Mind Over Menu

The waiters have been instructed to set these garnished plates in front of each diner in theatrical unison before filling them with a thick, cold eggplant soup. Michel wipes the rims with a clean white towel. The first waiter to pick up two soup plates puts his thumbs on top of the rims. Michel grabs the plates back and wipes the rims again.

"What's wrong with you?" the chef asks the sheepish waiter.

As the waiters march off, Michel says ruefully: "Maybe they are going to hate it. In my restaurant I have 15 chefs. Here we are two. At the restaurant I am, how you call it, a conductor. Here I'm a jack-of-all-trades. I'm a dishwasher. It can never be as good as the restaurant."

Michel frets that the plates they've been given for the next course are water-spotted. "Dirty plates," Michel mutters to himself. "Dirty plates. Dirty plates."

It is 8:30 p.m. The timing for the next course -- a chicken liver terrine Michel calls Chicken Faux Gras (a play on foie gras) is slightly delicate. The chicken liver pâté must be very cold to slice neatly. The accompanying brioche must be hot from the oven. David is mounding a small serving of apple slaw on each rectangular plate next to each pale slice of "faux gras." Michel comes behind him and pipes a single line of bright green apple jelly like an exclamation point. Each plate is supposed to be garnished with daikon sprouts. David tastes the sprouts and rejects them. "Too spicy," he says.

The waiters gather before them. Michel chuckles as he uses a large chef's knife to trim minute imperfections from the edge of the "faux gras." He wields his knife at the waiters and says, "Mr. Samurai." They laugh. Michel and David quickly add a hot slice of brioche to each plate while Michel urges the waiters to get them quickly to the dining room. "Go, go, go, go," Michel says. "Toute suite. And no fingers on my plates." Some, leery of picking up plates incorrectly, move too slowly. "The food is dying!" Michel cries. "The food is dying!"

"This is a vacation," Michel says wryly after the servers have fled the kitchen. He hasn't had a nonworking vacation in 10 years, he says. Sometimes, charity food events are held near beaches, and he brings his wife and kids along. "They play on the beach while Michel Richard is in the kitchen sweating like a pig," he says.

Suddenly, Michel looks gleeful again. The next course, John Dory, a mild fish from European waters, is going to be magnificent, he says. It will be served with a mushroom sauce finished with walnut oil. "You taste the forest," Michel says, and he suddenly begins marching around the worktable as if he's hiking rough terrain.

David, at the stove, really is in rough terrain. The saute pan he's been lent is much thinner than the cast-iron ones at Citronelle. The porcini mushrooms he plans to sprinkle over the fish are cooking far too quickly, and David shakes the pan furiously as he cries out to Michel in rapid French that this pan belongs in the garbage can.

It is 9:05 p.m. "We need five minutes before the fish is served," David says, his voice tense.

"You've got it," Mel Davis, a Citronelle maitre d', says.

Michel dips a spoon in the mushroom sauce to taste. David dips, too. "Ahhhh," Michel says, rocking back and forth. "It's the best mushroom sauce on Earth."