I was very happy at Restaurant Jean-Georges, cooking and working with that excellent crew in that bright kitchen. As JG began to open more restaurants, I had the autonomy to be creative within the rubric of JG’s restaurant and style of cuisine. Patricia and I had decided to marry. Life was good.
But in the spring of 2001—I still remember where I was. It was in the middle of the afternoon and I was working in the downstairs kitchen. Someone from the offices came up to me and told me I had an emergency phone call from France. I was surprised to hear my brother Hervé’s voice. Our brother Marc had committed suicide. Marc had long suffered from depression and had worked through two previous bouts of it, but could not make it through the third. The office at Jean-Georges is glass-enclosed, and I broke down, weeping in front of the whole kitchen. It was tragedy for me, for our whole family, but especially for our dear mother, who had lost her husband far too early and now a child. One thing that means so much to me to this day is that Jean-Georges’s parents attended the funeral on his behalf.
