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had been informally studying on a shoestring in restaurants all over western Europe were as immutable as the conjugation of Latin verbs.
    I walked back from Maxim’s to my Left Bank fleabag, stopping at a café for a game of pinball (
le flipper
). By then I knew the drill. First you asked the cashier for change
—de la monnaie
, if from a five-franc note; more often, you exchanged a franc coin for five twenty-centime pieces,
cinq pièces de vingt
, worth about four U.S. cents each, enough for five games (
parties
). Then you wormed your way next to the crowd of spectators around the Gottlieb pinball machine and plunked a coin down on the glass, asserting your right to play next.
    One night I surpassed myself, flipping and nudging my way to a celestial score worth three free games. A tall North African had been watching me.
    “Pas mauvais, monsieur,”
he said. It was late. I had an early train to England and my flight home. I waved off the compliment and walked out, leaving the man to play my
parties gratuites
.
    Two years passed. I studied more Greek and Latin. I spent another summer in Europe, three months filled with more classic meals, of which the highlight was a lunch with my parents and sister at France’s most important and historically pivotal restaurant, La Pyramide, in Vienne, on the Rhône south of Lyon. The food world knew this elegant, three-star establishment as Chez Point, or simply Point. Its founder, Fernand Point, had died in 1955, but his wife, Mado, kept the place going without any decline that a naive twenty-year-old could perceive.
    I was also unaware, as I suspect were most of the guests filling the sunny
terrasse
of Point in late July 1962, that Chef Point’s legacy of light sauces and uncluttered plates would live on in the kitchens of his former apprentices, Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers and virtually every other future star of the nouvelle cuisine. What struck me was the
foie gras en brioche
. I had eaten
pâté de foie gras
before, usually an inert pink spread scooped out of a can. But inside this flawless brioche, the Point kitchen had inserted fresh unadulterated foie gras. On the plate was a deceptively unimposing round slice of liver surrounded by a golden ring of bread. The taste caught me by surprise. This, I saw, was the real thing, the rich and refined goose liver that all the fuss was about.

    Fernand Point, 1947: He purified the language of the French kitchen and passed on his leaner cuisine to the young chefs who then created nouvelle cuisine. ( illustration credit 1.1 )
    I can’t recall the rest of the meal, only the very end, when my father discovered that his wallet was missing. He thought he must have left it in the car. I was sent out on a search mission. There it was on the driver’s seat, unmolested.

    Pierre (standing) and Jean Troisgros. In the pokey cattle town of Roanne, these former Point acolytes served the most radical and witty menu of the postwar period. ( illustration credit 1.2 )
    If I hadn’t been so anxious about the wallet, I might have looked up the street and seen the Gallo-Roman pyramid (really an obelisk) that gave the restaurant its name.
    By legend, Point had once tried to resolve an argument between two customers right there where our car was parked. He’d persuaded two men who were fighting over the lunch bill to take their loud dispute outside and decide the matter by racing on foot to the pyramid. The winning runner would pay the bill.
    Point was the starter. Off the men ran. And ran and ran and ran, until they disappeared into the afternoon.
    Back in Cambridge, I found senior year an abrupt culinary letdown but a big step up in the interpersonal relations department. By Labor Day I was married, and with the marriage came a kitchen. Mostly, my wife did the cooking, without any expectation that I would help out except with the dishes. But I did get my hand in, crucially, in the summer of 1964, in the easy weeks between my Fulbright year of