My staff waved good-bye from the restaurant’s doorway, disappearing in a blur when Paul’s foot hit the gas pedal and we shot off at an alarming speed in the direction of Orly Airport. He always drove like a madman.
A private plane was waiting for us on the tarmac, and only once airborne did Paul finally inform me that he had decided a proper celebration of my second star was in order, and that meant, naturally, a dash down to Marseille for a good fish dinner. He had bullied an investment banker friend in London into lending us his Gulfstream.
That night Paul and I dined at Chez Pierre, that Old World restaurant sitting on the cliffs above Marseille’s harbor. Our table was against the large bay window. When we arrived, the sun was setting, like a mango sorbet dripping over the horizon; the platinum rolls of the Mediterranean produced the soothing sound of waves thudding the cliff rocks below us.
Chez Pierre was old-school, dressed simply with sturdy tables under white tablecloths and heavy silver flatware. The aged waiter with pomade in his hair hauled a dented silver wine bucket to the side of our table. Paul and the elderly man bantered like they were friends from long ago, before Paul ordered a bottle of 1928 Krug champagne.
We sat in reverence as the ancient vintage was opened, as the golden-colored foam rushed to the glass rim and revealed its great age. But the real surprise came when we brought the flutes to our lips. The champagne, it was as fresh and sparkly as a blushing bride, and revealed no sign at all it was near retirement age. Quite the opposite. It made me want to sing, dance, fall in love. Rather dangerous, I thought.
We started, of course, with a teacup of Marseille fish soup, before moving on to a delicate dish of tiny clams, no bigger than babies’ fingernails, the translucent shellfish grown in the restaurant’s own grotto under the pounding cliff face. As a main course, loup de mer, grilled on fennel stalks and then bathed in warm Pernod before the waiter, towel over his forearm, dramatically flambéed the sea bass at our table, using a long matchstick, the fennel stalks and lemon wedges around the fish still smoldering as the plate was placed before us.
We laughed and talked deep into the night, until the sea outside seemed pumped full of squid ink. Sardine and mackerel fishing boats, their masts bejeweled with lights, headed out from the city’s harbor for a nighttime haul; far out, an oil tanker flat against the sea, a sugar cube of lights in the inkiest part of the blackening water.
That night I learned Paul’s father used to read him The Fencing Master and The Count of Monte Cristo, the reason why Paul had named his most famous dish after Alexandre Dumas. It was also partly why we were there. Château d’If, the island prison fortress that was the setting for The Count of Monte Cristo, was that magical night sitting outside our window in the Bay of Marseille, gray rock and fortress walls looking oddly elegant under a string of fairy lights.
The champagne loosened our tongues, and in vino veritas I finally glimpsed a few other interior facts behind the famously extroverted Paul Verdun. It was toward the end of our meal, as we ate a light almond tort, alongside sinus-clearing snorts of cognac, that Paul quietly asked me if I had ever eaten at Maison Dada in Aix-en-Provence, the minimalist restaurant of the up-and-coming Chef Mafitte. The insecurity in his voice, even with so much drink sloshing about his insides, was quite distinct.
Charles Mafitte was at the time emerging clearly as the artistic leader of the postmodern movement deconstructing food. He used nitrous oxide cans, an unusual kitchen utensil to say the least, to create his trademark “crystallized foam”—a hard froth he made from sea urchin eggs, kiwi, and fennel—or a bowl of delicious “pasta” made entirely out of Gruyère cheese and reine des reinettes apples. Mafitte’s technique involved the total reduction of ingredients, almost to a molecular level, before reassembling an odd mixture of fused foodstuffs into entirely new creations.
I confessed to Paul I had indeed had a memorable meal at Maison Dada, a few years ago, with my then-girlfriend, the thick-thighed Marie, who smelled of mushrooms. Where should I start? Chef Mafitte pulverized Fisherman’s Friend throat lozenges, and used this bizarre ingredient as the basis for his “lobster lollipops,” a stunning dish served with “truffle ice cream.” Even the classic frogs’ legs, really the archetypal dish of French country fare, had been unrecognizably transformed by Chef Mafitte’s artistry: he deboned and “caramelized” the legs in fig juice and dry vermouth, and then served them alongside a polenta “bomb” studded with foie gras and pomegranates. Not even a hint of the classic frogs’ legs ingredients of garlic, butter, or parsley. When I asked Marie what she thought of the dinner, she replied, “Zinzin”—Parisian street slang for “Crazy”—and I must confess my inarticulate shopgirl had rather accurately summed up our dining experience, even before that notorious womanizer manhandled her under the table.
All this I told Paul, and as I spoke, he became more and more morose, as if he somehow intuited from my animated chatter that this fast-rising chef from the south would one day become his nemesis, relegating Paul’s muscular embrace of classic French cuisine, which he loved with all his being and would defend to his death, as completely and utterly passé.
But he caught himself.
“Enough of this. We are here to celebrate your second star, Hassan. Now drink up. We are off to the discos.”
Paul downed his brandy before saying, “Get up, d’Artagnan. Get up. Time for us to sample the justly famous Marseille tarts.”
I don’t know how much Paul dropped on our celebration that night, but it turned out to be one of the most memorable and enjoyable nights of my life.
A year later, in Normandy to see a supplier, I dropped by Paul’s house in Courgains. His wife, Anna Verdun, greeted me stiffly at the door; she was well known to be rather dismissive of Paul’s common friends, preferring instead to expend her energy on his most famous clients and hangers-on. After her distinctly cool reception, however, Madame Verdun did have a young woman escort me to Paul’s lair in the back of the house.
As I followed the young maid through the halls of their nineteenth-century bourgeois house, the walls all dedicated to framed photos and press clips documenting Paul’s steady rise in the world of haute cuisine, I caught sight of a red-wax scrawl, the slant of the letters instantly striking me as faintly familiar.
The framed property in question was a pamphlet from the late 1970s and the firm handwriting scrawled underneath stated, “For Paul, my dear friend, the great butcher of Courgains, a man who will one day astound the world. Keep up the good fight. Vive La Charcuterie Française!”
It was signed, simply, “Gertrude Mallory.”
And so, finally, we come to the key period in question. I was thirty-five years old when Le Chien Méchant earned its second star, and for several years afterward I hit a creative impasse. I worked hard but made no headway, as the freshness and zeal with which I’d started my work at Le Chien Méchant was institutionalized through constant repetition.
We received a few mediocre reviews during this period, I admit. But the old fires, they still burned deep somewhere, and it was when I turned forty, that a dangerous restlessness set in, an urge to kick things up a notch.
I wished—even willed—for some dramatic change to happen.
They found Papa dead on the kitchen floor, in his bathrobe, surrounded by shards of broken plates and glass bowls. Auntie and his local doctor had stupidly forced Papa, at the age of seventy-two, to go on a strict diet; he was having none of it. Awakened by his loudly rumbling stomach, Papa descended to the kitchen in the middle of the night for a little sustenance. He threw open the refrigerator door and stuck his head inside; according to the medical examiner, he was gobbling the leftovers so fast that a chunk of chicken leg got lodged in his throat.