For how else can anyone explain how the best customer of Le Saule Pleureur suddenly became both my landlord and my best client in Paris, as if a baton were being passed from one restaurant to another?
“You are alarming me, Hassan,” Madame Mallory said into the phone, in a rather clipped and icy tone, when I brought up Le Comte de Nancy. “I am starting to think you are taking drugs, the way you keep running to me with these paranoid fantasies. Honestly, have you ever known me to encourage any of my customers to go spend money at a competitor? The very idea is preposterous.”
Paint fumes, yelling, phone ringing, shopping cart sweeps through stores, interviews, order forms, heated negotiations—what followed were long hours and backbreaking work. Mehtab dealt with the workmen, bossing them about, remodeling No. 11 in the image of my detailed illustrations and vision. I, in turn, when I wasn’t being called over to rule on a molding or color, was working on, most important, the hiring of the restaurant’s key staff. After hundreds of hours of interviews, for chef de cuisine I settled on Serge Poutron, shaped like an extremely large turnip, originally from Toulouse and quite rough, a fellow whom I’d met while working at La Gavroche. Difficult, sometimes even quite brutal to underlings, Serge nonetheless ran a very disciplined kitchen, and I knew he would consistently produce for me, night in and night out, beautifully executed dishes. And in the front room, Jacques, my maître d’hôtel, a veteran of the three-star L’ Ambroisie, so elegant and slight, like an upper-class version of Charles Aznavour, always ready to charm the guests.
The first restaurant review we received, shortly after we opened Le Chien Méchant, was in Le Monde, and I don’t mind admitting that I became very emotional when I saw my name and restaurant politely applauded in that august newspaper, which sits at the center of France’s opinion-making establishment. The article brought attention to the restaurant, as did the ever-growing word of mouth passed on by diners, most notably the one-man public relations machine that was Le Comte de Nancy Selière, who, naturally, was granted his regular table at the restaurant. And it is in this early period, the day after I earned my first Michelin star, but well before my second, that a man who would become so instrumental in my life and what followed sat down in a booth at the restaurant.
I was in the kitchen preparing daurade aux citrons confits when Jacques came into the kitchen to pass on two new table orders. Without looking up from his task of slotting order chits into the conveyor rack, Jacques tersely informed me I was wanted in the dining room, at table eight. My maître d’ looked uncharacteristically austere and harried as he turned and marched smartly back out through the swinging doors again, so I assumed it was someone of considerable importance not happy with the evening’s fare.
“Serge, take over. I must go out front,” I said over the metallic clatter of pans and clomping clogs, as the kitchen staff dashed back and forth along the steel ranges and across the tiled floor. Serge grunted that he heard me, before yelling, “Pickup”; a commis made me shrug off my fat-splattered whites, helping me into a freshly laundered version.
Le Chien Méchantwas full that night, and, past the kitchen doors, I nodded at one or two regulars as I passed through the anterooms. Table number eight, in the center room, was one of the better tables, and I knew only a celebrity of some sort would be sitting there.
The half-bald man at table number eight was sitting alone, a ring of silver hair around the back of his neck ending in bushy white sideburns that consumed most of his face, a style much favored in an earlier era. The fellow was brawny and muscular, with a gold chain around his neck and chunky gold rings on his coarse hands, jewelry that would not have been out of place on a member of the Corsican Mafia. But he also wore a beautiful charcoal gray silk suit of considerable taste, and he exuded an aura of quiet authority. I glanced down at his plate—this always tells me a lot about a person—and registered that he was eating a starter of smoked eel with fresh horseradish cream.
“Chef Haji,” he said, extending a big hand. “I’ve been meaning to meet you for some time. I was very upset to learn from my staff you’ve been to my restaurant twice and never announced yourself to me. I am quite hurt.”
Chef Paul Verdun. One of the nation’s greatest talents.
I was momentarily starstruck. I knew Chef Verdun well, from a distance, as his story was endlessly repeated in the French press. Over the last thirty-five years, Paul Verdun had transformed a modest country butcher shop into a world-renowned three-star restaurant, his immense talent attracting gourmands from across the globe to the second roundabout in Courgains, a tiny Normandy village where the gold brick Le Coq d’Or occupied a corner maison.
Chef Verdun was a master of that lard-heavy school of French cuisine that was just starting, at that time, to fall from favor, overtaken by the molecular cooking established by the fast-rising Chef Mafitte down in Aix-en-Provence. Chef Verdun was famous for his spit-roasted squab stuffed with sweetbreads, duck liver, and scallions; his hare cooked in port wine inside a calf’s bladder; and, perhaps most famously, his “poularde Alexandre Dumas,” a simple chicken studded with a decadent amount of black truffles.
I was delighted to make Chef Verdun’s acquaintance, and I slid into his booth, the two of us talking for a good thirty minutes before I reluctantly returned to the duties of my kitchen. But in that first chat we had the breakthrough moment that forever became the basis of our friendship. Chef Verdun talked a great deal about himself, with great exuberance, and so I wasn’t entirely surprised when he finally said, “Tell me, Hassan. Of the dishes you had at Le Coq d’Or, which was your favorite?”
While I was at his restaurant, waiting for the main course, I had impulsively tried the starter omelet with codfish cheeks and caviar. It was deceptively simple, but to my mind the pinnacle of French cooking, so refined and yet also so forceful. I later discovered, through my own research, the dish was originally created in the seventeenth century by Cardinal de Richelieu’s chef, served to the controversial cardinal at lunch every Friday until his death, this delicious omelet entirely disappearing from menus until Chef Verdun magnificently reinvented it for modern palates.
“That’s easy. The omelet. With codfish cheeks.”
Chef Verdun’s fork was on his way to his lips, but he paused perceptively at that moment. “I agree with you,” he said. “Almost everyone prefers the poularde Alexandre Dumas. But I think it is a bit much. Too opera buffa. The omelet, so simple, has always been my personal favorite. You and I, Hassan, we are the only two people who agree on this.”
In the ensuing years, Chef Verdun and I saw each other periodically. I don’t want to exaggerate our closeness; I don’t suspect anyone, not even his own wife, ever cracked the high-octane energy of that man. He was an enigma, always slipping away from our grasp. But over the following years, Verdun and I definitely established a deep and abiding professional respect for each other, even, I would say, one of real affection. And that friendship comes to life for me when I think about the time, the day after I won my second Michelin star, when Chef Verdun showed up unexpectedly at Le Chien Méchant.
It was late afternoon and unbeknown to me he had arranged with Serge and the rest of the staff—rather impertinently, when I think about it, but that was Paul—to hijack me for the evening, leaving the evening’s fare in Serge’s capable hands.
Spluttering with indignation and insisting I was needed in my own restaurant, Paul merely said, “Oui. Oui,” like he was humoring an unruly child, before forcibly pushing me down into the passenger seat of his Mercedes.