What the book does
32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line (Random House, 2016) is Eric Ripert’s memoir of the years before America, written with Veronica Chambers. It ends at the airport in Paris, with Ripert in his early twenties boarding a flight to Washington to cook for Jean-Louis Palladin. Le Bernardin and everything that made him famous are still ahead of him when the book closes, and that is the book’s discipline. It is about how a cook is formed.
The story begins in the south of France and in Andorra, where his mother set the family table every evening as a good restaurant would. His father died when Ripert was eleven, his stepfather was cruel, and boarding school was worse. The kitchen of a small restaurant in Andorra, where the chef let a lonely boy watch and taste, became the place he felt safe. He left school for a vocational cooking program and went to Paris at seventeen to join La Tour d’Argent under Dominique Bouchet. The title comes from his first day there, when he was asked to separate thirty two eggs for a hollandaise and could not manage the sauce. From there he went to Jamin, where Joël Robuchon ran what was then the most admired kitchen in France, and ran it on fear. Those chapters are the ones readers remember, and Ripert tells them without softening what the pressure did to him and the cooks around him.
The book is generous to the people who taught him and honest about the cost of how they taught. It suits anyone who wants to understand how a great kitchen of that era worked, and any young cook who needs to know that the people at the top once failed at the stove too.
What readers tend to want next
Readers who loved 32 Yolks almost always want the sequel. The memoir stops where the formation ends, and the reader wants to know what Ripert did with it: how he ran Le Bernardin after Gilbert Le Coze died, what he kept from Robuchon and what he refused to carry forward.
A second wish is to hear other chefs on the same years. Ripert’s apprenticeship is one account of the French system at its hardest. A reader wonders whether chefs trained in Spain or Hong Kong went through the same thing, and whether they too decided to lead differently.
A third is the question the book raises and does not answer, because it ends before Ripert has to face it. A kitchen holding the highest standard in the world has usually been run on fear. The reader wants to know whether it has to be.
What The Luxury of Attention adds
The Luxury of Attention is my own book, built from eighty first person interviews with 36 general managers of the world’s finest hotels and 44 Michelin-starred chefs. Eric Ripert is one of them. He appears in four chapters, and his profile on this site gathers what he told me. For a reader of 32 Yolks, the book is the sequel the memoir withholds, told by Ripert himself and by seventy nine others who faced the same question.
The Apprenticeship is where Ripert’s story continues. He recalls Le Coze’s instruction to read a good review once and a bad one every day until the faults are fixed, and then he describes the kitchen he ran around 2000: loud, authoritative and losing cooks, because that was the management he had received. He looked at what he had built and gave it up. Nobody yells at Le Bernardin now, and the standard did not move. The chapter sets his decision alongside Chan Yan Tak on the traditional Chinese kitchen and the hoteliers who name the manager who corrected them in private. The question page on how to create a healthy kitchen culture draws the answer out. The Human Touch returns to the same change from the guest’s side. A cook whose hands shake cannot be fully present, and Ripert argues that the care Le Bernardin is known for depends on the calm he built after 2000. Aaron Kaupp of Raffles and Patrick O’Connell of The Inn at Little Washington make the same case from a lobby and another kitchen. In Pursuit of Perfection gives Ripert’s mature relationship with the standard Robuchon drilled into him: a stuffed calamari that took twenty years to get right, and a habit of forgetting the stars and thinking about the day’s work. Ana Roš of Hiša Franko and Joan Roca of El Celler de Can Roca describe the same pursuit from their own kitchens.
Readers drawn to the memoir’s early chapters will find the same kind of beginning in The Calling, and in the quotes collected on the calling.
A reading order
- 32 Yolks, Eric Ripert with Veronica Chambers (2016), for the formation of a cook in the great French kitchens.
- The Luxury of Attention, Rahim B. Kanani (2026), for what Ripert and seventy nine others did with their training.
- Letters to a Young Chef, Daniel Boulud (2003; revised 2017), for another French master’s counsel to a cook at the beginning.
- The Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman (2000), for perfectionism as daily practice, observed at The French Laundry.