Good morning!
(Applause)
Good morning, everyone!
(Audience) Good morning!
Claudine and I are delighted to be with you this morning
to be the first one.
I left home when I was 13 to go to apprenticeship,
that was in 1949.
Actually, home was the restaurant where my mother was the chef,
I was already in that business.
In fact, there was 12 restaurants through the years in my family
and 12 of them owned by women,
I'm the first male to enter that business in my family.
So I went into apprenticeship from Lyon where my mother had her little restaurant
to Bourg-en-Bresse, where I was [inaudible] a few miles away.
Prior to that, when we were about 8-9 years old,
my mother [inaudible] restaurant so,
my brother and I before going to school walk with my mother to the market,
the St Antoine market along the Saône river,
and she would walk the market one way, about 1/2 a mile, and buy on her way back.
Buying a case of mushrooms which was getting dark,
maybe for a third of the price or less.
We carried, of course, we didn't have a car at the time.
She'd get home and start doing her vegetables, peeling for the day.
She did not have a refrigerator at that time.
She had an ice box, that is a block of ice into a little cabinet,
so she'd have chicken of the day, meat,
fish, usually, whiting or mackerel or skate -- inexpensive fish,
and that she has to use it that day.
And the day after, we start all over again.
Everything was organic, everything was local.
The word organic did not exist, really,
[because] chemical fertilizers did not exit either,
or fungicides, insecticides, pesticides, all that stuff did not exist,
so everything was, local and organic.
I went into apprenticeship, I was 13 years old and, at that time,
it was very structured, well, still is to certain extend,
you got to be there on time, you got to be clean,
you have to be willing,
it's discipline, it's structure, that's the way a kitchen can work.
We learn through a type of osmosis.
The chef never really explained anything, he'd just say, "Do that".
And if you say, "Why?", and he'd say, "Because I just told you".
That was about the end of the apprenticeship.
Probably, just as good for someone 13-14 years old.
So, we worked, repeating, and repeating, and repeating those techniques ad nauseam,
we were not allowed to go to the stove for a year.
So, during that year, I plucked a lot of chicken,
eviscerated a lot of chicken, scaled fish, chopped parsley,
all of that type of things,
and then the chef told me,