitz.
Although garde manger had its own station at the front of the kitchen, the fish station was responsible for making all the appetizers that contained fish or shellfish. Thus, communication among all stations was essential, and before bringing up a fish appetizer to the pass, we had to yell, “Au pass?” to the garde manger chefs to confirm that everyone was good to go. It was the same when we were bringing up entrées—only then we had to shout across the kitchen to the meat station. If for some reason we hadn’t communicated and a plate sat in the pass waiting for its companion plates for too long, Jérôme set off in a screaming frenzy. We were also required to shout, “Chaud! Chaud devant!” to signal that we were bringing food to the pass from our stations and you’d better not get in our way. Needless to say, there was a lot of yelling during service.
“You have to shout louder,” Etienne told me when I trotted back to our station after bringing up two plates of langoustines to Jérôme.
“Okay,” I acknowledged. But the noise was so intimidating, and I was also worried about sounding stupid yelling in French or not being able to make myself understood.
“Don’t be afraid. You have to yell!” he said, and darted off to simultaneously steam lobster meat and blend the accompanying vanilla cream sauce.
The cacophony finally subsided at around two thirty, signaling the end of the lunch service.
“You, go downstairs with Etienne and start cleaning the walk-ins,” said Julien, one of the garde manger cooks. He, too, looked young, but his gruff attitude, broad shoulders, and stocky build gave him an air of authority.
“After every service, we clean here. Organize the shelves and wash the floor,” said Etienne when we reached the walk-in refrigerator in the basement and began organizing crates of lemons, radishes, and arugula. “When we’re done here, then we go upstairs and help clean up there,” he said. Finally, at three fifteen, the Senderens kitchen sparkled anew, and we cooks were allotted a forty-five-minute break. Most of the cooks threw off their aprons and headed straight for the door, pack of cigarettes already in hand, and Etienne signaled for me to follow suit. I went with them outside to the arcade that opened onto the place de la Madeleine, one of the most expensive addresses in Paris, where the inhabitants were always dressed to the nines. Everyone began smoking cigarettes and making phone calls while leaning against the damp stone walls. Some of the cooks used this break to run quick errands, but mostly it was a time for socializing. The cooks didn’t go out of their way to include me in their conversations, but they didn’t ignore me, either, and I stood next to Etienne and a few of his friends under a cloud of tobacco smoke. I asked Etienne how their schedule worked, and he replied that the cooks worked from seven thirty in the morning to eleven thirty at night.
“Sixteen-hour days?” I said in shock. Was that even legal?
“Yeah, but there are two different groups of cooks. We work three days on, three days off, three days on, three days off. But, yeah, that last day is hard. But it’ll be easier for you since you’ll be working the stagiaire schedule, only nine to seven, but it is five days a week. This week, though, you’re working both the lunch and dinner shifts, so you can see what it’s like. Prepare to be tired by the end of the week,” he said.
We all returned to a serene kitchen, since Jérôme and the sous-chefs were still on break, and the mood was genial.
“You can peel the potatoes and then take the parsley leaves that you picked earlier. You know how this works?” said Etienne, who was assembling a small green-and-white machine that peeled vegetables into long, thick, noodlelike strips.
I nodded. At wd~50 we had used it to make long, thin strips of sweet potato, which were then pickled to accompany fried sweetbreads.
“And get eight sheet trays. The heavy ones. And get a cul-de-poule,” he said.
“A cul-de-poule?” Translated literally, that meant a hen’s butt.
“Yes, a cul-de-poule,” he said, pointing at his butt and then making a flapping chicken motion.
“What is that?”
“The large metal bowls that are flat on the bottom, you know.” Yes, of course, a metal mixing bowl is called a hen’s butt. What idiot didn’t know that? When I asked Etienne why it was called that, he shrugged. I later attempted to research the etymology and came up empty-handed.
After I peeled the potatoes, Etienne began slicing them on the machine and then used a small plastic rectangle to cut out squares. “These are chips for the brandade. You know brandade? It’s a puree of potatoes with salt cod,” he explained.
