Today, 12 years later, Guy Savoy has an empire of neighborhood bistros and his eponymous restaurant is a Michelin two-star in the even more rarefied air of the Rue Troyon off the Avenue Wagram. But at the time he was just starting out and already he was doing very well. A puckish man with a close-cropped beard, he was in his early 30s at the time — too young to feel fully at ease making the constant goodwill tours of the dining room that more established chefs were naturals at, but too successful to still be behind the stove himself. The people who came to eat wanted to see him. It was quite a responsibility to be the hottest young chef in France.

His sole method of relaxation was to do the marketing and he liked to do it alone. One day I asked to go with him. I'd always wanted to see Rungis, the largest food market in the world. But you needed a permit to get in. "If you really want to," he answered unenthusiastically. At 5:30 the next morning his battered white Renault van pulled up outside my studio on the Rue St. Antoine and we headed to Rungis together.

I'd made it home the night before at midnight and I knew he'd stayed on drinking Armagnac with important customers. Pre-dawn was the wrong time for small talk but we had a thirty-minute ride to Rungis and we had to say something to each other. "So, you want to be a cook," he said, trying to muster some enthusiasm.

"Yes," I answered.

"It's hard, isn't it?"

"Yes, particularly Paris," I said, though Paris was the only part of France I knew.

"You should go to the country." He said it in such a way and with such fatigue in his eyes that it seemed he regarded the world outside the capitol not just as a lost country, but a lost state.

A couple of croissants and espressos at one of the many cafés at Rungis soon picked up our moods. Then I followed him through the hangars where he poked salmon in the gills, looked turbots in the eye, got all excited over some wild ducks and made instant deals with Gauloise-chomping clerks who seemed very proud to have his business. By 7:30 we were back at a Rungis café having white wine and saucisson at the counter with a group of chefs. There were four of them and they had six Michelin stars between them. To the sellers who nodded as they passed us it was like a gathering of rock stars. To Guy Savoy, I now knew, it was the closest he was going to get to a market cafe in a country town.

On the way back into Paris he asked me to help him with a dinner he was making for Christian Millau, co-founder of the Michelin guide's competition, the Guide Gault-Millau. During the preparations I was right beside him and I was thrilled to be first assistant for the duration of the meal. I still have the menu written down in my cooking notes together with the wines that they drank.

Écrevisses en gelée de lapin au Sauternes — Dom Perignon Rosé.

Huîtres en Nage glacée —

Étuve de St. Pierre a l'huile d'olive — '78 Chevalier-Montrachet.

Charlotte d'homard — Rouget Poêle a l'estragon.

Ragout de Champignons sauvages — Haut Brion '53. Magnum.

Salmis de Pigeon — Haut Brion '61.

Fromage — Latour '53.

Glace vanille, coulis d'abricots — Clos Vougeot.

What I'll never forget is that after we'd sent out the meal Guy Savoy sighed like a gymnast who's just stuck a landing. He'd done his routine: classical yet modern, elegant, surehanded, perfect. All I could think of when I saw that sigh was the way he'd said, "You should go to the country." Meals in the country were about pleasure, not about relief.

The opportunity came up a few months later, when we'd be closing for a few days after the New Year's Eve dinner. I had a car, a very old Peugeot 204, and one of the guys I worked with asked me if I'd drive him down to his family farm in the Vendée after we'd finished the service. I had nothing else to do and I knew that his family hadn't seen him since he'd come to work in Paris, so I said yes.

We did the New Year's dinner and Guy Savoy came into the kitchen with champagne for the cooks and then this guy and I headed out of Paris about one in the morning. We drove down through France in the dark. Highways branched into narrower roads which, in turn, branched into hoarfrosted country lanes. By dawn we pulled up outside a small dark farmhouse in the middle of mist-covered fields. "Look at the oysters," my friend said pointing at the crates stacked up outside the front door in the cold, "they're for us." He then ran into the house to wake them. A few minutes later his father appeared in the doorway. He wore his nightshirt and he had a corkscrew and a bottle of Sancerre in his hands. "Come in," he shouted, "we've been waiting for you!"