Mind Over Menu
Michel Richard wanted to be a great chef so badly he could taste it

By April Witt
Sunday, August 20, 2006

"This is Michel Richard, the best chef in the world -- in the whole world," the sommelier says with practiced fanfare.

All eyes turn to a round, balding, bearded Frenchman who looks like Santa Claus wearing a slightly rumpled white chef's jacket. "He's not biased," the chef says of the sommelier, who works for him at his internationally acclaimed Georgetown restaurant, Michel Richard Citronelle.

Tonight the chef and a few key helpers from Citronelle are at a sleekly rustic mountainside resort in Jackson Hole, Wyo. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows at the Amangani resort is a natural vista so breathtakingly vast that guests sometimes enjoy a balmy sundown on the terrace while watching distant electrical storms float by like circus balloons.

Inside, four young members of the resort's waitstaff look nervous. The curtain is about to rise on a manmade spectacle. "Come closer," Michel coos encouragingly to a shy waiter. "Be part of us."

Soon, two dozen well-heeled food and wine lovers will negotiate the perilous switchbacks of a mountain road to attend a special dinner featuring seven courses of Michel's celebrated food paired with fine wine in the weekend-long Jackson Hole Wine Auction, an exclusive event in a nation obsessed with good living through fine dining.

The diners coming here tonight have paid $5,000 a couple for the weekend. "It's like nothing to these people," the sommelier, Mark Slater, tells the servers. "They know their food, and they know their wine. We are going to have a fun time tonight. We're friendly people."

"I am," Michel cracks to his sommelier. "Sometimes, you are not." Michel turns serious only when describing in minute detail each of the dishes the staff is about to serve. "You have the flavor of the country," the chef says dreamily about a morel and porcini sauce that will accompany a fish course. "When you taste the sauce, you really feel as if you are on top of the mountain." But mountains don't materialize by themselves. It's time to cook them up. Michel wanders off to the resort's kitchen to continue last-minute preparations.

Some celebrity chefs have spent more time becoming household names than actually cooking. They have signed lucrative contracts, lending their names to several restaurants they visit only now and then. They have hawked everything from frying pans to spice mixes. Michel has devoted much of the last decade to creating obsessively perfect food at one restaurant: Citronelle in Georgetown.

He has spent 44 years standing on his feet long hours in hot kitchens to cook his way into the top ranks of cuisine. Among the world's chefs, he is one of the most respected and most emulated. He is known both as a rare culinary wit -- his trompe l'oeil dishes can make diners laugh -- and a superior technician who understands food so well that he manipulates ingredients in unconventional ways to realize his artistic vision. His accomplishments have won him numerous awards and accolades. Along with Washington's other elite chefs, such as Roberto Donna of Galileo and Patrick O'Connell of the Inn at Little Washington, he has been recognized by the prestigious James Beard Foundation. He has been nominated for the foundation's coveted best or outstanding chef awards five times, including this year. In 1992, the foundation named him the best chef in California. Michel was selected for the first season of "Chef's Story," an upcoming television series of interviews with America's top chefs. Robert Parker, the nation's premier wine authority, calls Michel "a great chef, who is cooking at a level that far exceeds any Michelin three-star chef in France."

But even though his artistic reputation is secure, his place in the restaurant business is uncertain. The hotel that has housed Michel's 84-seat restaurant on M Street NW since 1994 has been sold to new owners. Michel must negotiate a contract or find Citronelle a new home. It's a nagging concern that isn't helping his passionately perfectionistic artistic temperament.

"Try to keep the tables very clean," Mark says to the servers as soon as his boss is out of earshot. "Keep an eye around the bread plates for crumbs. Michel is a crumb maniac. He's a very friendly guy. But if something goes wrong, he has a very short fuse. If something goes wrong, I do not want you to get yelled at."