Etienne showed me how to line up the potato squares on a tray lined with buttered parchment paper and instructed me to brush the potatoes with melted butter. Once the potatoes were buttered, a single parsley leaf was placed in the center and dabbed with butter to hold it in place before another parchment sheet and another baking sheet were placed on top, so the chips would bake flat and the parsley wouldn’t fall off. The chips were then baked for an hour at a low temperature. When they emerged from the oven, golden brown, translucent, and fragile to the touch, they looked like sheets in those old-fashioned books meant for drying and pressing flowers, only edible.
“Try one,” Etienne said, handing me a chip after we had baked them off. It was buttery and light and shattered into tiny shards as I bit into it.
“Mmm, it’s good,” I said, and he handed me another.
We worked side by side until the early evening family meal, an uninspiring dish of bland rice with pink, baked salmon slices and wedges of lemon, and then Etienne and I began setting up the station for the dinner rush, which he said lasted from about eight to eleven.
“So, do you remember how to do everything? I won’t be here for the dinner service, so it’s just you.”
I panicked. Just me? I was pretty sure that I had mastered the langoustine dish, and I had taken notes on how the other fish dishes were plated. But I knew I would be in trouble when it came to responding to the incoming orders, and I’d end up “in the weeds”—kitchen slang for royally fucked. Then I noticed Etienne’s grin. A jokester disguised as a chef.
“Did I just scare you?” he said.
“So what do Americans think of the French?” he asked. I liked that even though this was a really serious kitchen, we could talk, and Etienne was very friendly, not like some of the cooks working the meat station, who appeared unapproachable. They were probably Parisian.
“I don’t know, that they’re chic and fashionable? What do French people think of Americans?”
“That they’re all fat and you’ll get killed if you leave your house.” Funny—this was what Son and the other cooks in Hanoi had thought.
“Well, a lot of Americans are really overweight,” I conceded.
“They like McDo. I’d like to go to America so I could get a supersize at McDo. We don’t have that here in France.”
“I don’t think we have it anymore either after the movie Super Size Me.”
“But people still eat at McDonald’s after seeing that movie?”
“Yes,” I said, shrugging. To me it seemed that in general Americans preferred quantity, while the French opted for quality. That was why so many French people still shopped daily at the butcher, cheese shop, vegetable market, and pastry shop instead of going weekly to the supermarket: They wanted the best, even if it took longer and could be more expensive. Of course, things were evolving, but in France, much more so than in America, the act of sharing a meal together was still highly valued. Eating was about much more than the food itself; it was about sustaining relationships with the community by patronizing different shops and about knowing who was making your food.
“Okay, so you’re ready for the dinner service?” asked Etienne, who by now had organized everything we’d need for the next several hours. I nodded.
Etienne and I worked in tandem throughout the dinner service, which essentially replicated the lunch service, only this time we were serving one hundred customers spread over two seatings. I made most of the langoustines while Etienne helped out with the other fish dishes. The language barrier was becoming less intimidating as the day wore on, and Etienne helped me out by repeating instructions for each order.
At ten thirty, Jérôme called out from the pass, “Lauren, go home.”
I nodded, gathered my knives, and said good-bye to everyone, although they were still preoccupied with the dinner shift. Jérôme shook my hand, and I thanked him for a good first day. And then I headed for the Metro, homeward bound to my cozy sublet in the Fifth Arrondissement, just off Place Monge. Once home, I immediately crawled into bed, exhausted to the bone.
AFTER WORKING five fourteen-hour days in a row, I was beyond ready for the weekend. I had spent the week at the fish station, the first three days with Etienne, and then the last two with Nico, who was the commis for the second group of fish cooks and who also looked barely old enough to shave.
While Nico and I had been setting up for service, Arnaud approached me and asked, “Would you rather do prep or service?”
“Whatever is best for you.”
“No, you decide.”
“Service.” I was able to keep up with the pace and had been sending out nice-looking plates. Why would anyone want to do prep work when they could be working the line?
“Good choice,” said Nico. “So, why are you here? How old are you?”
“Twenty-five,” I said, knowing that I was an old maid in this kitchen. The regimented French educational system forced you to decide (or decided for you) in the eighth grade if you would attend an academically oriented high school or a vocational one, and nearly all the French cooks at Senderens had taken pre-professional high school courses and essentially begun their careers at the age of fourteen. So Nico, who told me that he was eighteen, already had four years of professional experience under his belt, even though he was only a commis.
