The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City (2 page)

She closed her eyes and put down her knife midslice, then turned around to look at me. And in front of the entire kitchen staff, she proceeded to tell me off, saying she had no idea who I was and how could I think that I could just walk into the restaurant unannounced and ask for a job? Then she picked up her knife and started chopping again, which I took as a pretty good indication that I should leave.

And that was the end of my first job interview in laid-back California.

So I went to work at another restaurant in San Francisco, where I found myself in way over my head and in a job that was downright horrible. The chef was a complete nutcase and should have traded his chef’s jacket for a more restrictive padded one, with buckles in the rear. My Sunday brunch shift would begin with his breaking open and smashing to bits all the scones I had carefully rolled out, cut, and baked that morning, verifying that each one was, indeed, flaky. And by my last shift (ever), I was so flustered by it all that, as I struggled to keep up with the barrage of orders that came streaming in, I neglected a pot of simmering fryer oil, which turned into a raging fire.

Cumin-scented cobblers were beginning to seem not quite so bad after all.

(I do have a few good memories of that place, though. I still get a chuckle when I think how one of my coworkers, who was teaching me a few words in Vietnamese, taught me how to say “sweet potatoes” in his native language, which actually meant “blow job.” Nowadays I wonder what the other prep cooks were thinking when I called downstairs and asked one of them to come upstairs because I desperately needed some “sweet potatoes.”)

After each day of work, I’d drag myself home and collapse in a defeated heap, near tears. Waking up the next morning, I found myself filled with so much dread that I could barely heave myself out of bed. So when I heard
the news that the chef at Chez Panisse was leaving to open her own place, I plotted my escape—a triumphant return to where I rightfully belonged. At least
I
thought so. After scoring an interview with the new chef and undergoing the final scrutiny of Alice Waters herself, I was soon proudly working at Chez Panisse.

(I have to mention that the original chef who disparaged me turned out to be a terrific person, warm and supportive of up-and-coming chefs, and someone I like and respect very much. Although not French, she was my first encounter with a short-fuse French-style temperament and good practice for things to come.)

In all, I spent nearly thirteen years cooking at Chez Panisse, most of it working in the pastry department, joining the select few who’ve mastered Lindsey’s famed, and notoriously tricky, almond tart. I’m not one for hero worship, but I will certainly say that Alice Waters was a formidable force, and she kept the hundred-plus cooks who worked there on their toes at all times. Someone once said, “You don’t know terror until you’ve heard the sound of Alice’s footsteps coming toward you.”

And how true that was. I quickly learned that the faster those little feet were racing toward me, the more trouble I was going to be in. For all my smart-alecky retorts, though, Alice was almost always right, and each upbraiding was actually a valuable lesson for a young cook like me. Alice was committed to instilling in us her ideas for using seasonal and local ingredients long before the idea became such an overused cliché that airline menus are now touting “locally grown” ingredients. And she inspired us to put those ideas into action in the food we were cooking.

Lindsey Shere, the co-owner of the restaurant and executive pastry chef, was also a constant, and lasting, source of inspiration. From Lindsey, I learned that making our deceptively simple desserts was often far more difficult than creating complex, multitiered, over-the-top sugary extravaganzas. Simplicity meant our ingredients—fruits, nuts, and chocolates—needed to be absolutely top-notch, and sourcing the best of them was an integral part of our job.

Lindsey constantly surprised me with a taste of something new and unexpected—like
fresh, tender apricots gently poached in sweet Sauternes to complement their tang, or a scoop of freshly churned rose-flavored ice cream, its perfumed aroma infused with the fragrant petals she’d plucked from her dewy garden that morning. There were golden-brown biscotti with the crunch of toasted almonds, each bite releasing the curious scent of anise, and what became my absolute favorite: wedges of very dark chocolate cake, made with European-style bittersweet chocolate, which were barely sweet. I gobbled up hunks of it every chance I could.

Each day was a revelation to me, and I learned restraint in a profession where the prevalent wisdom had always been not to let guests leave unless they were gut-bustingly full. I knew I was in the right place when I was told “This is the one restaurant where the customer isn’t always right.”

When I started, I worked in the café upstairs, and learned how to let the leaves of just-picked lettuce fall from my hands into an airy heap on the plate just so. Later, when I moved to the pastry department, I reveled in the
fraises des bois
, tiny wild strawberries raised especially for us, each one a tiny burst of the most intense strawberry flavor imaginable, which we’d serve with just a scoop of nutty crème fraîche and a sprinkle of sugar, letting the flavor of the wild berries shine. We were making food that was meant to inspire, not be mindlessly ingested. With each flat of picture-perfect fruit or berries I tore into, I realized I was part of something very special.

