the Fort, it was an old-school German
restaurant, whose owner, Rupprecht
Scherff, had fled the Nazis. The din-
ing room was a festive place, but the
kitchen was almost Dickensian in its
sordidness and gloom. Whereas Auro-
ra’s employees were ambitious and ob-
sessed with the art of food, no one at
the Fort imagined that they were doing
much more than punching a time card.
Many of the waitstaff seemed to be on
chemical mood enhancers. The Polish
woman who chopped lettuce and placed
it in bins the size of garbage cans wore
gloves, because she had severe eczema.
If working at Aurora was an appren-
ticeship in haute cuisine, working at
the Fort was an education in injuries
of class that are invisible from the din-
ing room. In school, I’d been reading
“The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s novel
exposing exploitation in the meatpack-
ing industry. Soon I understood Sin-
clair’s fury that readers had been more
alarmed by the book’s food-hygiene
implications than by its indictment of
working conditions.
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 down-
stairs was Walter, a man in his sixties
who bore a passing resemblance to Eli-
jah Muhammad. He had recently re-
turned to the Fort from a long leave of
absence after being convicted of stab-
bing 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 chan-
nelling my food obsession into writ-ing. I contributed restaurant reviews to
the school newspaper, closely mimick-
ing 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 ex-
pected to make a career in—closer, in a
way, to the basement at the Fort. New
interests were taking hold of my imag-
ination. 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 au-
thentic existentialist.I
n 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 Lame-
loise. 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 sym-
phony orchestra performing high-fidel-
ity versions of the classic repertoire.
Lameloise’s food was traditional Bur-
gundian 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’Es-
pérance, a three-star place an hour and
a half ’s drive away, glumly admitted
“Remember how I’ve always had a hard time asking for help?” that Lameloise was a letdown. Soon