32 Yolks

by Eric Ripert

You can walk through a playground, a department store, or any bakery and you will hear a hundred times, “C’est moi qui décide.” It is me who decides. French parents expect a sense of hierarchy and a respect from their children. You give them the answers and they accept them.

I was excited to be out in the forest, but I was still just a kid. I didn’t know how to follow Hugo silently and he yelled at me for making noise, scaring the birds away. It doesn’t take long for a child to figure out how quickly the switch in an adult can flip. When you are small and nothing in the world is truly your choice, you learn to read the adults around you so that you can get what you want: their praise, their affection, their love. I began to see that with Hugo there was very little room for error on my part.

If you asked me at age fifteen what I owned, I would’ve told you nothing but the clothes my mother still bought for me, my hiking boots, a few books, my skis, and my beloved BMX motorbike. It would take time for me to see that my mother had given me a gift by bringing me to Andorra. Growing up in a small town, with a mother whose business was central to the city, meant that I was surrounded by characters like Jacques and Madame Amparo. They knew me, and what’s more, they watched out for me, and dreamed for me of a life beyond the mountain range. Ask me now what I own and I can tell you with confidence that among my richest possessions are the memories I have of the people of Andorra, people like Madame Amparo, who made our village not just a place between France and Spain, but also a bridge between the stark reality of my present and the rich possibility of my future.

This seemingly easy task would be the thing that broke me, showing me the gap between culinary school knowledge and real restaurant chops. To start, it took me almost twenty minutes to separate the eggs.

(title connection)

In that kitchen, the highest compliment was silence. You either got screamed at or there was no feedback at all (which was good; it meant there was nothing to yell about). I

each task was a lot like hiking in Andorra. There was only one way to go—up. All of those years of climbing mountains had given me an instinct for the ascent, a sense of how to pace myself, how to structure my approach—not through sprints to the top, but slowly and over time.

Within the team, I had to make believe that I wasn’t stressed out. My nickname became the Tourist: I was always the last to arrive in the morning (just fifteen minutes after everyone else, but it didn’t go unnoticed) and I would calmly, deliberately make my coffee and toast in a way intended to telegraph that I wasn’t in the terror game like them. I was extremely careful never to cut or burn my hands, keeping them impeccable, and to appear as clean and creaseless and relaxed as possible at all times. I hoped that my calm appearance, in addition to the food that I was slowly learning to master, dot by dot, would see me through the service.

“But this is the thing, my child,” Madame Amparo continued. “You are headed for the same night sky. When it’s your turn to burn brightly, remember where you have been. Be careful not to harm all of those in your orbit.”

In Andorra in the fall, I also helped my mother put up the wild mushrooms that we harvested in our special spots in the mountains around our home.

You’re going to America and you will never come back to Andorra in the same way.”