INTRODUCTION I distinctly remember the exact moment when I became Parisian. It wasn''t the moment when I found myself seriously considering buying dress socks with goofy cartoon characters on them. Nor was it the time I went to my bank with e135 in hand to make a payment for e134, and thought it completely normal when the teller told me that the bank didn''t have any change that day. And I''m sure it wasn''t when I ran into the fiftysomething receptionist from my doctor''s office sunbathing topless by the Seine, à la française, and I didn''t avert my eyes (much as I wanted to). It wasn''t when my shoulder bag caught the sweater of a young boy in La Maison du Chocolat and, as it started to unravel, I ignored his woeful cries. " C''est pas ma faute! " I reasoned to myself before walking away. After all, who in their right mind would wear a sweater to a chocolate shop, anyway? It could have been the moment when I listened intently as two Parisian friends explained to me why the French are so determined to clip the pointed tips off haricots verts before cooking them. Was it because that''s where the radiation collects in the green beans, as one person insisted? Or was it to prevent the little points from getting stuck in your teeth, which the other one assured me would happen? Even though I didn''t remember ever getting a string bean end lodged between my teeth, nor did I think radiation had the ability to slide around in vegetables, I found myself nodding in agreement.

No, the exact moment happened just a few months after I''d arrived in Paris. I was spending a lazy Sunday in my apartment lounging around in faded sweatpants and a loose, tattered sweatshirt, my ideal outfit for doing nothing in particular. By late afternoon, I''d finally mustered the energy to take the elevator downstairs to the inner courtyard of my apartment building to empty the garbage. With the elevator door exactly three steps from my front door and the garbage room just five steps from the elevator landing at the bottom, the trip involves basically four movements--walk out the door, take the elevator down, dump the garbage, and go back up. The whole process should take maybe forty-five seconds. So I extracted myself from the sofa, shaved, changed into a pair of real pants, tucked in a clean wrinkle-free shirt, and slipped on a pair of shoes and socks before heading toward the door with my little plastic sac for the poubelle. God forbid I should run into someone from my building while wearing my Sunday worst. And that, mes amis, was when I realized I had become Parisian.

The unspoken rule if you plan to live here--but equally good to adopt even if you''re just coming for a visit--is knowing that you''re going to be judged on how you look and how you present yourself. Yes, even if you''re just dumping your garbage. You don''t want anyone else, such as a neighbor (or worse, one of those garbagemen in their nifty green outfits), to think you''re a slob, do you? Since only 20 percent of Americans have passports, we don''t get out as much as we should, and our dealings with foreigners are usually on our own turf where they have to play by our rules. We''re not so good at adapting to others, since we''re rarely in a position that requires us to do it. I''ve heard a variety of complaints from visitors (and uttered a few myself) expecting things to be like they are back home: "Why don''t they have doggie bags?" "How come there''s no ice?" "Why can''t I pick something up off the store shelf?" or "Why is our waiter flirting with those Swedish girls and having a cigarette when we asked for our check over thirty minutes ago?" I wonder why when we travel outside the United States we expect people to behave like Americans--even in their own country. Think about it for a minute: how many waiters, taxi drivers, hotel clerks, shopkeepers, and others in your hometown could or would respond to a French person who spoke only French? If you don''t speak French and have traveled to Paris, you were probably helped by a number of people who speak pretty good English. And almost all Europeans coming to our shores make it a point to adapt to our customs. Well, almost all.

Don''t ask a waiter who''s just been stiffed on his 18 percent tip. Every culture has certain rules. In America for some unknown reason, you can''t get wine at fast- food restaurants, and spending a few minutes digging deeply inside your nose on public transit is frowned upon. In Paris, the rules dictate one shouldn''t dress in grungy jeans and a ripped T-shirt, unless it says "Let''s Sex! . NOW!!" painted in gold lettering across the front. To live in a foreign country you need to learn the rules, especially if you plan to stay. And I had to learn plenty. Like so many other people, I dreamed about living in Paris ever since my first visit in the ''80s, during that rite of passage every American student fresh out of college used to embark upon, before kids decided it was less of a hassle to explore the world with RAM rather than a Railpass.

