Ambitious and talented Jean-Paul Fontaine had one overwhelming desire - to run an exclusive restaurant in London. His path was beset with frustration and tragedy but in time he rose from the penniless young waiter he had been when he arrived in London to the proprietor of 'The Silver Fountain' - a delightful restaurant in a quiet street in Soho. The Silver Fountain was to prove only the beginning of a longstanding and intense relationship between the Fontaine family and the restaurant world. Moving through the generations from the 1870s to the 1930s, and from London to Paris and New York, this is a passionate tale of obsession, ambition and culinary creation.