“When some people are young, they say they want to be firefighters or something, but me, I always wanted to be a chef,” he said as we minced pickled ginger.
“Was your father a chef?”
“No, he’s a police officer. My sister, too. But I had an uncle who had a restaurant, and I started out there.”
“How long have you been here?”
“A month or so. I’d like to stay one year, two years.”
“And do you live in Paris?”
“Right now I’m living in a hotel. I’d like to find an apartment, but it’s hard. But the hotel is on Place de Clichy, do you know it? It’s only ten minutes away by bike, so it’s not bad,” he said, shrugging.
Place de Clichy is a shady area of Paris, similar to Times Square before it got cleaned up, and let’s just say that the types of hotels there aren’t in the Ritz family. Renting a room in a cheap hotel would be cheaper than renting an apartment, but I pitied Nico. He looked so, so young, and he kept to himself during family meal. That lifestyle sounded so depressing: working, hoping to stick it out for two years, shuttling back and forth in the big city between work and a drab hotel room until his résumé was good enough for him to go somewhere else.
“Oh. How do you like living there?” I asked.
“It was good when I first came because I had a friend here, so he showed me around Paris,” he said. Tellingly, I thought, he didn’t mention anything about how things were now.
AFTER MY FIRST WEEK OF WORK, my British friends Carole and Andrew invited me out for Sunday lunch. They were family friends from our expat days in Budapest in the early 1990s. They had two sons close to my age, and we had all remained in touch over the years as we returned to our respective native lands. However, Andrew was currently living in Paris for work, and Carole, based in London, visited once a month while Andrew commuted to see her on the other weekends. I hadn’t met anyone in Paris outside of work, so I was especially happy to see them. I walked along the banks of the Seine to Andrew’s apartment on the Île de la Cité, in the heart of Paris.
“We want to hear all about your kitchen slaving over lunch, Lauren. We were thinking we’d go to Chez Paul next door—it overlooks the river. It’s good, very French, you know,” Carole said as she poured us mimosas.
As Carole promised, Chez Paul was a quintessential French restaurant. Its menu offered the predictable favorites like steak tartare and lamb chops, while specials that probably never changed were written in script on the mirrors that lined the walls.
“It’s great how the French go out for Sunday lunch. It’s just what’s done. They don’t get dressed up or anything,” said Andrew, attired casually in slacks and a button-down shirt.
“They do get dressed up. Look around,” said Carole. Several tables of families were leisurely sipping wine, while an elderly couple in their Sunday best sat behind us.
“Oh, I suppose so,” Andrew conceded.
“That’s the other thing that I like about going out to eat in Paris. I don’t feel like I’m automatically the oldest person in the restaurant. In London, we always feel so old. Where do they put all the old people in London? In homes for the soon to be departed, I reckon,” Carole joked. Indeed, with the exception of cheaper, quick-service brasseries and sandwich shops populated by younger people, most restaurants in Paris had a diverse clientele agewise. In London as well as in New York, the restaurant scene is dominated by the newest, trendiest places to see and be seen. But in Paris, a city that embraces tradition and is slower to change, restaurants are still places to eat and enjoy food, not acquire cultural capital.
“The problem with the French, though, is that they can’t stray beyond their own food. It’s always just so French,” said Andrew, perusing the menu.
For the most part, he was right. At “typical” French bistros and brasseries, you’ll find the exact same menu. It never changes and features the classics: eggs with mayonnaise, leeks vinaigrette, frisée salad with lardons, roast chicken, steak with béarnaise sauce, and steak with peppercorn sauce. The slogan for French cuisine could be “Why change it when we got it right the first time?”
I felt compelled to defend my employer, though. “You know, at Senderens they actually do a good job of incorporating some international ingredients. In the veal tartare, there’s a little wasabi along with the mayonnaise and capers and cornichons, and in the lobster ravioli we use a bit of pickled ginger. Also, in the langoustines that I make, there’s dried soy and coriander in the sauce, and the squid is sort of Spanish influenced with its chickpeas and chorizo. But it’s true, even when it’s somewhat international, it’s still very much French, with all of its stocks and sauces and butter and cream.”
