From that first summer on, the restaurant is filled at lunchtime with a clientele of local employees and craftspeople who always take time out from their day to eat a good meal, even if they have to do it quickly, while the evening shift attracts foodies eager to discover new “good little eateries,” the kind of people who travel all over Paris in search of a good meal, arriving in groups of four or five to taste organic wines and elegant tapas. Word of mouth spreads fast, and by September Mauro and Jacques have decided to expand the evening menu to offer something more than just tapas—because the clients, it turns out, want to eat. A good sign. So things are going pretty well.

Back from the market, Mauro cooks without a break to be ready for noon, when the first customers turn up, empty bellied. What happens during those compressed hours is at once an intense improvisation, a high-flying sensory experience, and a confrontation with matter—natural, animate, extremely reactive matter. When I ask him to explain how he does it, Mauro shrugs, twists his mouth, and strokes his chin: I focus on the ingredients: the idea is to reveal them, to highlight them. Sometimes, it’s when you combine them with other ingredients that they show their true flavor. These alliances, these contrasts, are his recipes: interpretations and reinventions of each vegetable that he brings back from the market. From time to time, he tastes the food the way a diver sounds the depths of the sea, trying to test the limits of what he’s preparing, the potential for expansion, for metamorphosis.

Nowadays, people talk about that pocket kitchen as if it were some sorcerer’s lair, where Mauro, this self-taught chef from nowhere, brewed his potions; that little box room is mythologized into the beating heart of a magic factory, producing wondrous meals that changed and evolved day after day. Mackerel with fresh raspberries, sea bass with peach, pumpkin risotto, beef braised in a carrot and basil sauce and served on a cabbage leaf, a sweet cake of potatoes with blood-orange sorbet, octopus salad with fresh fennel, rolls of sole and pancetta, monkfish tail with passion fruit, sea bream with spinach, pig’s trotter and salmon-roe salad with fresh white-celery sauce. Some of La Belle Saison’s recipes rapidly become signature dishes—notably the soft, melting gnocchi in butter and sage, or gnocchi with girolle mushrooms, or gnocchi with bacon and peas.

This inventive, delicate, unpretentious cuisine quickly wins admirers. Mauro’s work is a reminder that, contrary to what many believe, the most gifted and innovative chef is not necessarily the one who transforms the ingredients, but perhaps the one who most intensely restores their flavors.