At 6:00 p.m., Mauro starts work again. He’s already running late—he’s always running late: I’ve spent four years racing against time, he tells me, preparing a clementine savarin cake in glass bowls with iced rims, in the middle of a heat wave.

The most difficult moment, curiously, is not the frenzy of the shift itself, but afterward, at night, when everything must be cleaned, put away, the tables set for the next day, that moment when the weight of the day lies heavily, when the stress has wrung you out and you are exhausted, too weak to talk or even look at someone. The commis chef and the dishwasher always finish before Mauro, who whizzes around until midnight at the earliest, when the last customers talk in whispers, order one last coffee as they put on their coats. It’s the hour when Jacques launches into a long discussion with a local couple who are hanging out at the bar, and it’s when Mauro, inscrutable, empties the trash, a signal that he will soon be going up to bed; this is Jacques’s cue to announce in a solemn voice: Ladies and gentlemen, we are closing—there’s school tomorrow, time to go home.

8

Aligre

JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES, CHUCK STEAK

It is eight in the morning, sometimes seven, when Mauro crosses the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Then he is in sight of the Aligre market, carrying his basket or pushing his cart. The day begins; the vendors with stalls in the covered market and those with stands outside hail one another as they unload their goods and the first customers appear—shuffling old ladies who come for a conversation and their daily meat, three ounces of calf’s liver or a chicken breast; busy mothers or fathers who quickly do the shopping on their way to work; and guys such as Mauro, who will serve about fifty meals in a day.

Mauro walks here every day now, come rain or shine, to buy meat, fish, and vegetables. It’s the biggest moment of the day, the instant when the restaurant’s menu is decided, depending on what the young man finds that is good and affordable—Changing the menu daily, that’s the fun part: you invent something new every day, you choose an “ingredient of the moment,” so there’s really no routine, for the customers or for me, Mauro says, chewing on a matchstick while pointing with his eyes at some beautiful creamy white asparagus spears.

As a poor chef with no overdraft protection, constrained by a tight budget and with loans to pay back, Mauro still has to think about keeping his costs down, about haggling over prices. He can’t go wild with his purchases. He has to exercise common sense.