The Hundred-Foot Journey Read online

  Frightened by the clump of cold chicken blocking his air passage, he reeled around the kitchen in a panic, until finally felled by a massive heart attack. Mercifully, Papa was dead even before he hit the floor.

  We all thought Papa would live forever, and his funeral in Lumière remains to this day bleak and out of focus. The entire family was mad with grief, but I personally was so brokenhearted, my eyes so blurry from the constant flow of tears, that I never noticed how feeble Madame Mallory was looking, as she leaned heavily on Monsieur Leblanc’s arm and stood unsteadily at the back of the cemetery. All I could see was that the cemetery was filled with local residents, thousands of them from as far away as Clairvaux-les-Lacs, their hats off and heads bent in respectful mourning.

  He won them over in the end, my Papa.

  Two months later, on her way down from the attic, Madame Mallory tripped and tumbled down the stairs, breaking several ribs and both legs on the descent. She died a few weeks later, from pneumonia, confined to a bed in the same hospital that had treated my burns two decades earlier.

  It is my great shame and sadness that I never made it back to the Jura to properly say good-bye to my maîtresse, but I couldn’t, for simply too much was happening in Paris. Life always brings unpredictable surprises, and after all my good fortune, it was apparently time again for an Indian-style hullabaloo.

  The world we had known for so long, it abruptly ended in some profound way, when the television screens suddenly filled with the shocking news that stock markets around the world were collapsing.

  Economists have their own explanation as to what happened during this dark period, but I like to think the universe at large was itself reacting to the news that Abbas Haji and Gertrude Mallory were no more a part of this life, but had finally been summoned to the abattoir.

  Depression, on a global scale, it was the only appropriate response.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was Saturday, twenty years after I came to Paris, when I was at the Place Maubert farmers’ market acquiring a handsome pair of imported mangoes wrapped in purple tissue and carefully packed like rare orchids in a wooden box, that my sister rang my cell phone and informed me that Paul Verdun had died in a car crash.

  Mehtab called just as I was handing over my money to the cashier under the stall’s awning, so I was unable to respond to her typically brutal delivery, but my sister chattered on in a voice pitched with excitement.

  “They found him at the bottom of a cliff, just outside Courgains. Dead. Just like that. Car, flat as nan. Nah, Hassan? Are you there?”

  The vendeuse behind the fruit stall handed me my change.

  “I cannot talk now,” I said, and disconnected the phone.

  For quite some time I stood stupid with shock, wondering what should become of us. The world seemed to be coming to an end, and a meaningless and monotonous phrase—an era is over—incessantly went around in my head.

  But Paris cannot in fact be stopped and the Place Maubert market continued its brisk trade without pause. It was early May and couples lugging string bags stuffed with leeks and joints of spring lamb banged into me. A Vespa beeped with irritation at my statuary immobility before carefully negotiating around my back.

  Odd details still stick in my mind: the policemen on in-line skates eating cheese pastries, flakes of dough falling on their blue shirts; the golden charcuterie chickens turning in the rotisserie with windows yellowed from grease. The very air of the market smelled, I remember, of ripe Comté cheese, and a wicker hamper filled with wine bottles from Argentina’s Mendoza vineyards stood on the sidewalk opposite me. Not even the North Africans hawking cocaine-like vials of Turkish and Iranian saffron, normally a great personal weakness, could budge me from my spot in the center of the street, where I was rooted like thistle to a rock.

  But there it was, inescapable: an important branch of classic French cuisine had just died alongside Chef Verdun, one of its last true defenders.

  It was at that moment a cantankerous old woman with a fig face knocked into me, deliberately I am sure, and, without warning I was furious. I pushed back, hard, and she scuttled away yelling, “Sale Arabe.”

  The woman’s curse—“You dirty Arab”—brought me abruptly back to the Rue des Carmes, and for the first time I really looked around at the Parisian indifference surrounding me in the market, so typically offhand, as if nothing of true significance had actually occurred.

