Mauro does well at La Gourme. He likes his job and claims that he hasn’t experienced the tough side of life in a kitchen: the seventy-hour weeks, the authoritarianism, the relentless pace, the pressure. All the same, he’s no fool: as the son of a friend, he was almost certainly given special treatment. Yet, despite getting his foot on the ladder, he does not imagine turning this first experience into a future career. According to him, he might just as easily have worked in a movie theater or a bicycle shop or a bank. He says he simply took the opportunity to earn a bit of cash before going camping with his gang, and while he had a great time—skillfully placing the two thick slices of foie gras on the plate without breaking them, then sprinkling the pinch of pepper and the pinch of salt onto them in two cones of the same size, with a spoonful of fig preserve at the center of the plate—he is adamant that cooking, for him, remains a passion, not a job. So, while the majority of apprentices who have graduated from a technical school would have tried to secure full-time employment after completing their apprenticeship, Mauro whistles as he leaves La Gourme, unlocks his bike, and—in September—goes back to the round of economics lectures before, a few weeks later, moving on to the Catholic University in Lisbon, where he spends a year as part of the Erasmus program.

The second restaurant is a completely different experience. It happens two years later, in the summer of 2006.

The sabbatical year begun after the stay in Portugal is nearing its end, and Mauro is back from his foreign travels—Berlin, Italy, Venezuela. He moves into a studio apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement subleased to him by a friend who is away until September. He is in love with Mia, who has stayed in Lisbon, and spends a crazy amount of time online, searching for cut-rate airplane tickets. But the prices never drop low enough for him to afford a last-minute flight. He decides not to ask for any more money from his parents and to work all summer instead. He immediately starts looking for restaurant work: although he doesn’t say it out loud, he knows now, he senses, that he could take that path, that he could become a cook.