After that, Mauro is responsible for the fueling of the troops before trips. Stocking up, doing the food shopping, I’ve always loved that, he tells me as he pushes a cart down the various aisles of the giant supermarket near Porte de Bagnolet, where I accompany him one morning: five thousand square feet, and he knows every inch of it. Unlike those—me included—who return every week to their local grocery store and scan the same rows of the same products, which they will buy in the same quantity, Mauro likes to move around, to explore, to amble. He is not numbed by the infinite variety of each type of food, by the packets of cereal in identical formats, by the multitude of butters—salted, unsalted, slightly salted, grass fed, cultured, clarified, clotted, organic, homemade, goat or sheep, packaged on butter dishes or in plastic tubs or simply wrapped up in greaseproof aluminum foil. On the contrary, he seems happy to have this multiplicity of choices. Soon, he slows down in front of the condiment aisle, picks up a jar of tomato sauce from the twenty or so on display, and holds it to the light, observing its color, reading the label—I watch him do this, waiting for him to speak—then he turns toward me and declares: Tonight, we’re going to innovate! He knows everything there is to know about cookies, oil, rice, and is even capable of telling me the best brand of pasta to buy, depending on whether you’re cooking a bolognese (Barilla) or an arrabbiata (Panzani). I ask him if he figured out the menus in advance before a week’s vacation in a rented apartment with his gang when he was fifteen, and he nods: Of course, you have to have a menu, otherwise you’re just messing around … And anyway, it’s what I like to do, composing.

3

Restaurants

TOURNEDOS ROSSINI

The first time he works in a restaurant, it is early summer 2004, at a brasserie named La Gourme, near Les Invalides. A summer job, which he got because his father knows the boss, paying a thousand euros a month. An opulent-looking place with a solid reputation: imitation leather benches in rose madder, tall mirrors on the walls, paunchy patrons with thin faces wearing charcoal suits and dark ties that are sometimes concealed by the large white napkins knotted around their necks like giant bibs. Not many women in the room—I’m the exception. Lurking in a corner behind a thriller, I am on the lookout for Mauro, waiting for him to burst through the double door from the kitchen, but he never appears; it is the boss himself who wanders around the restaurant, jovially greeting his customers, making jokes.