Текст книги "Richard C. Morais - The Hundred-Foot Journey"

Автор книги: Richard C. Morais

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

“Yes. It is. And yet . . .”

Something was holding me back, an oppressive knot sitting inside my rib cage, and I didn’t really understand, at that point, what it was all about. But the main river, the fast-running Oudon to our right, took a bend at that point, creating a long deep pool and a forest flat at its banks. It was the perfect setting for lunch, and I deposited our rucksack on a lichen-covered boulder, under the immensely ancient pines, lindens, and horse chestnuts, the icy river in sight just beyond their trunks.

We stretched ourselves flat across a rock and languidly ate our lunch, the apples and cheese and the thick-crusted bread Margaret herself had made, which we slathered in lemon curd. I am not sure at what stage we heard the voices, but I remember the way they came to us through the woods, distant at first, but then ever louder as the figures moved across the forest floor, hunched, like crabs scuttling across a seabed. Margaret and I lay still, dozy with contentment, watching in silence as the figures approached.

It was mushroom season and this damp part of the state forest was locally known for prize cèpes and chanterelles. Madame Picard’s family had for years controlled the mushroom-picking license for this patch of the forest, and the widow was the first to come into view. Swathed in her trademark black sweater and skirt, under a billowing rain slicker, Madame Picard jumped from forest clump to forest clump like a mountain goat, kicking rotten birch tree stumps with her army boots, to reveal hidden clusters of pieds-de-mouton under the rotting cover.

Suddenly a squawk of excitement, as Madame Picard stood upright, clutching in her grimy hand trompettes-de-la-mort, the coal black and prized chanterelle that indeed does look like a trumpet of death but is actually very tasty and safe to eat. She turned to her lumbering companion behind her, a large man panting heavily and lugging two large baskets that were filling rapidly with their musty finds.

“Be careful with these trompettes. Leave them on the top. So they won’t get crushed.”

“Yes, bossy madame.”

Papa stood there like a bear in the forest, still in his favorite tan kurta, but buried now under a massive waxed coat that perhaps had once belonged to the late Monsieur Picard. On his feet, he, too, wore army boots, but in his case they were untied, the tongues pulled this way and that, the laces unraveled and wet and dragging behind him in the forest, making him appear, of all things, like a rapper from Paris’s suburbs.

Margaret was just about to call out, to wave them over, but, I don’t know why, I put my hand on her forearm and shook my head.

“I tink it is time we rested. And ate. I am rather hungry.”

“You will drive me crazy, Abbas! We just got started. At least one full basket before lunch.”

Papa sighed.

But when Madame Picard turned, to bend down with her stubby knife and cut another mushroom out from the forest floor, Papa saw something that was of great interest. For he tiptoed forward, reached in between Madame Picard’s legs for a grab, and yelled, “I found a truffle!” Madame Picard instantly screamed and almost fell forward on her face. But when she found her balance and stood again, the two of them were roaring with laughter. Clearly, she had rather enjoyed Papa’s goose.

I was horrified. My head instantly filled with images of my mother and Papa, walking together along Juhu Beach, from so long ago. I felt a heart pang. She was so elegant and understated, my Mummy, unlike this crude woman before me. But after a few moments I finally saw Papa as he truly was, just a man snatching a few of life’s simple pleasures.

He was not at that moment thinking about the responsibilities of the restaurant, or of the family, all of which consumed his waking hours day in and day out. He was just an aging man, with a few decades more of life, enjoying his brief time on earth. I was suddenly ashamed of myself. Papa, who shouldered so much for so many, he, of all people, deserved this carefree and joyous moment without my brow furrowed in distaste. And the more I watched Madame Picard and Papa carrying on like randy teenagers—both slightly bent, both hustlers—the more I realized this was entirely right.

It came to me then: it was not my family that was having trouble letting me go to Paris, it was me not wanting to let go of them. This, I would say, was the moment when I finally grew up, because it was in that wet forest that I was able to say to myself, Good-bye, Papa! I am off to see the world!

So the hardest good-bye, those final days, was in the end not with the family, or with Madame Mallory, but with Margaret herself. That talented and decent sous chef was just five years older than I, but the affair we had while we both worked at Le Saule Pleureur, it made me a man.

