This is a work of reported fiction.

From the Author: As many readers noticed yesterday, the profile of Chris Randle, the chef of Manna restaurant in Nye County, Nevada, is of a person who does not exist. He is fiction of that strange variety known as the April Fool's. Fortunately, the chefs quoted in the article are very real indeed. Our thanks go out to Linton Hopkins, Sean Brock and Charlie Palmer for playing along. They are all real as are as almost every dish mentioned in the piece: There is a Corsican dish of boar fetus. There is a restaurant that serves food made out of dirt. And there are restaurants that have served things made out of breast milk. In China. Also, Daniel Angerer once served cheese made out of his wife's breast milk to the customers at Klee Brasserie. Nobody yet has served human flesh, to our knowledge, in a restaurant. It's probably a matter of time. -- Stephen Marche, April 2, 2013

The police arrived just in time for cocktails. The parking lot of Manna was full. A Ferrari Enzo and a Lotus Exige nestled among the field of dark town cars, and four helicopters had taken up all the available room in the overflow lot. Nye County sheriff Jack Muskat and his three deputies had to pull right up to the front of Manna's outdoor lounge, where the evening's guests were sipping cocktails on driftwood furniture before heading inside for their meal.

Nobody was particularly bothered by the arrival of the police. The truth is that when you travel three hours by helicopter to a restaurant where you are spending $5,000 on a single meal, you expect some drama. And M, as its regular members call it, is famous within its tight circle of devotees for the theatricality of its dishes and presentation, as well as the originality of its ingredients. Debate rumbled among the tables about whether the police were real or performers, like the time a few months back when a bison had been walked in through the front doors by a model wearing only boots and a cowboy hat as a prelude to the one being roasted out back on a spit. The June night air, thick with the scent of rabbit brush and wild primroses, was so lovely that nothing seemed serious enough to warrant actual worry. The unperturbed servers brought out the cocktail Manna was offering that evening, a variation on the Pimm's Cup served at the Napoleon House in New Orleans, with miniature frozen Meyer lemons bobbing at the surface, and everybody drank and chatted.

Ten minutes later, Chris Randle, the mercurial chef of M was led out in handcuffs in his whites. Randle, whose muscular, energetic frame and bald head are defined by round glasses that give him something of the air of an overage graduate student, smiled and nodded as he stooped to enter the car. The diners stood up and applauded, though they weren't entirely sure why. Sheriff Muskat shushed the diners with a raised hand and shouted, mystifyingly, "You can clap all you want, but you are what you eat" before driving away.

Customers are not typically pleased to see chefs led out of their restaurant for unspecified violations in the middle of a meal. But then Chris Randle is not a typical chef, nor is Manna a typical restaurant. Technically speaking, it's not a restaurant at all. It's a private members club with a restaurant attached, which means that it accepts reservations only from people who pay the $15,000 initiation fee (members are rumored to include Ron Howard, Samuel L. Jackson, Larry Page, J.K. Rowling, and Kathryn Bigelow). Only a member can bring guests, and the members sign an agreement stating that they won't bring restaurant critics. Photographing the food is also explicitly forbidden.

I first heard about Chris Randle from Linton Hopkins, the chef of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta, whom I had met years ago during a brief stint at Emory. We stayed in touch over the years, meeting over ridiculous meals in whatever cities our paths crossed. Last summer, I was back in Atlanta reporting when, over chunks of foie gras smeared on pumpkin bread, Hopkins began ranting about sausages. He was very close, he felt, to developing the perfect boar sausage, but he didn't know how to serve it. He wondered aloud why nobody could just serve a bowl of sausages in a restaurant, why they always had to be sided and dressed when the whole point of a sausage was that it had all the flavor it needed inside it. "Nobody could get away with that except Chris Randle," he said. I had never heard of Randle. Hopkins looked at me with half pity and half amusement. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, since you'll never be able to taste it." Then he laughed and killed the rest of the bottle of blaufränkisch.