By 7:30 p.m., the dinner guests are milling outside the resort's improvised dining room, sipping Taittinger champagne. Michel and his executive chef, David Deshaies, are side by side in the back of the kitchen, preparing small plates of finger food. Slivers of salmon smoked at Citronelle go atop brioche and are arranged on a textured green serving piece that looks like grass. "Cigars" made of spring roll wrappers rolled around a duxelle of mushrooms back at Citronelle, then deep-fried here, are plated with a ginger sauce.

Michel squeezes droplets of a bright green basil oil into the bowls of 24 silver spoons. He and David top the oil with what appear to be neat quarters of hard-boiled eggs. But they trick the eye. The "whites" of the eggs are really mozzarella; the "yolks," yellow tomatoes. The chefs drop tiny bits of puffed rice into the bowl of each spoon to add crunch. Crunchy textures delight him. Michel -- who has stuck his reading glasses atop his head and forgotten them there -- gleefully makes crunching sound effects while he works.

These virtual eggs are one of Michel's signature dishes. He's been making them so long that he doesn't remember how he came up with the idea, only why: Mozzarella's essential blandness bored him. He felt compelled to make it fascinating, to transform the cheese as thoroughly as he himself had been transformed, from impoverished child laborer in France to world famous chef in Washington. Besides, he says, "It's fun to make people wonder. I love the magic of surprise."

The regular kitchen staff at Amangani is getting caught up in the magic. Several local cooks, who are supposed to be making dinner for the resort's regular dining room, gather wide-eyed as Michel and David prepare the amuse-bouche, a surprise first course that doesn't appear on the elaborate menu but will be brought to diners as soon as they sit down. David spreads starched white napkins across the worktable to keep their serving plates perfectly clean. On each of 24 small plates Michel and David place an eggshell that has been neatly cut in half lengthwise using a rotary tool called a Dremel. Tiny slivers of macaroni have been glued to the top half of each eggshell, turning it into a lidded vessel with a handle. Each egg vessel will hold a dollop of lamb tartare, a dish Michel has never made before. He adds a dash of hot pepper sauce to a large bowl of tartare, stirs and tastes. He adds a pinch of cracked black pepper. He tastes. He adds lemon juice, and tastes again. He nods. David dips in a spoon. He nods. The two chefs begin spooning tartare into eggshells, taking care that all 24 plates look precisely the same.

Out in the resort's library, Michel's dinner guests are sitting down at three large tables of eight. He leaves the kitchen to welcome them. The chef is making his way down a dark corridor when three carefully coiffed women from Los Angeles recognize him. "Oh, my gosh, that's Michel Richard," one squeals.

"I've had dinner many times at your restaurant," another tells him.

"We're big fans of yours," the third woman says.

"His food always looks so beautiful," the first woman adds.

His dinner guests are waiting, but Michel obliges these fans with a brief, broad performance. "So many gorgeous women," he says theatrically. "Are you here with your husbands, or are you alone? You are alone! What a gift from God!"

The chef leaves the women giggling in his wake.

He sighs. He walks as if his feet hurt. He is 58 years old. He needs to lose 50 pounds. The fact that his audience has paid a huge sum for the privilege of adoring him gives him little comfort. As far as he is concerned, he is only as good as the next meal he makes.

"Here we go," he murmurs as zero hour approaches, sounding like a child reassuring himself before plunging off a very high diving board.

WITH ONLY MINUTES LEFT, Michel and David work closely, without needing to speak. The only sounds in their corner of the kitchen are the blowing of a convection oven and the rhythmic whooshing of powerful dishwashing sprays. Rimmed soup plates are lined up in neat rows on their worktable. In the center of each plate, the men artfully mound cubes of vegetable compounds: two blackish ones made with eggplant, two orange made with carrots. Amid the cubes they stand a single translucent chip made with deep-red beets.

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."

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."

MICHEL WAS BORN IN BRITTANY IN 1948, the son of a laborer who moved the family to the Ardennes region to find work in the postwar reconstruction. He describes a childhood that was Dickensian in its bleakness.

Michel recalls a day when he was 5. His father, drunk on cheap wine, was beating his mother. "The screams," Michel says, closing his eyes as if he is hearing them across the distance of the years. "The screams."