But our relationship reached its logical conclusion during those closing days in Lumière one morning while I was at her tiny flat in town, just above the village’s pâtisserie. It was our day off and we were having a late-morning breakfast at the little table under the tall window of her kitchen.

Lumière’s famous light was pouring in through the old panes, where a few dried wildflowers—oxlip and yellow gentian—stood in a glass jar on the sill. We were wordlessly having café au lait and brioche and a quince jam her mother had made, each in our own world.

I was sitting at the table in my underpants and a T-shirt, looking out the window, when skinny Monsieur Iten and his plump wife walked hand in hand down Rue Rollin. They suddenly stopped in their tracks and gave each other lusciously wet kisses, before parting company, he to get into their Lancia, she to enter the local branch of Société Générale.

Margaret was naked under her kimono, reading the local paper next to me, and I am not sure why, but I stretched my hand across the table and spontaneously said, “Come.”

My voice was shaking as I held out my hand, hoping the woman across the table would grasp the fingers blindly searching contact in the air.

“Come with me to Paris. Please.”

Margaret slowly put down the paper and told me—I still remember that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach—that Lumière was where she was born, where her parents and siblings lived, where her grandparents were buried, up on the hill. She appreciated the offer, loved me for it, but she could not—she was sorry—she could not leave the Jura.

So I took back my hand and we went our separate ways.

Paris

Chapter Thirteen

If I am honest, my rise in Paris over the next twenty years, it was not as difficult as one would suspect. It was as if some unseen spirit were clearing obstacles and helping me take the path that I believe was always destined for me. For I was, as promised, promoted after just two years to the position of premier sous chef, at La Gavroche, that one-star restaurant behind the Élysée Palace.

But here is the great mystery, which I suspect I will never unravel: Was Madame Mallory somehow involved in my steady rise over the following years? Or did I imagine it?

During my time in Paris, my former maîtresse and I would exchange seasonal greeting cards, or talk on the phone, maybe once or twice a year. And I would, of course, pay my respects when I returned to see the family in Lumière. But for all intents and purposes, she was no longer actively involved in my education or career, at least not officially.

But I have always wondered whether she did not help me—a discreet call here and there—to help things along at key moments. And if she did, I have often asked myself, how was she able to ensure I never found out about her role?

Pierre Berri was, for example, the bighearted chef who enticed me north to his restaurant La Gavroche, but what I learned, after I got to Paris, was that he was married to a distant relative of Madame Mallory, a second cousin once removed. Naturally, with this connection, I quietly suspected there was a whispered word from Mallory that had elicited this offer from Paris. Chef Berri flatly denied it, of course, but I was never entirely convinced by his denials.

When I was back in Lumière to see the family that first winter after my move north, I crossed the snowy street to have tea with Madame Mallory in her attic flat. The steam radiators were clanking loudly, infusing the apartment with a cozy heat, and we settled into the old armchairs, drinking coffee and nibbling scalloped madeleines still warm from Le Saule Pleureur’s oven. I remember she wanted to know all about the tapas-style restaurant that Chef Pascal had just opened in Paris, which was then creating quite a stir in the capital, and a new craze for smart bistros where the food supported the wine, not the wine the food. It was during the course of our shop talk, however, that I nonchalantly slipped in a thank-you for orchestrating the offer from Chef Berri.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Hassan,” she said, refreshing our coffee with the same Limoges pot she had deployed during my apprenticeship. “I have far better things to do with my time than to call distant relatives on your behalf. Besides, I haven’t seen that particular cousin for thirty years—and I never liked her then. That side of the family is from Paris, you know, and they always thought they were superior to those family members who, like us, remained in the Loire Valley. Why in heaven’s name would I ask a favor from her? It would kill me. So I will hear no more of your nonsense. Now, tell me, is it possible for you to talk with your wholesalers in Paris and locate for me a few Ostrea lurida? Before I die, I want to try that American oyster. Just inconceivable to me that some French gourmands consider it superior to our Breton oysters.”

I returned to La Gavroche, worked hard, and five years after I arrived in Paris I was offered another opportunity and a big jump in responsibility. There was no opening expected to show up at La Gavroche for many years to come, so I handed in my resignation and instead became chef de cuisine at La Belle Cluny, a small and elegant restaurant in the 7th arrondissement, where I stayed for a total of four years.

