Letters from the kitchen: three chefs on the guests they remember.

We asked three chefs on the platform to write us a short paragraph about a single guest they still think about. All three wrote considerably more than we asked for. We have edited nothing.

Isabelle: 'A widower, seventy-one, booked me for a Wednesday dinner for one. He had bought his wife the same meal at the same bistrot in Paris every year on the same date. He wanted to eat it once more, at home, and did not want to sit alone in a restaurant. I cooked the meal exactly as I could remember it from the years I had worked there. He ate every bite. At the end he put his hand on my arm and said thank you and I could not speak. I don't cry in kitchens. That night I cried on the way home.'

Matteo: 'Two women. A first anniversary. They had cooked their first meal together on a camp stove on a beach in Peru. They told me the story with the second glass. I made ceviche. We ate outside. They kissed at the end of the meal like it was the first time.'

Amara: 'A family of six. Grandparents, parents, two children under ten. The grandmother had grown up in Lagos and had not eaten proper jollof rice in forty years. Everyone at the table watched her take the first bite. She did not cry. She just closed her eyes. Then she opened them and told us a story about her mother that her own children had never heard. I have cooked a thousand dinners. That is the one I remember.'