Manna is the kind of restaurant you mainly hear about after it's closed, he told me—not only could you not finagle a reservation, you also couldn't figure out the number to call to try; a pop-up available only to the most in the know. Its location adds to its mystique. Manna is at the end of a desolate stretch of road in Nye County, Nevada, with Round Mountain just visible in the distance. The closest city is Las Vegas, sixty-five miles to the south, but most of the members come from Los Angeles, where Randle was born and where he founded his original catering business, the Emperor's Conger, after stints at Ferran Adrià's El Bulli, Doraichi in Tokyo, and Cochon in New Orleans, as well as a formative year spent foraging in Papua New Guinea. He also worked at a soup kitchen while in New Orleans, to learn what foods are most satisfying to hungry people. Manna has no Website, no Facebook presence, no digital presence at all. Randle doesn't use e-mail. Instead, he has a single phoneline, which he doesn't pick up. If you want him, you leave a message. If he wants, he'll call you back (but only between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. PST, the single half hour per day he uses the phone).

Another bottle of wine later, Hopkins still wouldn't give me the number. But he did offer to leave Randle a message on my behalf. If I heard from him, great. If not, tough. He had tried, and when I begged he tried again, but I heard nothing. By Thanksgiving, I'd given up. Then two weeks later, I had just returned from dropping my son off at daycare when I saw a missed call and listened to the message: "Manna here. The time for service has come."

Sheriff Jack Muskat may have done what no restaurant reporter in the world could—expose the secretive world of Randle's cooking to the broader American public. Randle has found himself with $200,000 worth of legal bills and no means to pay them. Despite the fantastic prices of the food at Manna, the cost of the ingredients has always kept profits low. Now he has no choice but to cash in, and he is going about it with the quiet, indomitable fury he once devoted to maintaining his privacy. He has plans to open branches of Manna on Staten Island, and in Dubai and Sydney. He is currently working on a memoir. Kathryn Bigelow has already purchased the film rights. Randle is also in talks, still preliminary, for two Food Network shows, one about the world's desserts and the other about exotic ingredients.

America's chefs have lined up behind him, offering financial assistance with his mounting legal bills. Sean Brock, who once joined a nocturnal scavenging trip that Randle led in the Blue Ridge Mountains, donated $5,000 to his legal fund. "As far as I'm concerned, he's a genius," Brock says. "Sure, he's a badass chef, but we've had about our fill of badass chefs, haven't we? The thing about Chris is that he's the most precise badass you'll meet. His rebellion is so exact. He goes right to the upsetting place, the dangerous place, right there."

Charlie Palmer tried to get Randle to work for him after eating at Manna three years ago. "I've cooked with a lot of chefs and I've never seen anyone anywhere, who has more respect for an ingredient while taking it to such weird places," Palmer offered in an e-mail. "He's like an illusionist." Palmer introduced Randle to a book publisher, to whom Randle pitched a book about cooking things in sand, but only if the publisher would agree that the book would have no title.

The laws around food have always been obstacles for Chris Randle to overcome. The first time he was arrested on a food-related violation was in 2009, for taking sequoia bark from Kings Canyon National Park. He was using the material to plate diced raw elk heart crumbled with the shavings from their velvet. The police let him off with a warning. They had no idea how he could be using bark and moss to make money.

Manna's practice does not typically involve breaking the law. At the private party after the launch of the iPhone 3, Randle roasted a dozen oysters stuffed into a trout stuffed into a goat for Steve Jobs and the inner circle of Apple. He makes a meal entirely from bones—savory blancmange, then marrow foam, and then whole larks, eaten with the bones, all finished with a bourbon shot drained through the hollowness of an ox neck's spine. He titles his meals. A dinner of a whole spit-roasted bison is called "The Western Meal" and the bone dinner "The End Result." Manna prepares a traditional Corsican dish, a boar fetus cooked in its mother, which Randle calls "The Criminal Meal." In what he calls "The Quiet Hours," each course is accompanied by headphones playing sounds of the sea, or rustling grass, or a waterfall, or a busy restaurant, or a factory floor, the intent being to match the dishes: scallops, salad, burned red pepper soup, shaved pork, macerated calf's liver. The final course, the custard, is eaten in complete silence. He's also experimented with dirt as food. He uses mud from fifty different states in fifty different dishes and calls the creation "The American Meal."