I was very happy working alongside white-haired Marc Rossier, an elderly chef who, to put it politely, had his own ways. Chef Rossier made us dress completely in black, rather than the traditional whites, right down to the clogs, and he used to shuffle around us with his own billowing black pants tucked inside his socks, like a seventeenth-century Dutch pirate, all day singing raucous tunes from his youthful days in the French navy. But it was precisely this eccentricity that made Chef Rossier such a delight to work for. He liked to have fun.

He was, for example, amazingly open to new ideas, despite his advanced age, and so very unlike most other patrons. That meant I had, as his right hand, a great deal of room to try out my own new creations, such as a roast kid with lemons sewn into its stomach cavity. This creative freedom paid off, I think, and within two years of my arrival, La Belle Cluny was elevated from one to two Michelin stars.

This rewarding work at La Belle Cluny whet my appetite, and at the age of thirty I returned to Lumière to have an earnest talk with Papa. I desperately wanted to open my own restaurant, to finally become patron in my own house, but I needed capital. That Haji ambition, it was burning. So I sat in the chair opposite Papa’s desk in the old Dufour mansion and pleaded my case. Not five minutes into my fevered pitch, my cash-flow projections spread out across his table, Papa held up his hand.

“Stop! My God. You are giving me a headache.”

Spreadsheets with return-on-investment analysis, that was never how Papa worked; with him, it was always through the gut. “Of course I will help you! What did you tink?” he demanded crossly.

Papa took from his drawer a thick sheaf of communications. “I have long been expecting this,” he said, opening the file. “I am not some sleepy wallah picking at his toes all day. Nah? I long ago asked the lawyers and bankers to start arranging matters. It is all taken care of. Each of you children will get one-seventh of the family estate. You will get your share now. Why wait until I am dead, yaar? I would much rather see you launched and happy and making me proud. . . . But please. Don’t start sending me these computer printouts. I cannot stand such things. Always left accounting to your mother.”

I had to blink a few times, to cover up my emotion.

“Thank you, Papa.”

He waved his hand dismissively.

“Now. Here is the ting I am worried about. Your share, it will come to roughly eight hundred thousand euros. Is that enough?”

No. It was not. My Parisian accountant and I had figured the cost of securing a long-term lease on a top restaurant location in Paris, the space’s complete refurbishment, including a state-of-the-art kitchen, then hiring a team of top-rate staff—in short, all the initial start-up costs of launching an elegant restaurant targeted at the most sophisticated clientele—it would require close to two million euros in initial capital, to safely get off the ground.

“That’s what I thought,” said Papa. “So I have a proposal for you.”

“Yes?”

“Your sister Mehtab. She is troubling me. I cannot find a man in this little mountain town who will have her, and every day she is becoming more and more like your aunt. Cross all the time. She needs a bigger pond to catch her fish. Do you agree? So I tink you should consider taking her in as a partner in your fancy Parisian restaurant. Nah? She will be a great help to you, Hassan, and of course, she brings her own share of the capital to invest. It will also be a great relief to me, to know you are looking after her.”

This is the Indian way, of course, and so it was settled. Mehtab moved to Paris with me. But I must confess my one regret of this period: my parting from Chef Rossier, who was so good to me, it was not as I would have liked. Not at all. For when I told Rossier I was going to open my own restaurant, the elderly chef went quite red in the face and threw a pan, two plates, and a pepper-crusted salami. But life perpetually moves forward, not backward, so I dodged the flying projectiles and headed, for the last time, out the restaurant’s back door. For some time thereafter, however, Chef Rossier’s unusually creative maritime curses continued to ring in my ear.

But onward. Our path forward entirely clear, Mehtab and I embarked on our new mission to open our own restaurant in Paris. It was shortly thereafter, sitting in the bathtub, drinking a tea spiked with garam masala and dripping with sweat, all the while thinking of my father, that the name of the new restaurant suddenly came to me.

Le Chien Méchant.

Perfect. No?

Our first objective was to find the right space, of course, and Mehtab and I tramped through Paris for several months looking for a prime location. Real estate agents seemed to show us either cavernous warehouses in obscure side streets of the unfashionable 13th or 16th arrondissement, or else cramped shop fronts not much bigger than a doll’s house in the better streets down toward the Seine. Nothing suitable. But we pressed on, with great determination, in the knowledge the right location could make or break our fledgling restaurant.