Why bother getting lost in the labyrinth of historic cities, dining on regional delicacies, sleeping with total strangers in youth hostels, and soaping up in communal showers with a team of Italian soccer players? Yes, I suppose it''s far better to stay home and experience Europe though a computer screen. But back then, I had quite a time doing most of those things. (I''ll leave it to your imagination to guess which ones.) But explore I did. I spent almost a year traipsing around the continent after college doing nothing in particular except learning about European cultures, primarily by pulling up a stool or chair and eating what the locals ate. During that time, I made it through almost every country in Europe and tried whatever local delicacies were to be had: oozing raw- milk cheeses in France and hearty, grain- packed breads in Germany; Belgian milk chocolates that when sniffed, could transport you to a dairy farm in the countryside; and crispy- skin fish grilled over gnarled branches in the souks of Istanbul. And of course, lots of buttery pastries and crusty breads smeared with plenty of golden- yellow butter in Paris, the likes of which I''d never tasted before. After months of criss-crossing Europe, in dire need of a good, deep scrubbing and a proper haircut to rein in my unruly mop of curls (which definitely earned me the term dirty blond), I eventually ran out of steam--and money--and returned to the States.

During the carefree time I''d spent traipsing from country to country, I hadn''t given any thought to my future and what I''d do after I returned. Why spoil the fun? Back in America, after seeing a world outside of our sometimes isolating borders, I didn''t quite know where I would fit in and hadn''t a clue as to where to go or what to do with my life. I''d read about "California cuisine," which was a new and exciting concept just emerging back then. And something to do with food seemed like an interesting option, since I didn''t see Europe through my eyes, but my stomach. Everything I''d tasted was a far cry from my college days, when I worked at a vegetarian restaurant ladling out peanut butter-thickened soups and dishing up desserts made by our long-haired baker, who added his own unique touches to anything he baked. In fact, I can still smell his fruit cobblers filled with apples and kidney beans, baked and scented with his signature handful of cumin, which gave them a distinctly unpleasant odor. On second thought, that might have been him. Fortunately, the European style of cooking was gaining a foothold in northern California, and there was a new appreciation for fine foods and cooking du marché: buying locally produced foods at their peak of freshness, which was a daily ritual in Europe.

It seemed like common sense to me, and simply the right way to eat. So I packed up and moved to San Francisco, just across the bay from Berkeley, where an exciting culinary revolution was simmering. And I hoped cumin- scented desserts weren''t a part of it. Shopping the outdoor markets of the Bay Area, I discovered farmers who were raising things like blood oranges with tangy, wildly colored juices and tight bunches of deep- violet radicchio, which people at the time assumed were runty heads of cabbage. Laura Chenel was producing European- style moist rounds of fresh goat cheese in Sonoma, which were so unfamiliar that Americans were mistaking them for tofu (especially in Berkeley). And viticulturists in Napa Valley were producing hearty wines, like Zinfandel and Pinot Noir, which had a great affinity for the newly celebrated regional cuisine, which was liberally seasoned with lots of fragrant garlic, branches of rosemary and thyme, and drizzled with locally pressed olive oil--a big improvement over the bland "salad oil" I grew up with. I was thrilled--no, astounded-- to find the culinary counterparts to everything I had eaten in Europe. I savored the hand- dipped ultrafine chocolates of Alice Medrich at Cocolat, which rivaled those I had swooned over in swanky French chocolate boutiques.

I''d line up daily for a boule of pain au levain that Steve Sullivan would pull out of his fired-up brick oven every morning over at Acme Bread, and was ecstatic to find many of the pungent cheeses I remembered so fondly from Europe stacked up at the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley, just across from Chez Panisse. Since I believed that if I was really going to pursue a restaurant career I should start at the top, I applied for a job at Chez Panisse, where Alice Waters was leading this culinary revolution I wanted to enlist in. I sent a letter to the resta.