Used book – Plaisir en bouche, Béatrice Joyaud

Balthazar Chacun, an orphan, is a self-taught individual who dedicated himself to gastronomy from the age of 15. Quickly considered a genius due to his extraordinary ability to distinguish tastes and his disarming ease in cooking all sorts of dishes, he became, with his restaurant Arthus (3 stars, the ultimate), the symbol of a new intellectual trend, Mism, which advocates the search for the essence of each thing by stripping it of its trappings. This "fad," through its rapid radicalization, quickly showed its limits and went from minimalism to functionality, then became a culture of nothingness, of emptiness synonymous with the end of art and culture. Balthazar's cuisine suffered, and he lost a star. The news, strangely, had been announced to him the day before by an anonymous letter. This letter, by its content, helped him realize that he needed to abandon Mism and take the absolute opposite stance. Balthazar Chacun opened a new, totally baroque, orgiastic restaurant, which he named the Palais des Nuits. An American investment fund specializing in ethical investments provided him with the necessary money, and his success was phenomenal. This anonymous letter would be the first in a series that, each time, would help him push the boundaries of his gustatory field of investigation. The tragedy would occur when all that remained for him to "perfect in sauce" was the human being. A nod to Süskind's Perfume, Plaisir en bouche is a novel that, through gastronomy, deals with the quest for meaning and the transcendence of limits.