After one such hot and fruitless search, back in the flat, Mehtab kicked off her sandals and began examining her bunions, groaning each time she touched upon a tender spot. “My God,” she said, “this is worse than finding a flat in Mumbai.” She was just about to summon me over to examine her feet, but I was spared by the phone ringing, which I jumped to pick up.

“Am I speaking with Chef Haji?”

It was an elderly-sounding man at the end of phone, and I could hear, somewhere in the background, a dog barking.

“Yes. This is Hassan Haji.”

“Chef, I met you many years ago, when you were a young man just starting out. In Lumière. My name is Le Comte de Nancy Selière.”

“Oui, Monsieur Le Comte. I remember you well. You came every year to Le Saule Pleureur.”

“I hear you are looking for space. To open a restaurant.”

“Yes, I am. Quite right. How did you know?”

“Aah, Chef. You should know this by now. Paris, it’s a village. Gossip spreads with utmost efficiency through the markets, particularly when it involves haute cuisine. Or politics.”

I laughed.

“Yes. I suppose you are right.”

“Are you free? Perhaps you’d like to come visit me. Number Seven Rue Valette. I might have just the thing you are looking for.”

*   *   *

Le Comte de Nancy Selière owned a maison particulière, complete with turrets, up at the top of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève hill. He was just a half block from Le Panthéon, the basilica and elegant square where France’s great men, from Voltaire to Malraux, are buried in its chilly crypt. Mehtab and I, we were awed by the count’s imposing home, and we stood meekly out on the street, nervously ringing the bell, fully expecting to be met by a severe butler ordering us to the servants’ entrance in the back. But it was, much to our surprise, the count himself who opened the door, tousle-haired, in corduroys and leather slippers.

“Come. It’s two doors down,” he said, after curtly shaking our hands.

Without waiting for our response, Le Comte de Nancy headed down the raked Rue Valette, still in his house slippers, a large set of keys on a ring jangling from his liver-spotted hand.

I will always remember the first moment I set eyes on Rue Valette’s ivy-clad No. 11. The sun was setting over the city’s rooftops as I looked down the hill, and a glorious haze of pollution had created a kind of pink halo around the limestone building, reminding me of the lighting in Lumière.

No. 11 was half the size of the count’s imposing home, and it appeared rather plump and jolly, the wooden shutters and the ivy encircling the bottom floor giving it a relaxed air of informality. More country, in short, and less the hard elegance so common in Paris.

The entrance hall was quite dark, covered as it was in heavy wood paneling, but through the second set of doors we discovered a series of linked and airy living rooms and anterooms, each in itself not large, but flowing gently from one to the other. I stood in the main salon for several moments, under the crystal chandelier, imagining the possibilities, and it was not at all hard to picture an elegant dining room. Folds of heavy velvet sealed off the tall windows looking out onto the street, and we pulled the drapes back. Even in those weak shafts of dusty sunset, we could see how fine the wood pleating was in the parquet floors.

There was, in the back, a very large room and bathroom, ideal for a kitchen conversion, and it led out to a small courtyard for deliveries. The light-filled floor above we could rent as offices, because there was an internal spiral staircase installed in the 1970s connecting the two floors. The three higher floors in the building had their own side entrance, but the count said he did not rent them out; that was where he stored old furniture and paintings inherited from his family. So a restaurant in the bottom two floors would not be a noise problem for other tenants. Mehtab and I, we tramped between the two floors, up and down the spiral stairs, not believing our eyes and trying not to give too much away.

My heart fluttered.

For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I was home.

“What do you think?”

“Fantastic,” Mehtab whispered. “But can we afford it?”

Just at that moment, from downstairs we heard the count impatiently jangle his keys. “Come, now, you two,” he yelled. “I can’t stand here all day waiting for you to make up your mind. I have work to do. You must leave now.”

Back on Rue Valette, I looked at the neighborhood with fresh interest, as Le Comte de Nancy locked the building’s door again. Down the hill, Place Maubert, the Saturday farmers’ market, and the subway station. Up the hill, the elegant Panthéon. It would take me at most ten minutes to walk to work from my flat over by the Institut Musulman.