"I kept wondering, why did he drink too much wine?" Michel says. "I think maybe wine was cheaper than milk. It was cheaper than oranges. I don't know. I tried to find a reason why my daddy was drinking too much wine."

The following year, Michel's father abandoned the family. His mother worked in a factory making artificial silk. Unable to afford the rent on their meager home, she moved with five children to a house with no running water. The rustic kitchen soon became Michel's domain. He was content to labor there where it was quiet and calm: no fights, no screams, no wine.

"I was the chef," he recalls. "At 8 or 9 years old, I used to kill the rabbits. I would grab the rabbit, take a rolling pin -- bang, hit it on the head." His childhood memories spill forth like recipes. "You attach the rabbit's two back legs to the wall with a nail," he recalls. "You remove the eyes and collect the blood to use in the boudin, the sausage. You mix it with a bit of vinegar. You open the rabbit's belly. You remove everything. You remove the fur. I used to sell the fur to make some money on the side.

"My mom was so busy," he says. "My poor mom. She used to adore us. She never gave me a kiss, I guess because she was too busy. No time."

When Michel was 9 or 10, a schoolmate whose father owned a restaurant invited him to spend Easter vacation with their family. "When we opened the back door of the restaurant and I entered the kitchen, it was for me paradise. I helped the pastry chef to make a little tart. I looked into the dining room and saw these elegant people having a good time. I fell in love with it all.

"After that, when the teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, a chef. Everyone was laughing. There was nothing glamorous about becoming a chef. Chefs had the reputation of drinking too much wine and being dirty."

Michel had a gift for finding beauty when others might have noticed only squalor. In between tending the family vegetable garden, raising rabbits and chickens, feeding his siblings and going to school, he visited a local artist who gave him a small book on Impressionist painters. "I fell in love with that," Michel says. "I was reading about Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir and Monet and Manet. I was fascinated by artists who have magic coming out on their easel. It was gorgeous."

One day, when Michel was nearly 12, he heard a woman in their village screaming his mother's name. His mom had a call on the one phone in the village. An old boyfriend had heard she was alone and was looking for her. Michel's mother soon married the man. There wasn't room for Michel and his brother, who were sent to a foster home in the countryside. They lived there for two years, he says. "It was very nice," Michel recalls. They had showers there and plenty to eat. "It was like camp."

In 1962, when Michel was 14, he got a job as the lowest laborer at a bronze factory, a fiery hell that left his face perpetually black with soot, his hands cracked from hard labor and his artistic soul hopeless. Six months later, his mother saved him by signing a contract for Michel to serve a three-year apprenticeship to a pastry chef in a town more than 100 miles away. He began work at 4 a.m. He worked 16 hours a day, six days a week. On his one official day off, Monday, he was expected to pick apples and pears, then come to the pastry shop late at night to start the dough for the next morning's brioche. "We were slaves."

The pastry chef he both worked for and lived with was brutal. If Michel made a mistake, " Bang -- he hit you," Michel recalls. " Bang, bang, bang ." He says he was routinely slapped and punched. Michel remembers dreading the man's heavy footsteps down the narrow stairway to the shop's basement kitchen each morning. He dreaded even more returning nights to the chef's apartment, where even using the bathroom could unleash a torrent of irrational abuse. He could never leave the bathroom clean enough to satisfy his tormenter. "Taking a shower was like going to Hell," Michel says.

One night, left alone to scrub the shop, Michel sat on his bucket and wept. It was midnight. He put his one spare shirt in a small suitcase and walked toward the train station. Then it occurred to him: "I have no place to go. My mother will not accept me." He sat on a bench. He tried to think of any- place where someone would take him in. He went back to the pastry shop. "The worst thing is not to be able to go to somebody and cry in somebody's arms," he says.

Michel didn't blame his mother for his situation. He never even complained to her, he says. She had problems of her own. "She never stopped working, working, working . . . My mom was special."