While I happily learned dessert making surrounded by the most dedicated cooks imaginable, as the years wore on something else was happening: My back and brain were suffering under the stress and brutal demands of restaurant work. Cooks are known to move rapidly from job to job, but they stay put at Chez Panisse. When only the highest-quality ingredients are available to you and you’re surrounded by a terrific crew of people with the same passionate interest in sending out the best food possible, where do you go next? What do you do?

So after over a decade, I left Chez Panisse. But then had to ask myself, “What should
I
do?” I didn’t really know, but Alice suggested I write a book of desserts. So I started by plucking my favorite cookbooks off the
shelf and seeing what features appealed to me most. I had created quite a few recipes and adapted some that were inspired by others, and I wanted to share them in a friendly, approachable style. Most of them were simple to make and didn’t require an arsenal of fancy equipment.

I also wanted to shift people’s perception of dessert from being the rich overload, the proverbial “nail in the coffin” that seals one’s fate after dinner, to simpler sweets that concentrated on the pure flavors of fresh fruits and dark chocolate. I was delighted when people reported back that my recipes had become part of their permanent repertoires and happy to be carrying on with the foundations that Lindsey and Alice had instilled in me.

After a few years in the pajama-clad workforce of folks who work at home (or in my case, specifically, in the kitchen), I had a life-changing experience: I unexpectedly lost my partner, who had been the vision of health and vitality. It was one of those unimaginable experiences in life where everything around you stops and you go into shock, able to do only what’s necessary to stay afloat. I was devastated, and as Joan Didion wrote in
A Year of Magical Thinking
, I found myself in that “place none of us know until we reach it.”

Eventually, after months and months of numbness, I realized I needed to rejoin life. After learning that life can take an unexpected turn when you don’t think it will, I sought to regain my footing and felt ready to move forward.

It was an opportunity to flip over the Etch A Sketch of my life, give it a good shake, and start again. I had so much: a job in one of the best restaurants in America, a few well-received cookbooks, a beautiful house in San Francisco with a professionally equipped kitchen, and lots of really close friends who meant the world to me. But all that wasn’t fueling me anymore. After all I’d gone through, I was emotionally exhausted and in need of something to recharge me.

So I decided to move to Paris.

My friends reacted by saying, “You can’t run away, David.” But I didn’t feel like I was running from anything; I was heading in a new direction.

Why would anyone run from a beautiful city like San Francisco, where I had lived most of my life, and where all my friends were? Well, because there was Paris.

I had fallen in love with Paris when I had attended some advanced pastry classes at the prestigious Ecole Lenôtre a few years earlier. One night after a lively dinner with friends, I was walking alone across one of the graceful bridges that cross the Seine. If you’ve ever walked through Paris at night, you can’t help noticing that its beauty is magnified in the darkness; lights glow softly everywhere and frame the centuries-old buildings and monuments in spectacular ways. I remember that evening breathing in the damp air rising off the Seine, watching the Bateaux Parisiens gliding on the river, loaded with awestruck tourists, and illuminating the monuments in their wake, the dramatic light hitting a building for just a few moments before moving on to the next.

It’s the life of the city, though, that held the most appeal for me and inspired my move. Paris is a major metropolis, yet has all the peculiarities and charms of a small town. Each neighborhood has a special personality, its butchers and bakers, the
maraîchers
at the open-air stalls selling fruits and vegetables piled high, and the cafés, which Parisians use as makeshift living rooms to mingle with friends over a glass of wine, or just to sit by themselves with a chilled kir, content to do nothing more than gaze off in the distance.

It all seemed good to me. So off I went.

KIR
MAKES 1 SERVING

Kir is a popular apértif named after the former mayor of Dijon who dedicated himself to reviving the café culture in Burgundy after it had been devastated by World War II. He was a big proponent of this apértif, which featured a splash of crème de cassis, a fruity liqueur made with locally produced black currants. This further endeared him to the locals, as well as to me.

Substitute Champagne for the white wine and you’ve got a kir royale. Just be sure to serve it in a Champagne flute, which even the humblest and funkiest café in Paris will do. I prefer my kir on the lighter side, although it’s very
au courant
to use a bit more cassis than suggested here.

Pour the crème de cassis into a wineglass. Add the wine and serve. The accompaniment of choice, in Paris, is salted peanuts.

