Mind Over Menu

Michel and David deftly plate, sauce and garnish the fish. Servers come to take the dishes away on Michel's signal. "Again, fingers out of my plates," Michel says. "If I see a finger on my plates, I cut off the finger!"

Amangani's executive chef comes in to tell Michel that one of the diners doesn't like fish and needs a substitute course. "Then they should go eat in the dining room," Michel says.

Mark, the sommelier, sends Michel a glass of one of the red wines he'll be pouring with the next course: Duck 2 Ways "Tutti Frutti." Michel tastes the wine, 1995 Premier Cru Beaune Clos Des Ursules, which is elegant, with hints of blackberry, wet earth and bitter chocolate. It gives him an idea. He adds chocolate to the sauce, a red-wine reduction, for the duck. He tastes the sauce, then dumps his unfinished glass of wine into the pot and tastes again. He smiles.

When the dessert, espresso vacherin shaped to look like mushrooms and filled with chocolate ice cream, is served, Michel goes out to the dining room, where he is greeted by warm applause.

"Tell me you liked the food," Michel says, vamping for reviews. "It was better than the wine."

"It was equal to the wine," one man calls out.

The crowd laughs and claps. They seem satisfied and jolly.

Michel isn't. Exhausted, he slips away from the happy gathering to sit alone on an outside terrace. He orders a bottle of grappa.

"This is my religion," he says. "I'm a priest of food. I just love to cook. I love to please in the kitchen. My competition is ignorance." The chef reaches for the grappa bottle. "If people come, they eat, they say this is not good, then I want to kill myself."

The next evening, Michel is back at work at the nearby Bar BC Ranch, handing out perfect one-inch squares of opera cake in a large white tent lighted by $40,000 worth of chandeliers made out of moose antlers. Around the tent, several of the top chefs in the United States, such as Daniel Boulud of Restaurant Daniel in New York and Hubert Keller of Fleur de Lys in San Francisco, are serving samples of their rarefied cuisine to wealthy wine-buyers. All evening, chefs from around the country greet Michel with warm embraces and slaps on the back. Young chefs thank him for being a kind and inspirational mentor. One rising star from Chicago says Michel has been like a father to him. A chef from Boston says he keeps a photo of Michel and his other culinary hero, the late Jean-Louis Palladin of Washington, on his desk. He looks at the photos whenever he's creating new menus and asks himself, "What would they think?"

"He goes at cooking with a child's perspective," Paul Kahan, of the acclaimed Chicago restaurant Blackbird, says. "He has this incredible way of redefining things and going at things with total creativity."

As the evening winds down, Michel wanders alone to an empty table in the middle of the enormous tent. He sips a glass of wine. He looks pained. "My back hurts," he says. He looks at the wine. He has diabetes and shouldn't be drinking it, he says. He looks around the tent like a man at a crossroads, trying to calculate where to go next. "I feel like I moved to this country yesterday," he says. "It went fast."