  I was deeply offended. Paul was a national treasure and even I, a foreigner, knew the bells of Le Panthéon up the hill should have been ringing out the country’s great sorrow. And yet his departure from this world was greeted by nothing more than a Gallic shrug of the shoulders; but perhaps I should have seen it coming. Just weeks before, Gault Millau had demoted Paul from nineteen to fifteen points out of a possible twenty, a brutal reminder that today’s critics and customers were obsessed with the culinary cubism of Chef Charles Mafitte.

  It was logical, with my heritage, that I would be drawn to Chef Mafitte’s “world cuisine,” which seemed to revel in combining the most bizarre ingredients from the most exotic corners of the earth, but if I leaned in any direction, it was toward Paul’s French classicism. Charles Mafitte’s “laboratory” creations were highly original, creative, and even at times breathtaking, but I could not help coming to the conclusion his culinary contrivances were, in the end, a triumph of style over substance. And yet it was undeniably his “chemical” cooking that had struck a chord with the critics and public alike these last several years, and, like it or not, Paul’s classically ornate fare was passé and seemed, in comparison, hopelessly outdated. But Paul was all honest blood and bones and meaty substance, and I, for one, was going to miss him deeply.

  But it was all over. And thick-headed as I was, I realized, standing in that Saturday morning market, there was nothing left for me to do but to return home and call Paul’s widow to express my condolences. So, mangoes under arm and full of this admittedly abstract sense of loss, I headed back to Le Chien Méchant, up at the top of Rue Valette.

  As I trudged up the hill, past the flat-faced apartment buildings on Rue des Carmes, marking the postwar rise of French socialism, I walked under a string of children’s underpants hung from a clothesline stretched across two balconies. Right then a woman in the ground-floor flat of the working-class building threw open a window in her kitchen, and I was instantly engulfed in a steamy cloud of tripes à la mode de Caen, billowing out from the cast-iron pot on her stove.

  It was this earthy smell of tripe and onions that finally pulled up from my depths a stew of memories, and in that moment my friend Paul—not the three-star Chef Verdun—was restored to me.

  For I remembered that time when, a few years ago, eager not to take the trip alone, Paul convinced me to join him for a produce tour of the Alsace, on the border with Germany. Paul drove his silver Mercedes at a reckless tempo through the countryside, and it was too much, the manic way he pushed us through our tasks. Until, that is, the afternoon arrived when—after countless trudgings up and down muddy lanes to remote farmhouses, where we sampled yet another Gewürztraminer or thyme-infused honey or smoked sausage—I had a fit.

  “Enough,” I yelled. I would not continue to one more farm, I told Paul in an ice-cold voice, unless he first agreed to stop for a quiet and unhurried meal. Paul, shocked by my uncharacteristic show of steel, quickly agreed to my terms, and we pulled into a sleepy village I can no longer remember the name of.

  But I do remember the bistro we ate in was smoke-filled and dark-paneled and along the zinc bar there were a couple of locals huddled morosely over ballons of wine. I recall that the place smelled of rotten wood and spilled pastis, and we took the table in the back, under a mottled mirror. A bored young man, a Gitane hanging from his lips, came over and took our order, as an aged woman in a soiled housedress shuffled in and out of the back kitchen.

  Paul and I both ordered the day’s special, tripe, which was served in chipped bowls and plonked unceremoniou
sly down in front of us. We ate in silence, dunking crusty cuts of country bread into the stew and washing it all down with a local Pinot Gris, slurped noisily from the glass tumblers standing like squat peasants at our elbows.

  Paul pushed back his empty bowl and sighed with contentment. A bit of tripe sauce dotted his chin like a culinary beauty mark, and I noticed immediately the pressures that had been leaving deep creases across his face had miraculously disappeared for the moment.

  “Never, in all the three-star restaurants of France, will you taste anything finer,” he said. “We toil and toil, until we are exhausted, and nothing we do, if we are honest, will ever be as good as this, a simple bowl of tripe. Am I right, Hassan?”

  “You are right, Paul.”

