%20Studio%20PAM.jpg)
On the kitchen pass, a large digital clock reads 9:37 a.m. as Eugénie Béziat, wearing an apron over her chef’s whites, steps out of an industrial lift at the Ritz Paris. If you’ve been a guest at the historic hotel upstairs, sleeping on a pillow stitched with your initials and running baths from a gold tap shaped like a swan, it is not the type of lift you will have seen before. This one drops to a busy, utilitarian corridor two stories beneath street level on the Rue Cambon side of the property, where fruit and vegetables are delivered from the Ritz’s kitchen garden located in Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, just outside of Paris. The produce is divvied up according to where in the hotel it’s going, and Eugénie, having walked over from her apartment in the second arrondissement and finished a black coffee in the staff canteen, is there five mornings a week to collect the goods for Espadon, the fine dining restaurant under her leadership. She is 40 years old and the first woman to be Head Chef at the Ritz since it opened in 1898.
Before going into the kitchen, we sip espresso by the dishwashers: me in the bright blue elastic shoe covers worn by visitors, along with a translator in the same garb, and Eugénie in pearl earrings, her dark hair scraped into a ponytail, radiating the type of rude health that comes from doing laps at the public pool in Les Halles. The coffee has been developed to her specification using beans from Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the island of São Tomé and Príncipe. “I love this coffee,” she says in English. “We worked for a while to get it right.” Six months, to be precise, but you don’t get the feeling that anyone was wringing their hands. It took seven months to outfit the kitchen, with its mechanical prep station that sinks to accommodate Eugénie’s height (5’3”), and three to choose the porcelain, which is fragile, imperfect Astier de Villatte rather than the hand-painted Limoges service used everywhere else in the hotel. The menu itself was half a year of work, the toughest course to pin down being a brief pre-dessert, designed to look like a spoonful of sugar over absinthe.
%2520Joann%2520Pai%2520-%2520HD%2520(5).jpg)
Though the restaurant only reopened at the end of September, Eugénie has been living in Paris for 18 months while a new kitchen and dining room were built around her vision for Espadon, which is an iteration of a previous restaurant, L’Espadon, started by Charles Ritz—son of the founder César Ritz—in the 1950s. (L’espadon translates as “the swordfish,” as Charles was a keen fisherman.) Espadon still has a reverence for seafood, but otherwise, it now reflects the taste and training of its Head Chef, who was born in Gabon and grew up in Africa before moving to France for university. When she was 20 years old, she ate oysters with green apples at a restaurant in Paris run by chef Hélène Darroze, realized food was her calling, dropped out of her degree in foreign languages, and enrolled in culinary school.
There are four stock pots at a leaping boil in the stainless steel kitchen, reducing hibiscus water into bissap syrup, a flavor from Eugénie’s adolescence that is served with a course of barbequed lobster. I’m standing off to the side of the room in front of a Bose speaker playing the Cranberries, next to the translator, who was brought in by the Ritz and who is not translating the quiet, quick exchanges happening over the trays of steamed tomatoes. Hot gossip, I figure. While Eugénie and her Chef Adjoint, Gabriel Ulvé, peel the tomatoes, she and I talk about what it’s like being new in town.
%2520Studio%2520PAM.jpg)
On weekends—the restaurant weekend is Sunday and Monday—Eugénie runs, and meets a boxing instructor to hook and jab on the quays of the Seine. On Friday nights until Espadon opened, she volunteered as a cook at Refettorio, a well-known community kitchen that operates from the crypt of the Madeleine church, and on Saturdays, occasionally, after the kitchen at Espadon closes, she and a handful of the other chefs go to a bar called Le Petit Vendôme, a three-minute walk from the Ritz, where she orders white wine at midnight. (“What kind of white wine?” I ask. “It is not that kind of place,” she says.)
But mostly, if Eugénie isn’t working, she eats. “Eating—that is my hobby,” she says. “I love restaurants, I love food. The service, the wine. It is how I experience the world.” Her father was born in Senegal, and she tells me there’s a Senegalese restaurant in Paris, Les Marmite de Fa, in the 9th arrondissement, that serves a magnificent Chicken Yassa, which is also one of the specialties at Espadon. Her parents aren’t local, so I wonder where she would take them if they came to town, and she mentions Jeanjean Restaurant, in the north of Paris, which she found out about because Gabriel is friends with the head chef. The last time she was there, she ate “roasted chicken with potatoes and a lot of butter. It was…” She closes her eyes, and moves her shoulders.
%2520Joann%2520Pai%2520-%2520HD%2520(2).jpg)
%2520Joann%2520Pai%2520-%2520HD%2520(3).jpg)
Close to her flat on the Rue Montorgueil, she loves the restaurant Tekés, which only serves vegetables. “The atmosphere is loud, like a party. The chef there does wonderful things, like stracciatella with pistachios and green vegetables.” There’s a wine shop in the same neighbourhood, B.B.N., which sells books as well as bottles and has “exceptional natural wines, a great selection.” She likes the babka from the mini-chain of Parisian bakeries, The French Bastards, and Pralus, another chain, for their praline brioche.
“What about Parcelles?” asks Gabriel, referring to a tiny bistrot a vins in the Marais. A sous chef, Rodolphe Irazoqui, looks around from his prep station. “Parcelles, yes, absolutely” he says. “It is wonderful,” says Eugénie, while gutting a turbot. “It works very well, you know, these small, market-driven restaurants with young restauranteurs and natural wine lists.”
Eugénie takes a sip of water from a mug with a picture of Queen Elizabeth on it, which feels like an invitation to ask. “I’m not a royalist,” she says, “but I like a bit of kitsch and I love London.” During a recent trip to the British capital, she ate at the bar of an Indian restaurant, Kricket, in Soho. “It was so delicious,” she says. “So modern and spicy. I love the Indian food in London.”
We break for lunch. The staff take the lift downstairs to the canteen and eat together at the raised wooden table that unofficially belongs to Espadon, then Eugénie walks home to rest and returns to the restaurant at 5 p.m.
The kitchen hums at a higher frequency than it did in the morning. The staff—the full ten chefs now, the rest of the team having arrived at 2 p.m.—chat less, and lean more closely over their work. Eugenie is standing at the pass, looking through emails on an old silver HP laptop. “Around 6:30,” she says, “we’ll put on Uprising by Muse. It is a ritual.” She tastes through a plate of the sauces, then has a meeting with the front of house to discuss the reservations that night, and to run through allergies and menu accommodations. The maître d’ has a list of the evening’s guests alongside a handful of thumb-sized headshots, which seems like normal preparation these days. I don’t think anything of it: I go upstairs to change into a dress and come back down with my husband.
%2520Joann%2520Pai%2520-%2520HD%2520(8).jpg)
And then we walk into the dining room—and I know who at least one of the pictures was, because sitting there, plain as day, is Alain Ducasse. There are only 30 seats in the restaurant, so you can’t miss him, and you wouldn’t anyway, because of his round tortoiseshell spectacles. He’s eating with three other men, laughing, telegraphing to the room that he’s having a great night. Late in the evening, when most of us are on coffee, he goes into the kitchen to see Eugénie. There are two large windows from the dining room into the kitchen and several of us crane around to see what’s happening, but the chefs are standing in the back right corner so it’s tough luck for snoops.
When Eugénie stops by our table afterward, she says that it was her first time cooking for Alain, the most famous French chef on earth and a one-time mentor to Hélène Darroze, whose oysters rerouted the course of Eugénie’s life. “Now you know why I was so nervous,” she says, not having seemed nervous at any point.