And directly across the street, just down from the Collège Sainte-Barbe of the Sorbonne, stood one of the finest addresses of the Left Bank: the elegant Monte Carlo, a brass-plated apartment building where the mistress of the late president of France, a fiery Socialist, was known to be kept in magnificent ancien régime style in a third-floor flat. Two potted palm trees and a uniformed doorman now stood sentinel before the Monte Carlo’s carved doors.

No question. It was a fantastic location.

“Well, young man? Are you interested?”

“Bien sû-sûr,” I stammered. “It’s lovely. But I don’t know if I can afford it.”

“Pff,” said the count, waving his hand. “Mere details of finance. We’ll work something out. The point is, I want a good tenant, reliable, and a restaurant of quality, well, it rather suits my particular tastes and interests. And you, I believe, you need a good address to make your mark. So we have a common purpose. Terribly important for a partnership. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes. I do.”

“So there we have it.”

He held out his arthritic hand.

“Thank you, Monsieur Le Comte! Thank you! I will not let you regret your decision. I promise.”

I shook his hand, rather vigorously, and for the first time the aristocrat smiled, with little yellow teeth. “I am sure of it,” he said. “You are a young chef of talent and that is why I am backing you. Remember that in the days ahead. Now do not worry. I will have my lawyer contact you very shortly with the details.”

Le Comte de Nancy Selière became not just my landlord but also my best customer. Le Chien Méchant was his “local,” as he often said. But even that description does not really do his role justice in what later became of me, for the count was in fact a kind of protective spirit, always looking out for my interests.

The rent we settled on was fifty percent below market rates for the first two years, but even over the subsequent years the count only increased the rent very gradually, and usually prompted by some increased insurance cost of his or to keep up with a wave of inflation. Fact is, throughout the next years the count helped me in a hundred different ways, including, right from the beginning, a line of credit on very good terms from his own bank, for the four hundred thousand euros I still needed to borrow in order to complete my two-million-euro vision.

But more than that, I liked the fellow. Le Comte de Nancy was a surly curmudgeon, that is true, but he was also very decent, to anyone who gave him a chance, and really quite amusing. When, for example, one of my junior staff had the temerity to ask the count if he had room for dessert, he looked at the fellow as if he were a dolt before replying, “My dear man, a gourmand is a gentleman with the talent and fortitude to continue eating even when he is not hungry.”

But on that first day, the moment the count expelled his breath with that particular “Pff” after I had asked about the property’s costs, I knew in my gut what had just happened. For that noise, so arrogant and dismissive, it was very familiar to me, and while I had no proof, indeed never got it, I knew in that instant the arrival of Le Comte de Nancy Selière and his property, it was all somehow the work of Madame Mallory’s invisible hand.

For how else can anyone explain how the best customer of Le Saule Pleureur suddenly became both my landlord and my best client in Paris, as if a baton were being passed from one restaurant to another?

“You are alarming me, Hassan,” Madame Mallory said into the phone, in a rather clipped and icy tone, when I brought up Le Comte de Nancy. “I am starting to think you are taking drugs, the way you keep running to me with these paranoid fantasies. Honestly, have you ever known me to encourage any of my customers to go spend money at a competitor? The very idea is preposterous.”

Paint fumes, yelling, phone ringing, shopping cart sweeps through stores, interviews, order forms, heated negotiations—what followed were long hours and backbreaking work. Mehtab dealt with the workmen, bossing them about, remodeling No. 11 in the image of my detailed illustrations and vision. I, in turn, when I wasn’t being called over to rule on a molding or color, was working on, most important, the hiring of the restaurant’s key staff. After hundreds of hours of interviews, for chef de cuisine I settled on Serge Poutron, shaped like an extremely large turnip, originally from Toulouse and quite rough, a fellow whom I’d met while working at La Gavroche. Difficult, sometimes even quite brutal to underlings, Serge nonetheless ran a very disciplined kitchen, and I knew he would consistently produce for me, night in and night out, beautifully executed dishes. And in the front room, Jacques, my maître d’hôtel, a veteran of the three-star L’ Ambroisie, so elegant and slight, like an upper-class version of Charles Aznavour, always ready to charm the guests.