The custard is the constant. Every meal at Manna ends with the custard. When Randle first served it, at a party for Joan Baez in Malibu, he found his backers for the restaurant that night. "It's the end of all trends," says Hopkins, whose grown so close to Randall that he asked him to be the godfather to his son Linton, Jr. "Chris could just make that dish and serve it in Times Square and the line-up would never end. But the ingredient's too hard to find. That custard is what we're all out here looking for. Extreme refinement in pursuit of childhood pleasure." If the custard is the reason Manna exists, the source of its immense appeal, it's also the reason for Randle's arrest by the Nye County Sherriff's Office.

Chris Randle's lawyer, Ellen Guanacaste, runs the truck stop on Route 6 in addition to providing legal services. A short, powerful woman with stringy arms and a no-nonsense stare, she had been planning her Delaware wedding to Lucy Garcia-Richards, her partner of twelve years, before Randle's arrest. Her feelings about the arrest of Chris Randle ring with Tea Party—level outrage. "In Nevada, being a private club means you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want. You can screw what you like. You can smoke what you like. And sure as hell, you can eat what you like." Nye County is one of eleven Nevada counties with legal brothels. Guanacaste blames "government interference" and "reckless intrusion" for her client's arrest. "A private member's club, in Nevada, means private, and it means it belongs to the members. I mean there's no health code in there. You don't have to give any reason for anything. Muskat's just a busybody."

The sheriff's office, finding not one single health violation on the premises and being unclear about which laws his ingredients were violating, eventually charged Randle with possession of contraband. Randle had bought six boxes of Bolivar cigars in Los Angeles, which he was planning to use for a meal called "Elian Gonzalez, We Miss You." He was indicted under the Cuban Assets Control Regulations, which could result in a fine of up to a million dollars as well as a jail sentence of ten years. Even Sheriff Muskat, an old-school Nevada sheriff of the string-bean variety who sits in the sheriff office's mobile home, just a few miles from Guanacaste's truck stop, doesn't think either will happen. "Capone," he told me, poking the table. "It doesn't matter what you nail them for."

What was the real problem then? Why did he feel the need to arrest Randle in his restaurant during the cocktail hour? He answers my question with a question. "Do I look like the kind of man who likes to meddle in other people's affairs? There's an old joke about sheriffs in this county. You know how you get elected in Nye? Do as much nothing as possible. And I've always believed that."

I bring up the argument of Randle's lawyer—government intrusion. "That's Ellen, ain't it?" He smiles wryly. "Well, I can't disagree with her. And I think for anything else in the world, it would likely hold true, especially when someone is running a private business on his own property. I mean, that should just tell you how extreme this act was. And I don't care how tasty his cooking is." The sheriff's face suddenly brightens. "He sure can cook, though, can't he? While he was in here, we let him cook the chili one night. Best bowl of red I ever had in my life." His eyes momentarily reach for the ceiling as he sucks his ragged moustache, and then turns back remembering where he is. "And that's my point. It's nothing personal, you understand. He doesn't need these terrible ingredients. He can cook up a feast with just beans."

Tell me off the record, I say. Were there health-code violations? Was that it? The sheriff starts to squirm. "You know, there just has to be a limit to what this country can withstand. I'm talking about threats from within. I'm talking about the fabric of this nation."

In the sheriff's eyes, I could see a glint of suppressed confusion. Muskat didn't seem to know himself why he had arrested Chris Randle.

When you arrive at Manna before the guests, the place looks more like a summer camp than a restaurant. The sheer number of people is dazzling. Manna employs 3.2 chefs per customer on any given night, slightly higher than El Bulli's ratio was, and it serves nowhere near the same number of dishes. (A typical tasting menu can sometimes involve as few as seven plates.) The wait staff—mostly comprised of young families—is a small army devoted to pleasure. Manna is the only restaurant in the world, to my knowledge, with a nursery attached.

Paloma Heinz, who has worked at the restaurant since 2010, raising her daughter, Tosca, believes that the restaurant is one of the most progressive institutions in the industry. "I think that's what the cops were upset about, if you want to know the truth," she says. "We're just a little too much like hippies."