Michel's apprenticeship ended when he turned 17 and passed formal exams to become a pastry chef. He got a job at a pastry shop in Ardennes earning $50 a month. Every year thereafter, for as long as his brutal former master lived, Michel telephoned the man at Christmas to thank him for teaching him his profession. If not for that pastry chef, Michel says, he might have spent life as a laborer in a bronze factory. "When he was slapping my face, maybe he was shoving a great tradition into my life," Michel says with a shrug. "He gave me my direction."

At age 18, he married his first girlfriend and soon had a son. He joined the French army, where he was a cook. He left the army at age 20 and got a job in a pastry shop in Paris. He chafed at the ordinariness of some of the pastries he had to make. "I'd ask, why do you call that a cake creme au beurre when there's no buttercream inside, just margarine?" he recalls. "They'd say, shut up, you little idiot."

One night at a gathering of friends, another pastry chef had brought along a box from the patisserie where he worked. The elegant lettering on the box said: Lenotre. When the man opened the box, it changed Michel's life. "Inside was the most beautiful cake I'd ever seen," he says. "A little cake perfectly designed with a sugar ribbon. I was, like, my God! I was amazed that a cake could be so pretty."

Michel's new friend told him that Gaston Lenotre -- the most acclaimed pastry chef in France -- had an opening. Michel telephoned to arrange an interview. He arrived at the appointed hour but was too intimidated by the dazzling window display to enter. There were beautiful birds made entirely of blown sugar and chocolate cakes that looked like flowers.

"I spent an hour just looking" Michel says. "I thought, I cannot do that. I don't know how to do that. I'm just a dummy."

Ashamed, he left. Standing on the subway platform waiting for a train, Michel heard two women, who were carrying heavy bags of goodies from Lenotre, rave that Gaston Lenotre was the greatest pastry chef in the world. Michel returned to the shop. He was led, entranced, through a spotless, well-equipped kitchen and introduced to the great man. "It was almost like Santa Claus's workshop, with all the little baby chefs working everywhere," he remembers.

He got the job and began the next morning. He felt driven to excel. At night he went home to his apartment and practiced trying to blow birds out of molten sugar, an arcane craft akin to glass blowing. "One night I blew my first perfect bird," he recalls. He was so awed by his accomplishment that he sat up all night just staring at the pretty little bird.

Before long, all the most intricate and magical creations in Lenotre's shop windows "were coming out from my hand," Michel recalls.

"Mr. Lenotre made me," Michel says. "Who I am now is because of him. He gave me the ingredients to succeed. When I made a cake I had the best ingredients, the best chocolate, the best butter. You feel it when you are making that kind of cake. You want to deliver that yourself to the customer. You want to say: 'This is a gift from me. Take it. This is everything I have.'"

IN 1974, LENOTRE ASKED MICHEL TO GO TO NEW YORK CITY to open Lenotre's first pastry shop in America. Michel was 26. He'd had one two-hour lesson in English.

Michel left a French culinary scene that was being transformed radically in the 1970s by nouvelle cuisine, which freed chefs to become artistic innovators rather than interpreters of strictly codified culinary traditions. Lenotre, who had revolutionized French pastry in the 1960s, making it lighter and more modern helped inspire the movement. While nouvelle cuisine had spread rapidly throughout Europe, it hadn't yet made much impact on American food. Chefs at very good French restaurants in the city were more or less interchangeable, according to Daniel Boulud, the acclaimed French culinary transplant who arrived a few years after Michel. They were not celebrities. Their names were not even listed on most restaurant menus. The Food Network did not exist. New Yorkers were not inclined to spend $20 on a very small cake, no matter who made it or how beautiful it looked. "When he came to New York, I think his background was almost too powerful and sophisticated for New Yorkers," Boulud says of Michel.

Lenotre's U.S. pastry shop quickly failed financially and closed. When a pastry shop owner from Santa Fe, N.M., telephoned the New York shop in search of a new chef, Michel took the job. "I used to feel so small in France," he recalls. "I felt like a big deal in America. I felt like anything was possible." On the three-day drive to Santa Fe, he spotted a Kentucky Fried Chicken and stopped to eat. "For me it was a revelation," he says. "It was s-o-o-o delicious: moist and crunchy. In France, we don't have a lot of crunchy food. I discovered texture in this country."