JE SUIS PARISIEN

My first day in Paris, I was already in a fight—with three ridiculously overstuffed suitcases containing everything I couldn’t bear to live without. For most people, it would be clothing, a stockpile of their favorite shampoo, and maybe a photo album or two. Me? My suitcases were jam-packed with Sharpies, crunchy peanut butter, and measuring cups. The four of us wrestled through the massive wooden doorway of my unfamiliar apartment building and landed in a deserted courtyard. After twenty years of living in San Francisco, I had sold virtually everything I owned, and the rest I brought with me.

In addition to the cherished items in my suitcases, a few weeks earlier I had packed up two cases of my absolute favorite, most cherished cookbooks from a collection that I’d amassed over the years at Chez Panisse, all signed by the authors whom I’d met and cooked with, timing the boxes’ arrival to coincide with mine.

This year marks the sixth anniversary of my expectation that any day now,
La Poste
will knock on my door and reunite me with my long-lost collection of cookbooks. I refuse to give up hope. As a Frenchman at a dinner party said to me shortly after I arrived, and recounted my first troubled weeks in Paris, “I love Americans. You’re all so optimistic!”

Realistically, I have to assume by now that somebody, somewhere, has a fabulous library of personally autographed cookbooks by Julia Child, Richard Olney, and Jane Grigson. I just hope his name is David, he’s into cooking, and he treasures them as much as I did.

After stuffing myself and my luggage into the impossibly cramped elevator, the suitcases wobbling one on top of the other in a space half the size of an airplane bathroom, the door struggled to close, and I prayed I’d make it to the top floor without being crushed to death.

The door opened at the top and we all stumbled out. I dug out of my pocket the grandiose key that had been mailed to me for my dream
appartement
, which I’d optimistically fallen in love with from the pictures on the Internet. The place had looked perfect—ceilings mirroring the mansard roof, a compact but wide-open kitchen, an expansive rooftop view of Paris, and a peaceful, Zen-like bedroom.

Turning the key in the little slot, I swung open the door.

I stepped inside and pushed my way through the vastly overgrown and spindly tendrils of a dried-up and long ago given-up-for-dead plant whose withering branches were nailed firmly in place across the entryway. Once I managed to hack through the urban jungle, I looked around and took in my new home.

Where one might traditionally find, say, ceilings, big pieces of crumbly stucco dangled instead, collapsing in shards of papery stalactites, littering everything with dusty flakes of plaster. I kicked aside some of the debris
and looked down at the carpet, which was so dank and filthy I didn’t want to soil the bottoms of my shoes by walking on it.

The Japanese-inspired bedroom was indeed an oasis of tranquility, except for the futon bed, which was splattered with some stains that made me more than a little uneasy. And the previous tenant had left a collection of beer bottles by the bedside. Ever the optimist, I wanted to assume they were intended as a welcome-to-Paris gesture, but since they’d been polished off before my arrival, I could feel my optimism slipping away. At least my predecessors were kind enough to dispose of their stinky cigarette butts, which filled the inside of the bottles, rather than messing up the floor.

So what does one do when faced with this kind of situation?

In Paris, there’s only one thing you can do: eat. And have a glass of wine. Or maybe two. So I left, closing the door and locking it behind me. (As if anyone was going to steal my old socks and measuring cups.) Hungry for my first Parisian lunch, I took a walk and stopped at a small café. Flustered and overwhelmed by my less-than-successful arrival, I ordered a
salade
and the first of many glasses of wine, which I quickly surmised would become a good coping strategy for any problems that were to come.

After lunch, I went back to the apartment and made an anguished call to the landlord, who lived abroad. He managed to find a painter to rehabilitate my two-room apartment, which meant I had to move out before I could move in, the first of many mind-skewing French paradoxes. I expected a small job like painting two rooms might take a normal painter about a week.

Except the landlord hired a French painter.

One of the most important things I would tell anyone moving to France is not to expect anyone to be particularly concerned about finding the most expedient path to the end result.

If you don’t believe me, join the queue of Parisians waiting for their baguettes at the
boulangerie
and you’ll see what I mean. You’ve never heard
so many elaborate discussions over which baguette is better:
pas trop cuite
or
bien cuite
(pale and soft versus well-baked and crunchy),
traditionnelle
or
ordinaire, demie
or
entière …

Listen as you wait in line at the
volailler:
Is that
poularde
in the case going to make a more flavorful bouillon than the
poulet fermier
in the window? Could that chicken on the left be exactly the same size as the one next to it? Is it
really
the same price? Can you weigh them both and check just to be sure? Do you have others in the back?

