terested in its relationship to art and
politics, both growing enthusiasms, and
to sex, an unknown terrain that I was
impatient to explore. (One of my friends
came across a cassette I had made, full
of poetic confessions about food and
sensuality; after enduring hours of rid-
icule, I destroyed it.)
In the kitchen, I sought out meats
that I’d never eaten—rabbit, quail, pi-
geon—and discovered the voluptuous
frisson of offal, on the delicate line be-
tween succulent and repellent. There
were a few disasters. Once, I made pasta
with chanterelles that had been picked
in a forest in Maine by a family friend,
an old Russian Jew who claimed to be
a mycologist. Suddenly, my grandmother
said she felt sick and started to panic.
Everyone put their forks down. The
mushrooms turned out to be fine. While
my parents made sure that I hadn’t poi-
soned my grandmother, I went back to
the kitchen and whipped up a simple
spaghetti aglio e olio, which I secretly pre-
ferred to chanterelles.
N
ot long after Reichl’s profile ap-
peared, I found a French culinary
mentor, Gérard Pangaud. In Paris, he’d
become, at twenty-seven, the youngest
chef ever to receive two Michelin stars.
Then Joe Baum, the themed-restau-
rant pioneer, persuaded him to come
to New York and head the kitchen at
Aurora, on East Forty-ninth Street.
The restaurant was a chic and dreamy
midtown oasis in muted shades of blue
and pink. Bryan Miller, the restaurant
critic for the Times, called it “the Ver-
sailles in Joe Baum’s impressive collec-
tion of culinary chateaus.”
I first went there for lunch with my
grandmother, after writing Pangaud a
fan letter. He was waiting when we ar-
rived. For the next few hours, we ate
rounds of lobster tail in a tangy, buttery
sauce of Sauternes, lime, and fresh gin-
ger, on a bed of spinach; a ragout of per-
iwinkles, briny as the sea; and slices of
grilled, rosy-pink pigeon breast with ol-
ives, tomato, and lemon confit, in a rich,
sombre sauce that haunted the tongue.
Pangaud wasn’t a revolutionary like Sen-
derens, but he had a grippingly visceral
imagination, an intuition for unusual
combinations of flavor and texture, and
an earthy elegance. After lunch, he in-
vited me to study with him.
There was nothing unusual about a
chef asking a teen-ager if he’d like to
work in the kitchen. In France, culinary
training is based on what’s known as the
stage, an unpaid apprenticeship that all
chefs pass through, beginning with the
lowliest of activities and gradually rising
to more complex tasks. French kitchens
are deeply hierarchical institutions, run
along essentially military lines. My stud-
ies with Pangaud weren’t quite a stage—
living in Massachusetts, I could train for
only a few days every couple of months—
but my education there lasted several
years. The days began at dawn and ended
well past midnight, and I made the most
of them. I usually worked in garde-man-
ger, preparing salads and chopping veg-
etables, but I was occasionally allowed
to work on the line, searing steaks, duck
breasts, and thick slabs of foie gras.
Restaurant kitchens are enclosed
worlds, and now that I was inside one I
wanted to know who its players were
and how they operated. The chefs on the
line were mostly blue-collar white guys,
though there were a few women. The
only thing the line chefs talked about—
other than food, keeping up with their
orders, and who had screwed something
up—was fucking, and I guessed that
some of that was happening downstairs,
in the basement kitchen, where the meat
was stored. The prep cooks chopping
vegetables in garde-manger were mostly
East Asian and Central American im-
migrants. Once they graduated to the
line, they adopted the brassier, saltier
argot that cooking in conditions of ex-
treme heat and pressure seemed to re-
quire. The intensity of the kitchen—the
speed, the insults, the burns from hot oil
splashing—was frightening at first, but
soon I was intoxicated. And it was sat-
isfying to be welcomed as one of the
team. Some of the cooks referred to me
teasingly as the Kid. But I was a kid, and
I didn’t know a luckier one.
I
n the summer of 1987, just before I
turned fifteen, I went to France for
the first time, with my family. The high-
light of the trip was a visit to Lame-
loise, a Michelin three-star restaurant
and hotel in Chagny, a small industrial
town in Burgundy. I’d written to Jacques
Lameloise, the chef and owner, before
we set out, and Pangaud had sent a let-
ter of recommendation, too. Lameloise
greeted us warmly, and I spent the next
day in the kitchen. Afterward, he asked
if I wanted to come back to do a stage
there. My parents said I could, pro-
vided that I covered my living expenses,
which meant that I needed to get a job
back home.
So, when I wasn’t in school, I started
working in a very different kind of
kitchen, at the Student Prince, in
Springfield. Known to its regulars as
