Outside, the sun beats down. Mauro is dazzled; he blinks, unlocks his bike, rides down Rue Caulaincourt without pedaling, freewheeling all the way to Place de Clichy. There, sitting at a table on the first terrace he comes to, he orders a ham baguette and a shandy and smiles, savoring the moment, free.

It’s the middle of summer and Paris is full of tourists. There’s plenty of work in restaurants, bars, and cafés, a quick turnover in the capital’s kitchens. One week later, Mauro is hired as a commis chef at a brasserie called Les Voltigeurs in Montreuil. It’s a permanent CDI contract—the first contract he has ever signed—at minimum wage. In the restaurant trade, all contracts are permanent—it’s always the cook who leaves, never the boss who fires him, ’cause they can never find enough workers! Mauro squints appraisingly at a bowl of strawberries that he’s just picked from the garden. And minimum wage? Well, in a job where you’re often working seventy or eighty hours a week, your paycheck at the end of the month doesn’t really look like you’re on minimum wage, you know?

The restaurant is large: sixty to seventy covers. Two lunch shifts and two dinner shifts, served by a team of four people—more sprints than the Olympics, says Mauro, handing me a bowl of pistachios. It’s not haute cuisine, but the ingredients are fresh, the setting pleasant, and Mauro gets along well with the tough Ariège-born owners—in the kitchen, two brothers of the same height and build, shaved heads, hunched shoulders, open smiles; serving the tables, their wives, two loudmouthed sisters, emotional and diligent, able-bodied, square jawed, with smokers’ voices.

At Les Voltigeurs, Mauro is confronted with heavy shifts and a breakneck pace. He learns to deal with the rush hours, when no sooner have you finished preparing a meal than it is carried off to its table and you are already working on the next one. He grows physically tough, excels, flying from one task to the next, multi-skilling.

The two women treat him like a son, each of them outdoing the other with acts of generosity, saving him nice slices of calf’s liver (full of protein) with raspberry sauce, a cup of meat juice to keep his strength up, and bowls of homemade, pastel-colored sorbets, but he doesn’t touch any of it—no time, sorry—or if he does, he wolfs it down while standing in a corner of the kitchen. The women also squabble over who gets to look after him if he burns himself or cuts himself, the two of them standing side by side in the courtyard, preparing patches to help him fix his flat bike tire. Mauro likes them a lot.