He also discovered how to succeed. Customers began lining the sidewalk out-side the Santa Fe pastry shop. Michel was happy to work hard, but he wanted to work for himself. After several months, Michel told the owner he was quitting to start his own business. Instead, the owner sold him the shop for a down payment of $3,000. Over the next year, Michel saved $120,000. He used the money to open a second pastry shop, in Los Angeles. There, once again, customers lined up for his pastries, along with simple savory dishes such as omelets, sandwiches, salads and pâtés.

Michel had always longed to be more than a pastry chef. He taught himself to be a savory chef by cooking for friends, family and customers of his pastry shop. As the excitement of nouvelle cuisine finally reached the United States, the French chefs who were its leading proponents, men such as Paul Bocuse and Roger Verge, appeared frequently at food events in Los Angeles. When they learned there was a Lenotre-trained pastry chef in town, they asked Michel to make dessert. In turn, these great chefs invited Michel to visit them at their legendary restaurants in France. He did, and he became determined to join their ranks as one of the great chefs of the age. His pastry shop became his laboratory. Not having a strict French master to teach him savory cooking proved an asset in one respect: He did things his own way. His approach was architectural -- building dishes with varied flavors and textures as layered as the tiers on a cake.

Ariane Daguin, the owner of D'Artagnan, a purveyor of gourmet products like game birds and fois gras, met Michel through their mutual close friend, Jean-Louis Palladin of Jean-Louis at the Watergate. "Jean-Louis told me you have to go see that crazy pastry chef over there," she recalls. "He was doing very avant-garde things in his little pastry shop . . . Michel was combining hot and cold in a way nobody else was doing back then. He was looking at the other guys and saying, 'Hey, I'm a chef, too.' You could tell he wanted to dazzle them."

He did. In 1987 in Los Angeles, he opened his first restaurant, Citrus, to acclaim. "The restaurant is as hot as a firecracker, with people pushing eagerly through the door and tapping their toes while they wait for the ever-turning tables," Ruth Reichl, then restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, wrote at the time. "Citrus has captured the mood of Los Angeles right now, and it has thereby captured the city's imagination." Soon chefs elsewhere were copying Michel's blending of French and Californian cuisine, as well as his inventive style. Michel wrapped shrimp in the kind of shredded phyllo associated with Greek desserts, then deep-fried it. So many chefs around the country were soon offering the same dish that Michel stopped making it. Citrus had an open kitchen where diners could watch the chefs at work as if on a theatrical stage, Michel says. Soon, open restaurant kitchens were ubiquitous. Michel was also one of the first chefs to capitalize on his growing reputation by putting his name on several restaurants. By 1993 he had nine restaurants, from a Citrus in Tokyo to Citronelle in Washington.

Michel was in his late forties. He was miserable. It turned out he had built a success that he couldn't sustain and still be happy. He wanted to be a chef, not an entrepreneur. He began to close restaurants. "I needed that kitchen," he says. "It's my piano . . . When I cook I am entranced."

He looked for a city where he could spend the rest of his career making food that satisfied his creative desires. Los Angeles was too trendy, he decided: "People ask you what celebrities eat there, not what kind of food are you making." In 1997, he decided to make Washington his culinary home. Every year, business has been better than the year before. The restaurant sells $7.4 million worth of food and wine annually, he says. Michel earns a healthy six figures annually.

His six children range from age 13 to 39, the oldest of whom is a local chef. Michel is so obsessed with his food, his wife says, that he has no interest in the routine tasks of life, from mowing the lawn to attending one of their children's school plays or sporting events.

"When he thinks about cooking, he'll be going 40 miles per hour on the Beltway, and he doesn't even realize it," says Laurence Richard, 45, his third wife and the mother of four of his children. "His head is in the clouds. He's thinking about the dish he was working on last night and how he could make it better.

"He's always striving to be the best at what he's doing, to be number one. I think that comes from his childhood, always being the kid with the holes in the knees of his pants."

