At the bottom of the main staircase he stopped, bent his big frame down to pick up a foil-and-plastic rectangle, empty of its cold pills, and carried it till we passed a trash can. When I wrote about the boys’ school, the headmaster was forever stooping to gather scraps as he walked through the school. When I was out at the French Laundry, Keller and his sous-chef at the time, Eric Ziebold, were regularly picking up cigarette butts in the gravel parking lot. I don’t think I walked anywhere with Ryan during my time there when he didn’t stop at least once, bend to pick something up, and throw it away. Picking stuff up was more important than most people recognized, and it had little to do with the actual scrap of paper or a cigarette butt. We ate at the Colavita Center for Italian Food and Wine, which had supplanted American Bounty as the school’s showpiece restaurant, to begin a conversation that went on for most of my stay there and traversed the most important topics of the food revolution as it related to the elevated status of the chef in American culture.
