Secret Ingredients by David Remnick

eyes, searching for the right words—“
une petite merveille.
Now, you won’t believe it, but I gave a lot of thought to your lunch. I said to myself, ‘Maybe he should have a
sole aux nouilles
instead of the
truite au porto.
’ I decided against it. It might have been too much, and I don’t want my clients to eat too much. Only in bad restaurants is one urged to order a lot.
Enfin,
you are satisfied.”
    I said he could probably make a fortune if he opened a restaurant in Paris. He nodded glumly. “My friends have been telling me that for years. But why should I leave? I belong here. My men like to work for me. We have thirteen men here in the dining room, and eight cooks and two pâtissiers, under Paul Mercier, in the kitchen. Many of them have been with me for over ten years, and some have been here a lot longer than that. They don’t quit, as they do in Paris. Look at Vincent, here. He’s been with me for twenty years—or is it twenty-one, Vincent?”
    The headwaiter filled the glasses again and gave the champagne bottle a twirl as he replaced it in its bucket. “Twenty-one,
Chef,
” he said.
    “You can’t get rid of them,” said M. Point. “I could throw Vincent out the door and he would come right back in through the window. No,
mon cher ami.
Point stays at the Pyramide.” He lifted his glass. “Let us drink to the Pyramide!”
    “To the Pyramide!” I said.
             
    We drank a considerable number of toasts afterward—to France; to the United States; to Escoffier; to Dom Pérignon, who put the bubbles in champagne; and to the memorable day when M. Point prepared his first
truite au porto
—and it was with a feeling of light-headedness and supreme contentment that, late in the afternoon, I paid my bill (which came to no more than the price of a good meal in a good restaurant in New York), bid farewell to M. Point, and went out into the garden. It had rained again, but now the sun was shining. The earth had a strong smell of mushrooms and flowers. I headed back to my hotel. At the corner of the Cours Président Wilson, I ran smack into M. Lecutiez. He was talking to an unworldly-looking patriarch, who I presumed was the oldest of the three archeologists, but M. Lecutiez introduced him to me as
l’homme mûr,
the mature man. He said goodbye to his colleague and seized my arm with great enthusiasm. “I’ve been waiting for you!” he said, waving his pipe happily. “We’ve got lots of things to do. We still have time to climb at least three of Vienne’s seven hills.”
    I said that he must excuse me, because I was hardly able to make the Grand Hôtel du Nord, having just had lunch at M. Point’s.
    “M. Point has a very interesting place,” M. Lecutiez said.
    “Interesting?” I said. “They say it’s the best restaurant in this country. It’s the most remarkable—”
    “Oh, I don’t mean that,” M. Lecutiez broke in. “I don’t give a damn about the restaurant. I care only for antiquities, you know, and M. Point has plenty of them buried under his place. When they landscaped his garden ten years ago, they came across a couple of first-class Roman sculptures. I wish we could take over M. Point’s place and start digging in earnest. I’ll bet there are any number of marvelous relics under his wine cellar.”
    1949

    “I’d like to tell you about our specials this evening.”

A GOOD APPETITE

    A. J. LIEBLING
    T he Proust
madeleine
phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton’s apple or Watt’s steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. This is capable of expression by the formula TMB, for Taste > Memory > Book. Some time ago, when I began to read a book called
The Food of France,
by Waverley Root, I had an inverse experience: BMT, for Book > Memory > Taste. Happily, the tastes that
The Food of France
re-created for me—small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Côte Rôtie, and Tavel—were more robust than