  It was only when I recalled this memory, on the sad day of his car crash, that I finally had the decency to let in the enormity of my friend’s death, to really feel the loss of this incredible tragedy.

  Paul was no more.

  And so it was, halfway up the Rue Valette, that my palate independently demanded its own homage to Chef Verdun, and I found myself tasting on the broad back of my tongue the rich flavors and textures of his crayfish, a masterpiece of paper-thin slivers of grilled goose liver layered delicately between the pudenda-pink meat of freshwater crustaceans.

  Starlings chattering near my window woke me the next morning, but when I swung my legs over to the floor, it felt as if I had been hit with a hammer. All the recent departures, the collapse of the old economic order that we were seeing in the news every day, it was as if all this death and destruction had physically settled in the marrow of my bones. I was profoundly exhausted, dragging my feet, and when I left my flat I found I had to stop off at my local watering hole, La Contrescarpe, on the Rue Lacépède, for a second cup of coffee, before I could continue on to the restaurant.

  Marc Bressier, an acquaintance who was the front-room manager at the three-star Arpège, was already at our regular table under the brasserie’s green awning, eating an omelet, and he nodded when I pulled out a chair.

  At that time in the morning, Place de la Contrescarpe was free of tourists, and when the waiter came by, I ordered a double and a brioche. A street sweeper was driving his whirring green truck around the square’s fountain, hosing down the cobblestones with pressurized water and sending dog shit and cigarette butts rolling into the gutter. A clochard was asleep on the far pavement under a bush, his grizzled gray head resting on his extended arm, totally oblivious to the spray steadily heading his way.

  André Piquot, chef-patron at Montparnasse, pulled up a chair as shutters above the bar on the other side of the square suddenly clattered open, the noise sending a flock of pigeons soaring over the houses.

  “Salut, Hassan. Ça va, Marc?”

  “Salut, André.”

  Paul was all we could talk about, and André expertly jabbed at his cell phone applications with his stubby fingers to read us the latest press accounts. There were unresolved questions about Paul’s accident. The absence of tire tread marks on the road suggested there had been no braking of the car before it sailed over the ledge, and the car itself had just been serviced at a garage, so no technical malfunction could have explained the loss of control on a road that Paul knew like the back of his hand. Furthermore, a witness, a farmer across the road, said the car appeared to be accelerating, not braking, as it headed straight for the cliff and disappeared over its edge. Investigations were continuing.

  “I still can’t believe it. He seemed so full of life.”

  “What do you think, Hassan? He was your friend.”

  I shrugged, the French way. “He was as much a mystery to me as he was to you.”

  We moved on to the upcoming demonstration against the restaurant industry’s special value-added tax, a subject then much consuming our world.

  “You will be there, Hassan,” Piquot said. “Please. As a director of the Syndicat Commerce de l’épicerie et gastronomie, I must deliver bodies for the protest. Please. Bring your staff.”

  “We must stand together,” added Bressier.

  “All right. I will be there. Promise.”

  It was time to go. I shook their hands, crossed the square, and noticed another two shops, a parfumerie and a sandwich shop, had permanently closed their doors. But as I descended the raked Rue Descartes, I had to negotiate around a delivery of tarp-covered paintings to the Rive Gauche Gallery, all conducted with much yelling and theater, and it made me recall the time when Paul and I had spent an afternoon at the Musée D’Orsay, to hunt, as he said, “pour la source d’inspiration.”

  He was in good shape that day, at his charming best, and it was a very agreeable afternoon we spent together, even though we moved through the museum at vastly different tempos. I would regularly turn the corner of a room only to see the back of Paul’s silver head rushing ahead into yet another of the museum’s chambers.

  At one point, I sat alone before Gauguin’s The Meal, painted shortly after the great painter arrived in Tahiti. Not one of his best, according to the experts, but I recall the painting’s extreme simplicity—the three locals, the bananas, the bowls on the table. The painting stunned me, for it made me realize only a true master could strip away all obvious artistry and drama, to leave only the simplest and purest ingredients on the plate.