“And how is your job?” asked Carole.
“It’s good. I’ve mostly been doing prep work for other people, though I’ve been doing a little cooking. I had much more responsibility in Tel Aviv, though, so it’s been a bit of a downgrade.”
“It must be so unglamorous inside the kitchen,” she said wryly.
“But the people are friendlier than I expected, and the food seems really good, from the bits and pieces I’ve sampled, although it should be delicious at the prices they’re charging.”
“Yes, we went to the restaurant’s website and looked at the menu and nearly died at how expensive it was,” said Carole.
“I know. I can’t even afford to eat where I’m working.”
Carole smiled. “At least you’re in Paris and can console yourself with all the marvelous and inexpensive pastries at the corner bakery.”
“Yes, pastries and wine and cheese and bread. I’ll embrace the French paradox of eating lots of fattening foods without gaining weight. And to that, cheers,” I said, raising my glass of red wine. Then I ate a forkful of my foie gras salad, which, as I could have guessed, was more foie gras than salad, but delicious, even if predictably so.
“LAUREN, GET THE BAR,” said Arnaud on Monday morning, after I had spent an hour washing sand off hundreds of scallops and arranging them neatly on a sheet to dry. I looked at him, bewildered.
“Le bar.”
“Le bar?” I repeated. What was I supposed to get at the bar? I looked at him blankly, which unfortunately was my usual reaction to orders that I didn’t fully understand.
“Sea bass,” he said in English with a heavy accent.
“Oh, okay,” I said.
“And come here,” he said. Sweeping his hands across my waist, he pulled the apron strings together and retied it tightly around me. “You must be proud of your profession! Now you look so sexy,” he said, smacking his lips together and winking.
After I returned with the fish and we gutted and cleaned them into pristine filets, Arnaud announced that he and I and Stéphane, a sous-chef, would go upstairs and begin preparations for Alain Senderens’s birthday celebration.
I hadn’t even glimpsed the great Alain Senderens yet, although I had met his wife, who occasionally dropped by the restaurant office, located next to the prep kitchen. Although Senderens emblazoned his name on both the marquee and the menu, Jérôme ran his kitchen. Now in his seventies, and having worked a lifetime in kitchens, Senderens had taken a step back from the wheel. But he was still the boss, and no expense was spared for his birthday. Stéphane followed Arnaud into the kitchen and began attacking hundreds of dollars’ worth of truffles for the celery root gratin. I was given the menial task of peeling the celery root, but they let me help with the layering of the gratins.
But the fun was short-lived; after the gratins were in the oven, it was back to chopping. And although I had worked the line at the fish station during my first two weeks, this past week I hadn’t helped out with service at all but had been relegated to prep work in the upstairs kitchen, either alone or occasionally with Henri, the other long-term stagiaire, who was a seventeen-year-old culinary school student from Paris. I had thought the first two weeks had gone well, and I couldn’t recall having made any serious mistakes, but maybe I was wrong. My working hours were now divided between destemming case after case of arugula and using a pastry tip to punch out hundreds of circles of thinly sliced pickled ginger.
Henri and Sébastien, the meat commis, had been sent upstairs with a massive bowl of roasted red peppers that the three of us were supposed to mince together by hand. The task would have been much easier if we had been allowed to partially chop the peppers in a food processor, but oh, no. Pas possible! So for three hours, we chopped. And chopped. And chopped. After the first two hours, Henri told me to guard the door, and he grabbed a huge handful of the peppers and threw them in the garbage, hiding them under a mound of paper towels. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” he said, grinning. I was nervous that one of the chefs would find the discarded peppers, but the thought of spending another two hours chopping was even worse. So we all smiled at one another, guarding the secret.
LATER THAT WEEK, I forced myself to stand with the other cooks during the smoking break that occurred at the end of family meal. As it was, family meal lasted about twenty minutes, with about five to ten minutes devoted to eating and the rest to smoking outside in the arcade. As I wasn’t a smoker, I often stood in the gloomy arcade feeling like an outcast on the school playground. But Henri and Erez, one of the fish cooks, had been friendly to me in recent days, so I joined them.