The negotiations, gesticulations, and debate are far more important than the final result, which is getting the goods and getting out of there. And when it’s time to pay, that simple act can last an eternity too, as each precious centime is extracted and painstakingly given up to the cashier. For some reason, to the French, it always seems like a total surprise when the time comes to pay up. As if the customers are saying, “After all that, you expect me
to pay
, too?”

“What do you do all day in Paris?” is something I’m often asked by people who think I spend my days hopping from chocolate shop to patisserie. I know it’s not very interesting or romantic for them to hear, “Well, yesterday I bought paper clips.” Or “On Monday, I tried to return something that was broken. Tuesday, I went searching for shoelaces.”

I’ve learned to give myself p-l-e-n-t-y of time to run errands, and I realized the rule, rather then the exception, is that either the place will be closed when I get there (albeit with a polite
excusez-nous
taped to the door) or it will have every item, such as each and every kind of herb tea imaginable,
except
for the most common one of all—like chamomile. Which,
of course
, is the one my queasy tummy desperately needs.

The first time I had to return something in Paris, I naively thought I could take care of it in just a few minutes. The phone battery I had bought to replace the dead one in my new apartment at the electronics chain, Darty, didn’t work. Since the store advertises in big letters painted on the wall:
Notre Objectif: 100% de clients satisfaits
, I thought it would be a breeze. I’d pop in, get a replacement, and join the happy ranks of the 100 percent satisfied customers.

I entered the store and waited in the short line at the
acceueil
counter, which, even though the word means “welcome,” is, paradoxically, the most unwelcoming place in France. There I waited and waited…and waited and waited…and waited and waited. Even though there were just a couple of people in front of me, a half-hour passed before it was my turn. Each transaction seemed to take forever, with lots of back-and-forth negotiations on both sides, ending with either reluctant acceptance by the cashier, or an admission of defeat by the customer, who would shrug his shoulders and walk away.

Americans don’t like to accept defeat, which is why the phrase, “Can I speak to the manager?” is so often used. In the United States, the manager sides with the customer and usually clears up the problem in your favor. In France, the manager isn’t there to help customers. His job is to watch out for fellow employees. So you’re better off not asking, unless you’re confident enough to take on two adversaries instead of one.

When it was my turn, I figured I’d hand off the bad battery and they’d simply hand me a new one, or give me a refund. Instead, I was directed downstairs, to the
service clients
desk.

After shuffling through a mound of paperwork jammed into several bulging three-ring binders, the clerk began to compile a dossier. A stack of forms was filled out, date-stamped multiple times, then photocopied. Afterward, a manager was called to sign his approval, which he grudgingly did after studying the contents of the thick folder for a few minutes, suspiciously looking for some clue that I was fudging my bum battery claim. Then I was directed back upstairs, presumably to pick up my refund.

Relieved to be done, I proudly presented the supremely uninterested woman behind the register with my folder of paperwork, expecting to be united with a new battery. Instead, I needed to go to
another desk
, where my dossier would be reinspected and a new battery
might
be located for me.

The woman at that desk spent what seemed an inordinate amount of time searching for my replacement on her computer. When she couldn’t find one in stock, I asked, optimistically, “Could I please just get a refund then?”

Let’s just say that if there’s supposed to be truth in advertising, they need to lower their 100 percent
satisfait
number by one.

Back at home, equally low on my customer-satisfaction scale was my resident
artiste.
After two weeks, he’d nearly finished the painting but was finding it impossible to make that last definitive brushstroke and leave. I could again feel my cheery optimism slipping away day by day. After leaving him alone to work and camping out at a friend’s apartment, I’d foolishly assumed that if I moved back in and started setting up house around him, he’d take the hint, finish up, and split.

Instead, he left all his gear lying about, and would come back daily to do something—anything—no matter how trivial: repaint the bottom of a door, give the ceiling of the closet another coat, or touch up the baseboard behind the refrigerator. Then he’d leave, saying he’d be back tomorrow to finish up a few more critical areas. After a couple more weeks of this I realized that the concept of “finishing” wasn’t part of his agenda, which was odd, since he’d already been paid and I’m sure he had better things to do than spend his afternoons dragging his ladder and drop cloth around my apartment looking for obscure corners to repaint.

Because it’s kind of pathetic to see a man in his forties cry, my friends David and Randal offered to perform a “French-painter intervention” and get rid of him once and for all. They called him up and gave him his marching orders, informing him they were piling all his gear outside the apartment door and that he’d better come over to get it as soon as possible. Then we left for a very long walk, stopping in a café for a glass of wine. And when we came back, he and his equipment were out of my life, for good.

Or so I thought.