Death of a Chef (Capucine Culinary Mystery) by Alexander Campion Page A

famous for his passion for vegetables. He took Alain Passard’s hyper-organic, neo-vegetarian school one step further. The blossoming of the philosophy of not putting anything on the table that doesn’t come from a horse-plowed field.”
    Capucine told herself that she was going to have to ask Alexandre to explain these horse-plowed fields chefs never seemed to stop talking about.
    “Actually, I think Chef was just neurotic. It wasn’t so much that he loved vegetables. It was that he was afraid of meat. Protein was an alien substance to him. But the result was phenomenal. His cuisine was truly ephemeral. He managed to create intense flavor without the burden of substance—foams, purées whipped as light as air, magical things no one had ever eaten before. His dishes were like a chiffon veil wafting behind a dancing ballerina.” He looked up at Capucine to see if she understood. “Me, I want to hold the ballerina in my arms and feel the warmth of her body.”
    “Does that mean you’re going to do more meat?”
    “Naturally. Spring lamb, sweetbreads, poulet fermier raised on the farm of a friend of mine in Brittany. But it will be done with a delicacy that Chef would have appreciated. Absolutely nothing heavy. No beef and, above all, no game.”
    “Chef Brault enjoyed hunting, didn’t he?”
    “I don’t know if he enjoyed it, but he certainly went pheasant shooting every now and then during the season. It was odd. He never brought back any birds. He said he didn’t want the reek of them even in the trunk of his car. If you ask me, it was another one of his neuroses. Did you know his father is a baron? I think he only went shooting because he thought it was a baronial sort of thing to do. It was his duty. A way of keeping a link to his family traditions.”
    “Did he have any enemies that you knew of?”
    “Enemies? Chef didn’t know enough people to have enemies. Other than the staff at the restaurant, he only talked to his producers, and he had a love relationship with every last one of them. And, of course, his financial backer, who was the closest thing he had to a best friend.”
    “No girlfriends other than Mademoiselle Duclos?”
    “Not that I knew of, and Delphine tells me he wouldn’t even turn his head to look at a pretty girl on the street. She kept hoping he’d have a little fling on the side and cut her some slack.” Ouvrard laughed.
    “Tell me about the financial backer, Monsieur Brissac-Vanté.”
    “A bigmouthed playboy. The front-of-the-house staff didn’t like him all that much, because he’d come in and act like he owned the place. But I didn’t mind him, because he was good for Chef.”
    “Did he come here often?”
    “About once a month, sometimes more. Always a six-or eight-top, and he’d only call the day before. That would create real problems for the maître d’, as you can imagine. Then he’d talk big at his table, order very expensive grand crue wines—all of which we’d comp, of course—and expect Chef to come out so he could make a big production and tell his guests he was the éminence grise of modern haute cuisine and Chef was his favorite protégé.”
    “Did this irritate Chef Brault?”
    “Au contraire. He adored Brissac-Vanté. They’d spend hours on the phone. Brissac-Vanté was the only one who could get Chef out of the dumps. And thank God he could, because Chef could get very depressed when he set his mind to it.”
    “But Brissac-Vanté refused to invest more money in the hotel.”
    “Damn straight he did. That hotel was a complete waste of time. Brault probably picked up the idea from the Troisgros when he was an intern down there. It was right out of the Michelin Guide of the nineteen thirties. One-star restaurants were ‘very good,’ two-stars were ‘worth a detour,’ and three-stars ‘merited a trip.’ So naturally, the idea was that if you were taking a trip to a restaurant, you had to spend the night in the restaurant’s hotel.” He