Despite being one of the most celebrated chefs in the world—and hanging out with Anthony Bourdain—Eric Ripert still has a recurring nightmare. It involves his former boss, the legendary Joël Robuchon. When I interviewed Ripert last month for the Washington Free Beacon, we chatted at length about his recent memoir, 32 Yolks, his philosophy behind Le Bernardin (three Michelin stars, four New York Times stars), and his experience working for Robuchon in Paris.
“Violence was in many ways everywhere [including the kitchen]. But Robuchon was not like that,” said Ripert of his time at Jamin in the early 1980s. “At the same time he dealt with a bunch of 20-25 kids, my age and older, but like in their mid-20s at max, and he was trying to create discipline and an environment that was basically a good environment to create the most perfect food you can create.”
The demands were considerable. Robuchon became both mentor and tormentor to Ripert and the other young cooks. As he explains in 32 Yolks:
Despite this and other horrific anecdotes, Ripert assured me that Robuchon “has always been very kind to me. He sent me to America. He helped me a lot in my career.” Except: “The only thing that happens to me really is that every two or three months, even after the book is published, I have a dream that comes back and comes back, and I basically failed miserably in America in my career and I am back in his kitchen. And I still have the dream.”
His dreams, however, have evolved. As he writes in his memoir, “For four months, I was seasoning, roasting, and then spending hours breaking down about eighty ducks a day. I cooked so many that for years I had nightmares about those canards. Sometimes I was cooking and I burned all the ducks. Other times, I was being attacked by vicious killer canards. It makes me shudder to think of it, the amount of my dream time that was—and sometimes still is—taken over by nightmares about ducks.” But not any more. “The ducks have gone,” he told me with a sigh of relief.
(My own recurring nightmare takes place in school. It’s the night before a paper deadline and an exam, and I haven’t opened a page in any of the assigned books for either class. The dream is based on my sophomore year in college. And if anyone is looking for a pristine copy of The Good Soldier Svejk, please email me.)
