Did it really go down that way? Did the greatest chef of his generation come to Monte Carlo to recruit Alex one day, and did the greatest restaurateur of his generation come the next? I almost didn’t even want to write that down. Origin myths are not meant to be fact checked.

Alex wanted to take me to see where our omelets’ tomatoes and peppers came from, and ten minutes later, we pulled into the Rottkamp Brothers Farm. It’s a fourth-generation farm, sixty-five years in the game, on property someone would probably kill to turn into a stand of mansions. Instead, it’s a cornucopia laid out on dusty earth: green beans, watermelons, half a dozen kinds of eggplants, and the full family tree of tomato varieties. Squashes, pumpkins, and a football field of callaloo, grown for Caribbean markets in the city. An unreal row of beets, as if staged for a photo shoot: their leaves proud, rigid, and deep green, their single red vein diving down into perfectly round roots, gently nestled in the soil.

Alex put his feet in the dirt and beamed.

“If I see you serving a tomato from a thousand miles away when this is right in your backyard,” he said, “I just don’t see why I would need to ever come back to your restaurant again.”

Philippe Bertineau, executive chef, Benoit: Alex always loved vegetables, more than anything. He was the one who started us working with the Union Square Greenmarket. He was passionate about all different vegetables. And his knives… so many knives.

Anne Marie, one of the owners, rushed over to greet him. He spoke with her in French, and they caught up: she’s well, and her husband—one of the namesake brothers—is out cutting the callaloo. It’s been a good season; the tomatoes have been fantastic, haven’t they? The corn is coming to the end, but it’s been a great year for it too.

She turned to me, saying, “You know, when Alex calls, they all go into the field and pick whatever he wants. We could be so busy, but everyone will run out, and they all say, ‘But it’s for Alex!’ He has such a great heart. They all love him.” He looks a little bit away, into the fields, as if to avoid hearing.

Anne Marie took us through her crops, and Alex pointed out patches of purslane she didn’t even know she had. He talked about Ducasse’s favorite stuffed zucchini, with poulet roti, truffle, and parmesan. He recalled three preparations of every vegetable we walked past, every herb from every dish. It’s like he remembers everything he’s ever cooked, everything he’s ever eaten, and it needs to come out.

Zohar Zucker Zohar: When Alex makes something and he’s happy with it, it’s like an event that he emotionally connects to. When something tasted like this, and it was just the exact season for it, and in that moment it was perfect—that’s like a pearl of joy to him, and he keeps it.

The herb garden was one thing, but walking through an actual farm with Alex Lee was a little like staring at the sun.

But then we got to one of the barns, and Alex was stunned silent. There was a gray, ancient tractor, a Ford, from 1952. Richard, one of the Rottkamp brothers, found it abandoned in a stand of shrubs. It had the round, bulging nose of old cars from that era, a kind of warm muscularity. “He fixed it up himself! He looks so happy when he rides on it,” Alex said. “I love asking him about it, because he’s so proud of it. But his life is so hard. These people, they work so hard.”

It occurred to me that Alex talks about hard work almost as much as he talks about country cooking. I watched him chat with Anne Marie and Richard. He offered to cook them some of that callaloo, which they’ve only grown, never eaten. I thought about what he’d told me earlier, about making time for the people who worked so hard for him. At first it sounded like a strategy, something you put in a best-practices guide for business managers. But seeing the way Alex swelled with a kind of pride looking at this farmer’s fixed-up tractor, I don’t think it’s a tactic. I think it’s just him.

We said goodbye to the Rottkamps. Driving back to the club, I asked Alex how he came to his job there. It wasn’t exactly the question I was supposed to ask, I guess—the question anyone would want to ask of the guy who spent ten years building one of the best restaurants in New York, one of the best restaurants in the world: “Why did you leave the game?” I didn’t want to ask that question. I didn’t want to ask this man something that would sound like I was questioning his honor or his commitment. But that might have been the question he heard anyway.

We pulled into the parking lot. “I like growing, I guess,” he started. “Watching plants grow. Watching people grow. I love cooking, but the balance of my life wasn’t so good anymore.”

