Rave reviews appear here and there on blogs written by food enthusiasts with powers of tantalizing description, people whose obsessive attention to detail suggests they live only for mealtimes: all of them salute the singularity of their experience at La Belle Saison. They are surprised, above all, by the chef’s youth—twenty-four: a kid!—but also by his mastery, his sensitivity; what most impresses them is his temperament: savage, secretive, reluctant to enter the dining room, shake hands, collect compliments; a temperament that runs counter to the trend in gastronomy—cooking as a televised spectacle, a suspenseful contest, with the chefs transformed into personalities, media icons, faces that sell. Restaurant critics with hard-to-please reputations describe La Belle Saison as the most exciting discovery in years, and Mauro as a chef of great promise; hip bloggers, supposedly food crazy, publish photographs of their plates; the fooding community acknowledges him as one of their own—part of the new generation, the avant-garde.

In his first year, Mauro does virtually all the cooking himself. It’s hard—physically difficult—for one guy on his own. He gets by with a little help from his family—his mother and his sisters lending a hand during peak time—and on little sleep, when the work he puts in would normally require long, restorative nights of slumber. A dishwasher joins the team, and he does a bit of peeling, but the kitchen is too cramped to allow any further recruitment. When it is expanded in 2009—a sign that something is really happening—Mauro hires a commis chef to assist him in the kitchen; he, too, has a minimum-wage CDI contract, but it really is minimum wage: no overtime—Mauro makes sure of that.

He decides to start earlier in the mornings, to prepare for the influx of customers who always turn up between 1:30 and 2:00 p.m.—twenty-five meals served in a frenzy. I ask him if the solitude bothers him, if he might find it easier to deal with the peculiar responsibility of delighting all these strangers were it shared with someone else, and he shakes his head, arguing that he is naturally independent: I’m fine like this, I can chill out, I don’t have anyone yelling at me.

Above all, the day is long, very long. By the time the kitchen has been cleaned, it is 3:00 p.m. and at last Mauro can sit down. Take a break. He eats lunch as calm descends in the passageway, as if the air were suddenly thickening, swelling with silence. The restaurant empties; the commis chef and the dishwasher have now gone. Mauro relaxes, sometimes he falls asleep. Often, he goes back to the market to say hello to a few people, to have a drink with the other artisans, who are similarly haunted by these afternoon hours, these little lulls in their manic days, and then suddenly the afternoon is over: it’s time to get back to the kitchen.