The kitchen was on two floors. I worked downstairs, in a basement that looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned since the place opened. In the morning, I pounded veal cutlets for schnitzel; in the afternoon, I put scraps of pork through an electric meat grinder for bratwurst. One day, the grinder blew up. Sparks flew, and my face was pelted with bits of ground pork and slicked with brine. The only other person downstairs was Walter, a man in his sixties who bore a passing resemblance to Elijah Muhammad. He had recently returned to the Fort from a long leave of absence after being convicted of stabbing a fellow-employee; Rupprecht hired him back as soon as he was out of prison. Walter didn’t talk much and had a way of chuckling to himself. I didn’t think much about him, until one day he grabbed my meat tenderizer and chased me through the basement. He cornered me, and I pleaded with him. He broke out laughing, as if my terror was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. After that, we got along beautifully.

In school, meanwhile, I was channelling my food obsession into writing. I contributed restaurant reviews to the school newspaper, closely mimicking the style of Gault and Millau. I was also writing about politics and culture: editorials denouncing Reagan’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras, essays on contemporary cinema. Reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and Claude Brown’s Harlem memoir, “Manchild in the Promised Land,” I was discovering a New York very far from the exclusive restaurants I expected to make a career in—closer, in a way, to the basement at the Fort. New interests were taking hold of my imagination. I immersed myself in French literature, dressed all in black, and thought of myself as an existentialist, although I couldn’t have said what that meant. I looked forward to my adult life in New York, the only place in America where one could be an authentic existentialist.

In the summer of 1988, taking the money I had made at the Fort, I set off for France, and stepped into a gleaming modern kitchen where more than a dozen young chefs—mostly French, but also a few Japanese—worked with utter absorption, fired up by the idea that they, too, would one day run an establishment like Lameloise. I spent hours at a time paring turnips, trimming haricots verts, and shaving potatoes for potato tartlets; occasionally, I was permitted to sauté pieces of duck foie gras, which were then nestled on top of mâche dressed in sherry vinaigrette.

I became very efficient at my tasks—the whole point of being a stagiaire—but the kitchen was monastically quiet, and I missed the banter of the cooks at Aurora, their pleasure in conversational combat, their improvisatory élan. If Pangaud’s kitchen was a jazz band of many voices, Lameloise’s was a symphony orchestra performing high-fidelity versions of the classic repertoire. Lameloise’s food was traditional Burgundian haute cuisine updated with nouvelle touches. I wondered what Alain Senderens would say, and was pretty sure that he would disapprove. One young chef, who had worked at L’Espérance, a three-star place an hour and a half’s drive away, glumly admitted that Lameloise was a letdown. Soon after, while we were in the middle of some task or other, I asked, “Is this how they do it at L’Espérance?,” imagining he’d appreciate my sarcasm. With sudden vehemence, he told me never to mention L’Espérance again. He left before the summer was over.

Jacques Lameloise’s son, Armand, was only a few months older than me but seemed vastly more sophisticated, especially about girls, who frightened me. A self-styled intellectual who worshipped New Wave cinema, he adored his mother, a reader of classical French literature with whom he would linger for hours in the morning over café au lait, croissants, and cigarettes. His father, who had probably never opened a book that wasn’t about food, was the odd man out in his own home. He was a kind, doting father, but Armand considered him a fool and believed himself to be cut out for grander things than inheriting the family restaurant, however many étoiles the Michelin inspectors had awarded it. I still wasn’t sure there were grander things than running a three-star, but I was becoming bored in the kitchen, so, whenever I could, I started joining Armand on excursions he took with his friends.

Our first trip was to Noyon, a hundred kilometres north of Paris, where Armand’s friend Jérémie, an actor-comedian, was throwing a Bastille Day party. Noyon had seen its share of luminaries—Charlemagne was crowned co-king of the Franks at its cathedral in 768, Calvin was born there, and through the centuries the town had fallen to Vikings, Habsburgs, and Nazis—but now it was a backwater. There were no adults in sight, and I watched a teen-age bacchanal unfold with fear and fascination. A group was roasting suckling pigs over a fire and opening bottles of beer and champagne; couples cavorted in the grass. Someone poured me a glass of punch. It went down easily, and I drank another. Next thing I knew, I had thrown a bottle into a wall and collapsed on the floor of someone’s bedroom. A couple came in and began to have sex on the floor next to me. “What’s wrong with the American?” the woman asked. “Oh, it’s just the jet lag, I hear he flew in today from California.” They continued their business and I passed out.

A few weeks later, in the Jura, Armand’s friends and I sped through a field on bicycles to a discothèque, and danced till early in the morning. When we left, a group of skinheads attacked us with baseball bats and stole our bikes. We spent the rest of the morning filing a report in a police station. Then we made fondue, smoked, and listened to Serge Gainsbourg, Sade, and the Cure. I had just read Camus’s “L’Étranger,” but I’d never heard the Cure’s song based on it, “Killing an Arab.” I was stunned by its blunt, angry insistence on the identity of the man Meursault had killed. Later that summer, I found myself in a car with a group of middle-aged friends of Jacques’s, who were joking about “the Arabs” (no one said “Muslims” then). It was Eid al-Fitr, and the men were talking about the blood that flowed when the Arabs sacrificed their sheep. They seemed to relish the image of Arab “savages.” Only a quarter century had passed since the liberation of Algeria from French rule, and some of these men had probably served in the Army there. I sat in silence, understanding almost nothing, and yet understanding everything I needed to know.

The most important things I learned that summer were outside the kitchen. I still enjoyed cooking, but the idea of a life of eighteen-hour days at the stove had started to seem less enthralling. Perhaps cooking had achieved its unconscious purpose: although I didn’t exactly like my body, I was no longer counting calories or scrutinizing myself in the mirror. Finding a refuge from the world seemed less necessary, too—indeed, I was impatient to plunge in and make a difference in its conflicts. At one of my last stints at Aurora, I showed up wearing a “U.S. out of Central America” pin; one of the chefs said that I should probably take it off when I was in the dining room, since many customers were Reagan supporters. He was teasing me, but I knew that he was right. Cook for imperialists? For a teen-age radical, it was unthinkable.

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Shopping Cartoon by Andrew Hamm

During my last two years of high school, I stopped working in restaurants, aside from a summer job at a McDonald’s in Enfield, Connecticut. The owner praised my skill at frying fish fillets and said I had a great future in his establishment. I discouraged customers from ordering Coke, because the company refused to divest from South Africa, and I came home every day smelling like cooking oil. I worked one final time with Pangaud, on the opening night of the Rainbow Room, where he was an adviser, an experience that felt like a beautiful last dance in haute cuisine. By then, Pangaud knew that I wasn’t planning a culinary career, but he was fond of me, and said that I was always welcome in his kitchen.