There is something of the commune or the kibbutz about Manna, with its series of cheap but decent prefab buildings sprawling behind the restaurant."It's a lifestyle," Heinz tells me. "For a server, it's a very comfortable lifestyle. For a server with a young baby, it's practically the best possible lifestyle imaginable, I would say." The daycare begins after lunch, so the restaurant's workers, who won't see their kids at night, spend time with them during the morning. Heinz mentions that all the daycare workers have early-childhood-education degrees. "It's the love out here that goes into the food. And it is political."

The lunch for servers is the day's first big event, an easygoing counterpoint to the intense and ferocious high art of the evening meal. The chicken broth with noodles is made from scratch. A plate of raw baby spinach receives the lightest sprinkle of oil and then a hundred tosses, each sharp gesture of the tongs counted off like a summer-camp game by the happy diners. Small bowls of hazelnuts glazed with cane sugar fill the table and the women snack on them constantly. Two pregnant waitresses are served separate meals, poached perch and a dish of a lima bean casserole. The waitresses and waiters are joined by their happy babies under the arbor. The whole scene is a model of health and strength, a single long table of content families under a vine-shaded trellis.

"Everything is perfectly humane," Heinz says. "None of the ingredients here are had by force. There is far less exploitation here than in a typical New York kitchen."

I say there must be almost no turnover. She smiles. "Not quite. Nobody stays here longer than thirty months. The isolation can take its toll. The sheriff implies that we're some kind of cult. I don't know how many cults force their members to leave after two and-a-half years. But you're right that many servers would stay forever if they could."

There are exceptions, Heinz says, people who can't find a job right a way, and women who get pregnant while on staff. "There's even the special dish for the pregnant staff," she mentions, bringing me over to the two full-bellied servers. "It's a casserole of lima beans in mustard and mayonnaise, with baked gingersnaps on top of it." Heinz hands me a spoonful. The flat flavor on my tongue is earthy and grotesque, like sweet mud, absolutely disgusting. I have to spit it into my hand. The two women cannot seem to wolf it down fast enough.

"Every dish has its time and place," Heinz says, laughing at my disgust. "Except the custard," she says. "Everybody loves the custard."

Chris Randle was released on bail the night of his arrest. Ellen Guanacaste had to postpone her wedding trip to Delaware to post bail, but Randle managed to return to the restaurant in time for dessert. He hasn't stopped working since. Whenever I try to talk to him, he is always elsewhere. Three meetings have had to be canceled. "He's just always on the edge of what's possible," Heinz tells me. "It's not great for scheduling." That's the only explanation I ever received.

He surprises me in the arbor after the family meal. Even as he approaches, his directness and sincerity—his irrepressible candor—are apparent. Behind the architect's glasses and the pressed, clean whites, covered by a Chicago Blackhawks Stan Mikita jersey, he moves with the confident sense of an artist who is cheerfully getting away with things.

He looks joyfully exhausted as he sits down, like a new parent. He's brought cocktails for us, though he never takes so much as a sip of his own. "These are Napoleon's, you know," he admits. "We ripped them off. We were doing intriguing stuff for a while. We have one where you take three sips of brandy, then smell a vanilla bean, and then take a bite from a tomatillo. It was great. But none of it was as good as I remembered the cocktail at Napoleon." He shrugs.

"I'm really grateful you're talking to me," I say.

"I'm going to have to tell everybody anyway because of this court case," he says as a look of pain cloaked in jokiness crosses his face. He claps his hands, bored with small talk. "I'd rather be cooking. Let's get on with it."

Breast milk.

Breast milk is the secret to Manna's best dishes.

Randle sketches out the process for me. All of the servers produce milk for Manna. It is a condition of working there. Heinz is the restaurant's lactation consultant, running the hospital-grade pumps in the milking room off the kitchen and screening the women for health issues and drug use.

