The first Pascal Ribreau dish I ever tasted was ravioli of rabbit. Three or four of them lay at the bottom of a deep white china bowl, half submerged in a rich sauce of piment d’Espelette, butter and peppercorns as silky and crimson as a harlot’s cushion. The vegetal fragrance of those Basque peppers wafted upward. The ravioli looked like giant tortellini, loose knots of soft, slippery pasta stuffed with slow-braised rabbit meat cooked with garlic, onion, fresh herbs and a dash of balsamic vinegar. A little brunoise of the peppers was scattered over the top. It was a gorgeous dish, rustic but also sophisticated, resonant with sweet, tangy flavours.

That was in early 2003, soon after Ribreau opened Célestin on Mount Pleasant Road, just around the corner from where I was living. The building had been my bank—I had sat there only a few months earlier lobbying unsuccessfully for a $500 line of credit; now it was a smart French restaurant with its own retail bakery–cum–patisserie called Le Comptoir de Célestin, a much more useful addition to the community. I didn’t know much about Ribreau. He had last cooked at Provence, in Cabbagetown, but I had failed to visit during his tenure. One of my neighbours remembered him from the mid-1990s as the wunderkind chef-patron of Allumette, on Montreal’s rue Saint-Denis.

The rabbit ravioli had been a signature dish there; it proved equally popular on Célestin’s opening menu. As I mopped up the last of the red emulsion with a piece of excellent bread from the bakery, I could see the chef working in his kitchen, a good head and shoulders taller than the other two cooks. Not that they were particularly petite, or Ribreau, at five foot 11, a giant. But he was upright in an electric stand-up wheelchair, strapped in tightly around the chest and legs. On October 11, Thanksgiving weekend 1999, he was a passenger in a car on a country road not far from Montreal. He was sitting in the back between his wife, Laurie Anderson, and his two-year-old goddaughter. The child’s mother was driving, her husband beside her. Ribreau had just unclasped his seat belt to help the little girl off with her coat when a car appeared in their lane, coming toward them fast, trying to overtake traffic. Ribreau’s friend turned the wheel; their car hit the verge and started to somersault. Everyone else escaped with bumps and bruises, but Ribreau smashed through the rear window. He remembers the sensation of flying and the horrified face of the driver in the other vehicle. He remembers Laurie cradling him as he lay beside the upturned car. Glass had lacerated his throat and body and his back was broken, his spine severed between the lumbar and thoracic vertebrae. The accident left him a T8 paraplegic, paralyzed from the chest down. He was 30 years old.