  Paul inevitably came back to find me, full of enthusiasm, like a child, to say “you must see” the painting by so-and-so in the next room, and he left again only once I had promised to do so. There was a period, however, when Paul disappeared entirely and there was no sign of him until I finally reached the third floor of the museum.

  He was standing stock-still before a painting stuck in the far left-hand corner of the grand parlor. I am not sure how long he had been standing there, but he did not move as I came to stand by his side, but continued to stare blank-faced at the image that seemed to have a fierce hold on his imagination.

  The painting wasn’t particularly good, I thought then, but now, looking back, the image does come back to me quite vividly. The painting was of a bearded king, sitting on his throne, his wife clinging to his side. They were both deep in shock, each separately wondering what would become of them. A huge and empty gray wall stretched seemingly forever behind them, a ceremonial church candle bluntly extinguished and abandoned on the floor in front of the distraught couple. The painting, by Jean-Paul Laurens, was titled, simply, The Excommunication of Robert the Pious.

  When after several minutes he never acknowledged me in any way, not even when I shifted my weight and cleared my throat, I said, “Paul?”

  He blinked twice and turned in my direction.

  “Ready? My God, it’s like touring with an old lady, you are so slow. Now, how about we have a drink at a little bar I know not too far from here?”

  When I slipped through the front door of Le Chien Méchant, I found my maître d’hôtel, Jacques, at the table in the foyer, busy stacking the silver peaches that had just arrived from Seville. The spotlit table was the first thing guests saw when entering the restaurant’s darkened hall, and every day we seductively set it anew with fresh figs, pineapples, and mangoes, colorful pots filled with berries. Among the heaps of lush fruit, we frequently placed a plate of smoke-blackened sausages, or delicate and flaky pastries of the day stacked under a smooth glass dome, all to create a mouth-watering contrast of hues and textures. The only permanent fixtures were a preserved and mounted pheasant—with two glittering glass eyes and a long tail that majestically swept across the table’s polished pear-wood planks—and two strategically placed antique copper pots with lids of hammered silver.

  Jacques, dressed in a tailored blue suit, stacked the last peach and turned his head in my direction as I eased shut the front door.

  “Chef! You won’t believe it. I cracked it. I know who they are.”

  Again I was visited by that overwhelming sense of weariness.

  “It’s a young couple. I am sure of it.”

  Jacques made me come
over to the podium and his leather-bound volume of research to pore over his reams of hastily snapped photographs.

  “See? It’s all here. Look.”

  Normally a man of great elegance and reserve, Jacques lost all sense of proportion when it came to restaurant critics. He loathed them. In fact, his great ambition in life was to unmask the anonymous Guide Michelin inspectors who secretly reviewed restaurants and doled out Michelin’s coveted stars. His strategy, these last several years, was to photograph guests he thought could be the Michelin critics, in the foyer, as they left our restaurant. He would then take his rogue’s gallery of photos to Bib Gourmand–designated restaurants, modest-priced brasseries and bistros that were the Michelin inspectors’ personal favorites, according to the guides’ own definition, and where they took their own families on their days off.

  For years now, Jacques systematically dined in his free time at the unpretentious Bib Gourmand restaurants, comparing his portfolio of snapshots with the room full of diners. It was complètement fou, of course, like looking for a needle in a haystack, and this was the first time he had ever found a match.

  “Look. It’s the same young couple. They dined here on the fourth. And then here they are again, four days later, over at Chez Géraud in the 16th arrondisement. I am sure they are Michelin inspectors. He has a rather sneering look about him. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes. Possibly. But—”

  “Well, I am sure of it.”

  “Actually, that’s the son and daughter-in-law of Chef Dubonet from Toulouse. They were here in Paris that week on a research mission. They’re opening a bistro. I personally sent the young couple to Chez Géraud.”

  Jacques looked crestfallen.

  I tried to smile sympathetically, but it was halfhearted, and I moved on quickly before he could engage me further in his bizarre obsession.