"We use breast milk in everything. You know the story about Alice Waters? When she first met the French cooks, she was making these unbelievably delicious salads at Chez Panisse. And they said to her, 'That's not cooking, it's shopping.' I think what I've done is the ultimate act of shopping," Randle says. "I've found the ultimate ingredient. Alain Ducasse says cooking is 85 percent ingredients. I've just had to go shopping for what nobody can buy."

The waitresses who provide the milk do an extra pump a day beyond what their infants need—an average of five ounces a day, sometimes more with mothers who have older children.

The idea for breast milk came to him when a Starbucks moved in beside his father's diner and he started researching how it had become so successful.

"At Starbucks, you know, they had labs trying to figure out how to mimic breast milk in the lattes. The Starbucks latte is the most successful replication of breast milk on the planet, and the taste of their lattes is why Starbucks is Starbucks. I just thought, Why not go to the source?"

Then in 2003, he heard about a Chinese restaurant in Hunan Province that served perch and abalone in breast milk. He experimented with milk purchased online until he finally discovered the custard, which preserves the essence of the flavor in the simplest way.

None of the milk is wasted. The daily batches are kept in vats to separate, untouched, over the course of two days. The water is used in soups and in preparing vegetables. The cream is the basis of the custard and is also churned into butter. For a while, Randle experimented with flavors, with having the women eat curries or garlic or sugar and citrus fruits. Randle tells me that breast milk takes on the flavor of the mother's diet within a week, but the flavor derived from a basic meal—broths, hazelnuts, and greens—gives the cleanest breast milk. "I didn't want to fool around too much. The milk is the fundamental ingredient," he tells me. "The job of a cook is to reveal the ingredient. Breast milk takes no revealing. I put it in everything. It makes beurre monté look like a garnish of parsley."

He pushes over the second cocktail. He brought both for me, I realize. The Pimm's Cup is fittingly refreshing as dessert. Randle smiles as I sip, evidently pleased at my pleasure.

"I mean, what are we all looking for in all these restaurants? With all this money? Why do you think David Chang has Tastee Freez for dessert? Why do you think half the avant-garde chefs have milk and cookies for a grand finale? I just found a way to get directly what everyone else was looking for indirectly."

What follows breast milk? I wonder. Since he's new to the chef-marketing game and about to become famous as the ultimate purveyor of the new thing, how will he stay fresh? He pauses warily but cannot quite suppress a burning excitement in his voice. "There is one food that is eaten all over the world, and has been eaten from the very beginning of the species, that is totally taboo," he says. "I'm interested in that."

He won't tell me the name of the food. Instead he offers a kind of riddle.

"You know about the Emperor Heliogabalus, the great dining emperor? He was a cool guy. He had fish carried in pots from the sea to his table. He entered Rome in a chariot pulled by naked women. He ate conger eels fattened on the corpses of dead slaves."

That sounds like cannibalism, I say.

He shrugs. "The Mohawks, you know, they ate the thumbs of their enemies, and they considered it the ultimate sign of respect."

Has he ever served human flesh? "No," he says definitively, sudden fear in his eyes. "I will deny that." Something unspoken is quivering on his tongue. "Who would do that?" he says. "If there's such a thing as too much, then that's too much."

We are interrupted by the rising chop of helicopter blades coming over the desert. I can't tell where the sound is coming from, but Randle knows, out of familiarity, and looks over his shoulder as the massive machine pulls over Round Mountain, his next task arriving. He points up and says something that I can't quite hear. Then he shouts "the money" loud enough that I can hear and strides toward the helipad. The dust kicks up ferociously, swallowing him, and then a few moments later he emerges from the storm with a man who looks a lot like Elon Musk.

I am still sitting in the bower, taking notes, when Heinz returns. "A gift from the chef," she says.

It's a clay bowl about the size of a large handful containing a yellow substance. Heinz hands me a small bone spoon and leaves me to the gift. The smell is vague and delicate, like warm vanilla. The first taste on the tongue tip is a soft sweetness, then a deep relaxation, an entire body massage in a bite, as if soft and sweet and cream were all the same. The end of the flavor rounds on my tongue—the quintessence of satisfaction. I lick the bowl clean, without embarrassment. I'm utterly full of it.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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