French-born in Vittel, the Vosges, Lorraine, Le Grand Est, 1954. No 3 of 4 boys, grows up in tiny village amongst silly cows, mass on Sundays and all that holy shit, screwing around on weekdays in bad company. Every school holiday in grandparents farm, did everything except the milking & driving the tractor. Comes 14 and -the dumb age lasting longer than expected: lots of head scars and broken windows. Dreaming of being a long-distance semi-trailer driver. Pfft.
1970-72. Real Cooking School in Contrexéville: 2 diplomas, thinking:
What the f**** am I doing’ here…? Hello, frigging kitchens. Seriously angry Chef coming up.
Hands-on, hatless, wild, meticulous, chain smoking-long-haired-lone-wolf Head Chef at 17⅕ ricocheting at diabolical speed around French kitchens for the next 20 years. Full time: Brittany, Alps, Cannes, Switzerland, French & Dutch Antilles, Washington DC, Cape Cod & the Kennedys, London (later Maryland, Paris, Ireland, Ibiza). 75 to 104 solid hours/week. Chef gone apeshit. My favorite dish ever: sumptuous women.
17 kitchens through the wringer -1970-1981- Fabulous Seventies, my 20s. Nightlife by the Ocean, Disco craze, DJing, Soul Music, slow dancing with motley, erotic exotic girls, fast driving muscle cars.
[The really engrossing heart of the narrative happens outside those f kitchens. Life. Girls.]
Interlude: 1 month in Caracas, 1 month in Egypt. ’76-’77. Not cooking.
Also, meet René-pain-in-zee-ass, aka BIROUTE, a fancy fool with moronic tendencies who might will get on your tits. Can’t pronounce beet root, deserved sobriquet. French equivalent of Biroute is dick, like in dickhead. My alter ego, the spanner in my works, the idiot that pulls the chair from under my ass when I sit down, nagging me about my shitty karma, morning to night, the typical git with three hairs around his ass thinks he’s a bear. There you go.


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Ceux qui aimeraient penser que ce recueil, étalé sur une trentaine d’années, est encore un autre bouquin de recettes à la c.. ou à la Tante Marie, ou de la confiture mal étalée, sorry, vous l’avez dans le baba.
Trente-huit jobs gastronomiques à faire à bouffer à plusieurs millions de voraces, mieux connus sous le nom de clients, ou enfoi.és.
Les rapides du calcul péroraisonnent a blanc. La vache!….. il ne moisit pas longtemps sur place, dis-donc.
Cuisine Cocorico aux 4 coins de la planète. France, Suisse, Irlande, Antilles Françaises & Hollandaises, USA, Angleterre, Ibiza.
Vingt années en restaus bleu-blanc-rouge, Chef de Cuisine sans toque, à courir kif-kif le cul badigeonné à l’extra-forte de Dijon. De 80 à 104 heures hebdo, sur les rives de Charon.
Vingt autres en temps que Chef Personnel: Prince Khalid d’Arabie Séoudite, Lords & Ladies, Mick Jagger, Businessmen milliardaires… Une cuisine est un endroit m.rdique où tu deviens moitié fou. Voilà. …Heureusement, belles jeunes filles fleurissent parcours… Bon-n-appétit.


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