32 Yolks: From My Mother's Table to Working the Line

It was a very happy time in my life, and that was an important lesson too: to learn how little it took to be happy, to understand from a young age that the human heart is a small and delicate vase. You must handle it carefully, but in the right circumstances, it does not take much to fill it up.

Prior to my second stint in Perpignan, I was a fine diner and as I saw it, food was art. At vocational school, I was being taught how to cook, but I was frustrated by how basic the dishes were. I was like a kid who had grown up listening to Chopin, then showed up at music school, never having actually played an instrument. I mean, when you listen to Chopin all the time, you want to become Chopin. And then you go to music school and all you're doing is plunking out do...re... mi for hours at a time. It's boring as hell, and not why you enrolled. I was impatient to create great meals and not so excited about starting with the basics. Why were we spending hours learning how to hold a knife or mine a shallot when we could be making nouvelle cuisine? True, I didn't know how to cut a chicken in eight pieces or make a bechamel. But in the two- and three-start restaurants I had been to, they were way over the bechamel. Still, there I was, in school, making the most basic of dishes--salade Nicoise, potato-leek soup, an omelette.

Just like the beautiful tea bowls that Japanese artisans purposefully nick or chip at the bottom as a quiet reminder that there is no such thing as perfection, so was Robuchon flawed with his frustration and his temper. His food was divine, but the chef was a man with all of the nicks and chips that make us human.

the important thing, Jacques instructed me, was to get the pan hot as you could before adding the meat - that, and always give good wine to your butcher.

It wasn’t her fault, but it was her fate, like so many single mothers, to be caught between a wistful child and his fantasies of the father who is perfect, in part because he is hardly ever there.

my father...there was never any mistaking his love for me. When I walked into the room, his eyes lit up and he wrapped me in his arms as if it was Christmas morning and I was the best gift imaginable.

I knew then that he had seen something in me—not just a lack of skill, because the skills would come—but in all of my blankness, an endless span of possibility.

But when your time finally comes to be in charge, when you get to call the shots and it’s your job to make a kitchen full of young up-and-comers execute plate after plate of flawless dishes, you draw from all of your training. You think of all those who bossed you, trained you, frightened you, impressed you, and you must decide: How will you act?

We were all hard on our commis because we were always afraid, and cruelty is one of fear's most common by-products. It would take me a very long time to unlearn those methods of surviving under pressure.

Buth this is the thing, my child, " Madame Amparo continued. "You are headed for the same night sky. When it's your turn to burn brightly, remember where you have been. Be careful not to harm all of those in your orbit.