MICHEL POURS STRONG COFFEE INTO A SAUCEPOT AND LAUGHS. He is amusing himself. "I never used coffee for a sauce before," he says. "I just liked the idea of it."

Michel, back in Citronelle's immaculate kitchen after Jackson Hole, is preparing for a photo shoot. Nespresso, a maker of high-end espresso machines, produces a glossy food magazine for its affluent customers. Michel is slated to be featured in an upcoming issue. The magazine editors have asked him to create a menu of recipes to publish with the profile.

Michel has been toying for days with the idea of a haute cuisine version of pork belly with red-eye gravy. "I've never tasted red-eye gravy," he says. "Is it sweet? Is it thick? I don't know what it is. I just love the idea of it. Maybe I'm going to create the worst red-eye gravy in the world. Maybe you are going to throw up if you try it."

He doesn't look worried. He looks delighted, until he dips a spoon into the sauce and tastes. He rolls his eyes, then adds fresh vanilla and a slug of rum to the sauce. "It's strange," he says. "Ah, well. It's fun to try."

It is midmorning on a weekday, and Robert Wiedmaier, the chef of Marcel's restaurant in Washington and a friend of Michel's, stops by. "Add sugar and vinegar," Wiedmaier advises after tasting the sauce and grimacing.

Michel obliges, carmelizing the sugar first to add a deep bass note of sweet. "Thanks, man," Michel says after they taste the sauce again. "You saved my life."

Mornings are Michel's favorite times in his kitchen, a large, open space he designed to be maximally efficient as well as sleekly beautiful. By 8 a.m. a dozen women, whom the chefs call "the mamas," line a long, narrow back room doing prep work: precisely dicing vegetables, removing peas from pods, cleaning roasted peppers, brushing dirt from mushrooms, ripping the tails from lobsters.

The large main kitchen remains nearly empty all morning, leaving Michel and his two key helpers space and quiet to experiment. Cedric Maupillier, Citronelle's executive sous-chef and the next in command after David, is trying to create a terrine of octopus in a gelatin made from cucumber water. "Failure is not a problem," he says. "It's not trying that's the problem. That's what Michel tells us every day. So I'm trying."

Once while strolling through an art gallery, Michel was exhilarated by the bold colorful blotches of a Jackson Pollock painting and thought: sashimi mosaic. He went back to Citronelle and created an appetizer of several bright slivers of raw eel, tuna, beef and peppers. Like many of the dishes at Citronelle, the sashimi mosaic relies on a technique Michel pioneered, and other chefs copy. To create perfectly consistent rounds, Michel has his chefs roll a particular ingredient such as tuna into large sausage-like forms wrapped in plastic. The rolls, all of which are created with the same diameter, are then frozen until they are firm enough to be sent through a meat slicer. Eel, beef, tuna and pepper suddenly conform easily to Michel's precise standards of beauty.

"It looks like a garden," David says admiringly of the sashimi mosaic, a regular on Citronelle's menu.

"When you eat it, you can hear the birds sing," Cedric says.

For Michel, any encounter is an opportunity for inspiration. The next morning, when the Nespresso photographer, a native of Austria, arrives, Michel queries him about Wiener schnitzel. "How do you make it?" he wants to know. "How do you eat it?"

Michel is happy to mug for the photographer, wearing a chef's jacket and chomping on a cigar. "Don't I look like a grand chef?" Michel says. "It's always been my dream to look like a grand chef. I smell like a chef. I'm big like a chef. My shirt is dirty like a chef. Who cares?"

But he can't stop thinking about Wiener schnitzel. "I'm thinking of making a schnitzel of squab," he says after the photographer leaves. A few hours later over in a corner of the kitchen where the fresh fish is stored in refrigerated drawers, Cedric eyes the skate. "Michel wants to do a schnitzel of skate wing," he says.

Michel's drive to create new dishes and discover new techniques sometimes puts him at odds with the commercial realities of running a restaurant. Michel removes even popular dishes from his menu if they begin to bore him, Carl Halvorson, Citronelle's food and beverage director, says. "We say, please repeat the osso bucco dish -- everyone loves it," Carl says. "He's like: 'No. I'm on a journey here. It's evolving.'"