The first restaurant review we received, shortly after we opened Le Chien Méchant, was in Le Monde, and I don’t mind admitting that I became very emotional when I saw my name and restaurant politely applauded in that august newspaper, which sits at the center of France’s opinion-making establishment. The article brought attention to the restaurant, as did the ever-growing word of mouth passed on by diners, most notably the one-man public relations machine that was Le Comte de Nancy Selière, who, naturally, was granted his regular table at the restaurant. And it is in this early period, the day after I earned my first Michelin star, but well before my second, that a man who would become so instrumental in my life and what followed sat down in a booth at the restaurant.

I was in the kitchen preparing daurade aux citrons confits when Jacques came into the kitchen to pass on two new table orders. Without looking up from his task of slotting order chits into the conveyor rack, Jacques tersely informed me I was wanted in the dining room, at table eight. My maître d’ looked uncharacteristically austere and harried as he turned and marched smartly back out through the swinging doors again, so I assumed it was someone of considerable importance not happy with the evening’s fare.

“Serge, take over. I must go out front,” I said over the metallic clatter of pans and clomping clogs, as the kitchen staff dashed back and forth along the steel ranges and across the tiled floor. Serge grunted that he heard me, before yelling, “Pickup”; a commis made me shrug off my fat-splattered whites, helping me into a freshly laundered version.

Le Chien Méchant was full that night, and, past the kitchen doors, I nodded at one or two regulars as I passed through the anterooms. Table number eight, in the center room, was one of the better tables, and I knew only a celebrity of some sort would be sitting there.

The half-bald man at table number eight was sitting alone, a ring of silver hair around the back of his neck ending in bushy white sideburns that consumed most of his face, a style much favored in an earlier era. The fellow was brawny and muscular, with a gold chain around his neck and chunky gold rings on his coarse hands, jewelry that would not have been out of place on a member of the Corsican Mafia. But he also wore a beautiful charcoal gray silk suit of considerable taste, and he exuded an aura of quiet authority. I glanced down at his plate—this always tells me a lot about a person—and registered that he was eating a starter of smoked eel with fresh horseradish cream.

“Chef Haji,” he said, extending a big hand. “I’ve been meaning to meet you for some time. I was very upset to learn from my staff you’ve been to my restaurant twice and never announced yourself to me. I am quite hurt.”

Chef Paul Verdun. One of the nation’s greatest talents.

I was momentarily starstruck. I knew Chef Verdun well, from a distance, as his story was endlessly repeated in the French press. Over the last thirty-five years, Paul Verdun had transformed a modest country butcher shop into a world-renowned three-star restaurant, his immense talent attracting gourmands from across the globe to the second roundabout in Courgains, a tiny Normandy village where the gold brick Le Coq d’Or occupied a corner maison.

Chef Verdun was a master of that lard-heavy school of French cuisine that was just starting, at that time, to fall from favor, overtaken by the molecular cooking established by the fast-rising Chef Mafitte down in Aix-en-Provence. Chef Verdun was famous for his spit-roasted squab stuffed with sweetbreads, duck liver, and scallions; his hare cooked in port wine inside a calf’s bladder; and, perhaps most famously, his “poularde Alexandre Dumas,” a simple chicken studded with a decadent amount of black truffles.

I was delighted to make Chef Verdun’s acquaintance, and I slid into his booth, the two of us talking for a good thirty minutes before I reluctantly returned to the duties of my kitchen. But in that first chat we had the breakthrough moment that forever became the basis of our friendship. Chef Verdun talked a great deal about himself, with great exuberance, and so I wasn’t entirely surprised when he finally said, “Tell me, Hassan. Of the dishes you had at Le Coq d’Or, which was your favorite?”

While I was at his restaurant, waiting for the main course, I had impulsively tried the starter omelet with codfish cheeks and caviar. It was deceptively simple, but to my mind the pinnacle of French cooking, so refined and yet also so forceful. I later discovered, through my own research, the dish was originally created in the seventeenth century by Cardinal de Richelieu’s chef, served to the controversial cardinal at lunch every Friday until his death, this delicious omelet entirely disappearing from menus until Chef Verdun magnificently reinvented it for modern palates.

“That’s easy. The omelet. With codfish cheeks.”

Chef Verdun’s fork was on his way to his lips, but he paused perceptively at that moment. “I agree with you,” he said. “Almost everyone prefers the poularde Alexandre Dumas. But I think it is a bit much. Too opera buffa. The omelet, so simple, has always been my personal favorite. You and I, Hassan, we are the only two people who agree on this.”