“Hey. So, things are going well?” asked Erez, who hailed from Israel and was tall and thin, with delicate features and long eyelashes—I would have developed a serious crush on him if he hadn’t been married and a father.
“Things are good,” I said.
“You’re lucky that the chefs like you. They don’t like all the stagiaires. And Henri, too, they like him.”
I thought about that. A stagiaire named Fabien had started with me on the same day, but the cooks didn’t take to him and he “disappeared” after one week, presumably fired.
“Yeah, they have been really nice to me, which is good.”
“Well, you’re nice and you work hard,” said Erez.
“Thanks.” I was relieved to hear his words of reassurance because I had been second-guessing myself a lot. But maybe I was just being my own worst critic; it was something my mother had often spoken to me about.
“Lauren, you come and do the crab,” said Arnaud when I returned to the kitchen after the break. He handed me a gargantuan pot filled with the giant stone crabs the French call tourteaux. The restaurant had just unveiled a new appetizer, a black radish rémoulade mixed with flecks of crab and topped with large crab chunks, paper-thin slices of mushrooms, and a garnish of exactly twelve micro herb leaves. Since cleaning and shelling crabs is a long, tedious task, it was the perfect job for me, the lowest person on the totem pole.
“I have a trick for this. I have a blacklight so you can see the shell. I will bring it upstairs,” said Arnaud. He reappeared later, holding a box containing the blacklight, a single fluorescent tube. We switched off the lights and placed the blacklight on top of two upside-down bowls to shine over the tray holding the crab. It illuminated the tiny pieces of cartilage, indistinguishable to the naked eye, hiding amid the meat. It took about an hour to sift through all of the crabmeat, and although I could find a certain CSI- like glamour in the situation, I was disappointed that I was whiling away my time sifting through crabmeat and not cooking.
With the Christmas season approaching, I had become relegated to a daily exile of washing and organizing hundreds of scallops before tackling the crabs, whose smell lingered on my skin even after multiple washings. I worked in the empty upstairs prep kitchen, where there was lots of room and it didn’t matter if I made a mess whacking the crabs with my giant knife. But with only dead crabs for company, the conversation was limited.
“And Lauren, after you’re done with the crab, let me know so we can get naked and sunbathe in front of the blacklight,” said Arnaud.
What? I looked at him like a deer in headlights. I didn’t know how to react. So I kept quiet and took it like a man.
As you might expect at a restaurant with two Michelin stars, most of Senderens’s recipes are complex. The following recipes are almost identical to those served at the restaurant, but some steps or ingredients have been adapted or modified to make them easier for the home cook—not that your guests will be able to tell the difference.
The lobster ravioli at Senderens was one of my favorite dishes. It evokes all the decadence and luxury that one should expect from a top Parisian restaurant. The original version comes covered in a mountain of foam made from the remaining sauce, but that’s an unnecessary step for the home cook (the dish is time-consuming enough as it is!), and the following recipe is my adaptation. Look for square dumpling wrappers made out of wheat dough, although thin sheets of flat pasta would also work. This will serve four as an entrée, although it’s on the light side, so you might want to add an appetizer and dessert—and, of course, lots of bread to soak up the delicious sauce.
SERVES 4
1 cup spinach leaves
3 tablespoons sliced, pickled ginger (available at Asian specialty stores)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 medium shallots, sliced (about 1 cup’s worth)
1 vanilla bean
½ cup champagne or other dry, sparkling white wine
1 cup heavy cream
Heaping ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
2 (2-pound) live lobsters
½ teaspoon minced lemon zest (if you have a Microplane, use it to grate the lemon, and then mince the zest until it resembles sand)
4 dumpling wrappers (available at Asian specialty stores)
Slice the spinach leaves into ¼-inch-thick ribbons. This can be done quickly by stacking several leaves together and slicing several at one time. Set aside. Mince the pickled ginger as finely as possible; then, using a paper towel, squeeze out all of the water it contains until it feels relatively dry.
Prepare the sauce: Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a medium-sized saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the shallots and cook until soft, about 4 minutes. Slice the vanilla bean in half and scrape out the seeds. Add the seeds, bean, and champagne to the shallots, and cook until reduced by half, about 5 minutes. Add the cream and simmer over medium-low heat for about 10 minutes. Strain and discard the solids, then return the sauce to the saucepan. Whisk in the remaining butter and season with salt. Keep warm.
