Menu Twenty-Three

I picked up and moved to Paris on a whim. I was there on holiday in the spring of 2001 and found myself at dinner with some ex-pats at my friend Peggy’s place on the rue Madame. One of them was about to give up his apartment; did I want to come by to look at it? I’d heard about the place, in a seventeenth-century building in the Latin Quarter. The next day, I stopped by and, within minutes, I decided to take it.

I couldn’t move immediately—I had to return to San Francisco and give notice at Chez Panisse. I was the chef in the downstairs restaurant and I’d been there on and off for almost twenty-five years. Alice knew I had been wondering what to do next. She was stoic but gracious when I told her I would be leaving in six months.