Ten months have passed since Mauro started at Le Villon. It’s the longest he’s held any job, and the partnership he forms with Pierre, the chef, is now well established. The two men understand each other intuitively—they’re on the same wavelength—and eventually the young man is so competent at dealing with orders to suppliers, paying bills, and hiring dishwashers that he is given extra responsibilities, such as creating cold starters for the summer menu or choosing new plates for the restaurant. When Pierre is away, Mauro takes over without any decrease in quality. This starts to happen more and more often beginning in the spring of 2007: Pierre has fallen in love with a winemaker from Corbières who came to the restaurant to sell her wine. Now, whenever he can, he rushes off to join her in the hills where she lives, often spending half the week there, leaving Mauro to run Le Villon. The workload becomes untenable in June, though, with Mauro’s exams approaching.

One Monday morning, Pierre pops in briefly to tell Mauro that he has decided to sell Le Villon and go live in Corbières. Mauro nods, stunned. It’s all over within a week. There’s no long goodbye.

The new owner is a handsome young man of thirty, cheerful and smart, who wants to create a restaurant that fits with the way the neighborhood is evolving: a stylish, pleasant place that will offer light meals in a cool minimalist decor—pale wood tables, inexpensive Eames-style chairs, and Japanese paper lamps, where people will eat soups, salads, bagels, quiches, pies, and the kinds of desserts that are popular with Brooklyn hipsters (carrot cakes, cheesecakes, cupcakes, doughnuts, brownies). Mauro listens to the new owner rave about this banal future, but Mauro is not convinced. He doesn’t want to work in one of those places where the menu never changes, where there’s no room for innovation; he doesn’t want to work in one of these new tearooms for cool urban twentysomethings. He decides to wait, sees a few friends, and in June he obtains his CAP and his master’s in economics. He knows that his profile is unusual, eye-catching.