Place the lobsters in a steamer basket set over boiling water and cook until done, about 10 minutes. The lobster should be bright red and the meat inside opaque and white. Deshell the lobster. If there’s any white gunk on the lobsters, rinse it off, and devein the lobsters. Cut each of the tails and half of the claws into large pieces, about 1 inch. Chop the knuckles and remaining claws into smaller pieces, about ¼ to ½ inch.
In a small saucepan over high heat, combine the ginger with the lobster, lemon zest, and half the sauce. Cook until the mixture is hot, about 3 minutes.
Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Blanch the spinach by submerging it in the water and immediately removing it with a slotted spoon. Set aside. Using the remaining water, add the dumpling wrappers and cook until done, about 30 seconds.
Spoon the lobster-vanilla sauce mixture into four bowls. Place the spinach atop the lobster, then drape one dumpling wrapper over the spinach. Top with the remaining sauce. Serve immediately.
While working the fish station, I helped prepare and plate this dish, which is made with langoustines for the downstairs restaurant and with shrimp for the bar. Langoustines are prohibitively expensive—not to mention hard to find—in America, so I opt for shrimp at home. Brik are thin sheets of North African pastry dough, available online or at a specialty store. At the restaurant, we garnished this dish with a soy-butter sauce, but I think it goes especially well with homemade tartar sauce.
SERVES 4 AS AN APPETIZER
½ cup slivered almonds
12 jumbo shrimp
1¼ cups flour
1 cup beer
1 teaspoon baking powder
10 sheets brik dough (may be called feuilles de brick)
Vegetable oil for frying, about 4 cups
Kosher salt
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Bake the almonds for 5 minutes. They should not brown but should have just a wisp of color.
Shell the shrimp, leaving the tail intact and attached. If desired, remove the shrimp’s vein by inserting a paring knife into the body near the tail, lifting out the brown intestinal tract with your knife, and pulling it out with your fingers. You do not want to devein by slicing down the whole shrimp, as you want it to keep its shape.
Combine the flour, beer, and baking powder in a small bowl. Stack the sheets of brik and cut into ¼-inch squares (they don’t need to be perfect squares, as this isn’t Senderens). Combine with the almonds and spread half across the bottom of a plate or flat, shallow bowl. (If your brik sheets are stuck together, you can break them apart by rubbing a handful between the palms of your hands.)
Holding a shrimp by the tail, dip it into the batter, shake off any excess, then place on the brik-almond mixture. Cover and pat with the remaining brik-almond mixture, then toss gently from hand to hand to shake off any excess dredging. Repeat until all the shrimp are breaded.
Pour the vegetable oil into a small pot over high heat. To test if the oil is hot enough, drop in a small square of the brik; if it bubbles and rises to the surface immediately, add 3 to 4 shrimp to the pot. Fry until the shrimp are golden brown, about 3 minutes, turning them over if necessary. Remove with a slotted spoon and dry on paper towels. Sprinkle lightly with salt. Keep warm. Repeat with the remaining shrimp. Serve immediately.
Veal tartare is one of the classic dishes at Senderens, served both at the bar and in the main restaurant. I am not the biggest fan of steak tartare because I find that it can often have a strong flinty taste, but raw veal is much more delicate. Because the veal is eaten raw, make sure to buy the highest quality available.
SERVES 4 AS AN APPETIZER
½ pound veal cutlets
1 egg yolk
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon wasabi paste
Pinch each of kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons minced cornichons
2 teaspoons minced chives
1 teaspoon minced capers
½ teaspoon lemon zest, grated with a Microplane
Trim any remaining fat off the veal, then cut into small cubes, about ¼ inch on all sides, and place into a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, prepare a mayonnaise: Combine the egg and mustard and whisk together for about 30 seconds. Slowly whisk in the oil a few droplets at a time. Whisk in the wasabi and the salt and pepper. Add the mayonnaise to the veal and combine well.
Stir in the cornichons, chives, capers, and lemon zest. Adjust seasoning, if needed, and serve immediately.