Zohar Zucker Zohar: The level of stress that Alex was under in that kitchen was enormous. It wasn’t the right environment for him. He just wanted to grow strawberries, pick them, and then cook with them. It always felt that once dinner service started, that was not his element. That was not where you would see who Alex was. That part was Alex doing his job. I felt that was the only time you could see him looking at the door. I was really happy for him when he left, not for me, but for him. That stress level took a huge toll on him. I used to feel really bad that Alex doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. But I don’t think he lives for that. He lives for the connection he has with people around food. Alex is a true chef—not a New York restaurateur. He knew that, and he made the choice that was true to himself. Cooking is not a career for Alex. It’s his passion. I took that as inspiration—would I devote my life to the restaurant, or would I have a family? And I decided to leave and have a family.

“In the restaurant, you feel like it’s a fight when you walk in the door. You’re fighting the purveyors, you’re fighting during prep, you’re fighting to be perfect in an imperfect system. Then service is a battle. There’s a lot of yelling and screaming. Whether it was me or someone else, I always talked to people after to make it good. It takes so many people to put on that show, and everyone’s important: the dishwasher, the coffee guy, the bread guy. I tried to make myself available to them, but it just got too crazy, to be between my family, my staff, the menu, the ordering… In life, all these things are tradeoffs. I do miss sometimes the energy of the city. Cooking is performance, and I enjoy the aspect of creating for people, especially when other chefs, critics, real foodies are coming through. I love feeding people.”

He paused, and I couldn’t tell if he was looking for words or getting emotional.

“At a restaurant like Daniel, you work so hard.

Michael Anthony: Alex is still probably the most knowledgeable chef that I know in terms of food history, ingredients, the big picture of the dining industry, the nuances of the subculture of kitchens, both French and American. He came at a time before this contemporary culture of immediate exchange of information, and he was the last of the chefs to transmit that day in and day out in the kitchen: Always telling stories. Every day, sometimes every minute. He embodied this sense of full commitment to the kitchen. A dedication not just to restaurant Daniel, but to the profession. You have to give it your all. If you weren’t living up to expectations, there was a sense of threat. I felt it, I was terrified by it, but man I loved working like that. That kind of confidence, determination, that developed there was what pushed me in my career. If you hear him talk, he’s a New Yorker. You hear it in every word. He also embodied this sense that what we do is a gritty business, a physical, gritty business. But you never stop thinking. Like with parents, older siblings, people in your life who you desperately search for approval from but with a tingle of fear, for me and most people who worked for him, we felt that need to get his approval. When we all got together to cook for Daniel’s twentieth anniversary, as soon as we all got in the kitchen, it was immediate that he was the leader. No one said anything, it was just immediate. Twenty years later, and Alex is saying, “Okay, why don’t you guys do this?” And everyone was just, “Oui, Chef.” He wields this real power, and he does it in this very responsible way.

I would be there eighteen hours a day, especially in the beginning, standing there and scrubbing down steel with my cooks after service. Believe me, you’re punishing the cooks. I guess I eventually just felt like I couldn’t ask that of them anymore if I wasn’t always going to be there for them, too.”

We decided to call it a day. It was hot, and his dinner service was starting. Casual millionaires were taking their seats for the barbecue on the veranda. The sushi station was set, the carving station was going up. Alex asked if he could get me a bottle of water for the road.

I waited a few minutes for him to come back out with the water, and his words turned in my mind. Alex Lee left the city for himself, for his family, but, just as much, because he was committed to the notion that if he couldn’t sacrifice everything of himself for his cooks, he shouldn’t be there at all. Could it be that he really had so little ego? Could it be that, after ten years of his life, after all the stars in the dining room and all the stars in the reviews, he didn’t think he should be doing it with his own name on the door?

A few days later, he will tell me over the phone that, just a few months ago, Daniel texted him out of the blue to say that the happiest he’d ever been in the kitchen was when he was cooking with Alex. And before I can follow up with a question, Alex will quickly change the subject and I will let it be, because some people want to keep their pride for themselves.

When Alex didn’t appear in the parking lot, I assumed he got stuck in service. I found him inside, by the Chicken Man’s fried chicken. He was munching on a drumstick, putting a few pieces into a box for me. He wanted to make sure, before I went, that he could feed me one more time.