After 44 years as a chef, Michel is struggling to feed his artistic ambitions while broadening his commercial appeal. His second cookbook, Happy in the Kitchen , is to be published in October. "I hope it does well," Michel says, and crosses himself theatrically. His first cookbook, published in 1993, sold about 20,000 copies, which he found disappointing.

This fall, he's slated to open a second restaurant in Washington, Central, an American bistro. "It's the democratization of Citronelle," Carl says. It's also the model for what Michel hopes will be a small network of restaurants around the region. By keeping any new restaurants geographically close to Citronelle, it will be easier for Michel to oversee than was his previous far-flung empire. Still, the new ventures bring problems along with promise. Training and retaining top chefs for one restaurant is already a challenge. In recent months, six chefs have left Citronelle. High standards make the restaurant an exciting but tough place to work. But there is one potential loss that would be particularly painful.

If Michel is the architect of his cuisine, he says, then David is the builder. David, another passionate perfectionist with a gifted palate, is destined to be one of the great chefs of his generation, Michel says. "I look at him, and I see a petit me," Michel says. Someday David wants his own restaurant. For now, he's content to help Michel build the food he dreams of. "What if I fail?" David, 28, says. "What if I end up at a little restaurant cooking pasta? I have not proved anything yet. Maybe when I'm 30 or 35 I will have my own restaurant, and you will see my face on the magazines. Right now, I am nothing."

Right now, he needs to focus on dinner. It is 3 p.m. on a Friday, the week after they returned from Jackson Hole. Michel and David are sitting at a long pine chef's table in Citronelle's kitchen. Diners can reserve the table for special 10-course tasting menus that cost $275 a person. Tonight, the former Washington Post restaurant critic Phyllis Richman will be dining at the chef's table along with a small party of food enthusiasts. The group's hostess won the dinner with Richman at a charity auction.

Michel wants to dazzle Richman with dishes she's never tasted -- he respects her knowledge of food, and even though she no longer regularly writes restaurant reviews, he craves her approval. But he still doesn't know what he wants to serve her.

At 5 p.m. David has marching orders: a list of 10 courses written on a yellow legal pad. "It could change," David says.

Michel is still toying with a few ideas. Mark Slater, the sommelier, comes by to look at the courses so he can match wines. "Let me know when it changes," he tells David, as if he is quite certain it will.

Tonight, for the first time, Michel wants to try making rockfish encrusted with ratatouille, the classic dish of eggplant, tomatoes, onion, peppers, zucchini, garlic and herbs simmered in olive oil. David spoons a portion of the ratatouille on a square of plastic wrap, twists the plastic to make a tight bundle and turns it over to show Michel how the red, yellow and green vegetable melange might look flattened against the fish. Suddenly, the vegetables become a bright mosaic.

"Perfect," Michel says.

He also decides to try breading large sea scallops with a fine julienne of potato, then deep-frying them in clarified butter. Michel wants the shreds of potato to adhere only partly to the scallops, leaving long crispy strands radiating outward like porcupine quills. "It's a very elegant crunch," he explains.

At 5:30 p.m., as a waiter sets the chef's table with red and yellow damask napkins and square red service plates, Michel rubs his eyes. "Long day," he says and arches his back. "The aging process is starting to be present."

Just before 6 p.m. the chefs change into clean, freshly starched white jackets and tall paper toques to create a dramatic tableau for their guests. The lights in the dining room are low, making the bright kitchen, visible through a large glass wall, a stage. The chef's table, just inside the glass wall, is like a front-row seat. Curtain is at 7 p.m., and Richman and the others take their seats expectantly.

Michel was unable to decide on just one amuse-bouche to begin the meal, so he sends out three: cauliflower mousse piped into napkin ring-sized rounds of fried yucca topped with caviar, a small piece of pork belly accompanied by tiny rice beans, and quail egg tempura with spinach.

"We call it the world's most expensive pork and beans," the sommelier jokes about the pork belly.

"You talk too much," Michel calls to his sommelier before commanding Richman and her companions: "Eat, eat, eat!"

"This egg is amazing," Elena King, a Washington business woman, says.

"This is like caviar in the clouds," Ann Yonkers says of the mousse.

At the pass, Michel adjusts the angle of a ruby beet chip before releasing five rimmed soup plates to the table.

Richman loves the eggplant soup. "It's like a liquid salad," she say. "It is tart and light and silky."

Michel, distracted, is pacing, eyeing a back corner of the kitchen where one of Citronelle's most skilled line cooks is making lobster burgers for customers at the upstairs bar. "She's overcrowding the pan," Michel says quietly to David.

David brings Michel the green peppercorn sauce to taste for Richman's next course: escargot nestled in a half-round tuile made of emmenthal and topped with hazelnut bread crumbs. "The garlic is too strong," Michel says. "Cook it for a few minutes." When David returns, once again they dip white plastic spoons in the sauce. "Much more elegant," Michel says. But before they can plate the escargot, the sauce begins to separate, its smooth texture suddenly becoming rough. David, looking tense, puts it back on the induction burner and uses a hand blender to quickly reincorporate the butter.

"Here we are," Michel says as a waiter picks up the escargot to take them to the chef's table. "Lots of love. Love is butter."

Richman and her new friends clink glasses. Michel steps over to the chef's table and puts his arm around Scott Thomas, King's husband. "Do you like my food?" he asks.

"We love it," Thomas says. "It's amazing."

The next course, rounds of freshly made spinach ravioli filled with oysters and sauced with an herbed lobster beurre blanc, elicit more raves. But Michel and David look miserable. The following course was to be the scallops coated with fine shreds of potato. The potato shards do stand out from the scallops, but they don't look elegant. It looks as if the scallops are having a bad hair day. Michel is not sending these scallops to any diner, much less to Richman.

The wild rockfish appears in the colorful mosaic of ratatouille. The dish is gorgeous, but the diners' response is muted: The ratatouille overpowered the fish. "The ravioli was mind-blowing, but I don't taste the rockfish much," Yonkers says.

Michel walks away from the table grimacing. He stands in the kitchen shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "My feet hurt," he says. "My feet hurt. My feet hurt."

It's going to be nearly impossible for Michel to top his oyster ravioli, but he must try. For the seventh course, he sends out rabbit tenderloin and leg with rabbit sausage and bacon barley. For the eighth, he and David unveil the potato polenta they've been working on. They serve it, elegantly topped with composed vegetables, to accompany a breast of Muscovy duck with syrah sauce.

When the diners at the chef's table look as if they could not possibly consume another bite, dessert arrives: a whimsical array, including trompe l'oeil sweets made to look like breakfast foods. The sommelier pours Les Forts de Latour, a wine that tastes like raspberries. Michel, exhausted, sits down at the chef's table and pours himself a glass.

He tries to lead Richman and her companions in a "wave," where they clink glasses in succession around the table. He doesn't think they got it quite right, and asks them to do it a second time.

Yonkers has taught cooking, written about food and now runs a farmers market throughout the region that sells locally grown produce. She peppers the chef with a series of questions: from what kind of butter he uses to what kind of childhood he had.

"When you were little were you always interested in flavors?" she asks. "What is your background like? What were your parents like that you became so free to experiment?"

"My father left when I was 6," Michel says. "My mother worked in a factory. My brother and sisters were saying, 'Michel, we are hungry.'"

Unfazed by his response, Yonkers confidently queries on. She challenges Michel to do more to support local farmers. She tells him he would be amazed at the cornucopia of produce available at the farmers markets she promotes. She could, she says, get him almost any fresh produce he desires.

Michel sighs and helps himself to another pour of the dessert wine. Suddenly, he looks far away, entranced. He thinks about what it would be like to be able to get any kind of produce he could dream up.

"What I'd really like," he says, "is a square apple."

April Witt is a staff writer for the Magazine. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.