He will soft-boil an egg, delicately remove the shell, extract the yolk with a syringe, use that to make hollandaise sauce, and then inject the hollandaise back into the egg with the syringe. It’s an ambitious project for an eighth grader, but at 14, Nick Normile is thoroughly infatuated with food. In school, he researched the menu of a state dinner served during the FDR administration - prepared the salmon beurre blanc, salad with a passion-fruit vinaigrette, and potato blinis - and fed it to his history teacher for extra credit. In bed at night he reads cookbooks: In Search of Perfection, by Heston Blumenthal; What Einstein Told His Cook, by Robert L. Wolke; The French Laundry Cookbook, by Thomas Keller; and Molecular Gastronomy, by Herve This. At home in Wynnewood, he cooks small but spectacular dishes for his pleased but bewildered parents: butter-poached lobster with chorizo and tomato puree, halibut with braised onions in an onion reduction with parsley puree, scallops with asparagus and portobellos. “Is it genetic?” his mother, Rosemarie Fabien, wonders aloud. “His father was a waiter in college. I know he didn’t get it from me.” Entire cabinets are set aside in the family kitchen for Nick’s equipment (don’t touch), and shelves for his library. He shops at Philadelphia Lobster & Fish (”I’m happy with the quality there”), and watches such shows as “Iron Chef” and “Dinner Impossible.” He already has an unpaid apprenticeship at Lacroix and an impressive roster of mentors, among them Ellen Yin at Fork, Guillermo Tellez at Striped Bass, and Jose Garces at Amada. With the passion of a fan who has tickets to the Super Bowl, Nick describes his plans to eat lunch June 30 at Keller’s acclaimed Manhattan restaurant, Per Se He’ll take the train in with his mom, and she’ll shop while he eats - alone, which is something he has become accustomed to, now that his expectations have exceeded the family budget. He started working part time, taking on odd jobs, to pay for the $250 fixed-price meal. “I don’t mind eating by myself,” he says, “because the food will be so spectacular.” Ultimately, Nick says, he wants to be the kind of chef, like Keller, with one restaurant in the city and the other in the country - where he can grow his own Kaffir lime leaves and lemon verbena. But first he has to graduate from Bala Cynwyd Middle School. Nick says his grandmother was his inspiration. His mother was not. “My mom makes mostly beige foods,” he says - the limited range that will satisfy his sisters, Carolyn, 11, and Grace, 8. Raised on Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and Swanson pot pies, Nick ate out with his family at Ruby Tuesday and TGI Friday’s until about four years ago, when his grandmother took him to Italy. The two ate their way through Venice, Florence, Rome, Pisa and Pompeii - enjoying course after course of dishes made with fresh, local ingredients. Nick gets a dreamy, faraway look in his hazel eyes when he thinks about the trip. “That’s where I had calamari for the first time,” he says wistfully. “I guess that’s what got me interested in food.” There was no going back - certainly not to McDonald’s. Next he wanted to try Buddakan: “Melt-in-your-mouth salmon teriyaki,” he recalls lovingly, “lobster fried rice, a banana rum tower of sorbet.” To celebrate his completion of seventh grade, Nick had lunch at Le Bec-Fin. This he relates with an air of accomplishment you’d expect from an explorer who had climbed Everest. His father, Tom Normile, is a structural engineer; Mom works part time for a group of architects. She does most of the cooking at home. From her perspective, a good meal makes guests feel comfortable. Nick is into the alchemy of it all. Using sodium alginate and calcium chloride to make liquid ravioli: It’s a guy thing. He never measures, and rarely follows a cookbook recipe ingredient by ingredient, preferring to improvise - and to send Mom shopping for esoteric ingredients. “I had never heard of xanthan gum,” his mother says. He fantasizes about turning classics on their heads - such as the deconstructed eggs Benedict, which has all the ingredients of the classic recipe but in a different order. And he likes the idea of concocting dishes from unexpected combos: White chocolate and caviar. Sardines on toast with sorbet. Snail porridge. Four out of five days, Nick dips into his culinary experiments as soon as school lets out. “Usually, what he’s made is already laid out on a beautiful plate when I get home,” his mother says. But the servings are small, she says. “His father and I have to fight each other for a taste.” Nick doesn’t eat what the rest of the family are having, but he joins them for conversation (at Mom’s insistence) when they sit down to dinner at 7. The kid does have other interests: He works out, runs four miles a day, plays basketball, and is a drummer in the school band. A straight-A student, Nick broke the school record for sit-ups in sixth grade, doing 91 in 60 seconds. But he has outgrown the middle school’s cooking classes. (”They don’t do anything in-depth.”) And this year, he gave up on school lunches and started packing his own: quality canned tuna mixed with red onions, scallions, a little olive oil, and some mustard. “I try to keep it toward the healthy side,” he says. He’s 5-foot-9 and 150 pounds now, but foie gras and twice-fried pommes frites, his two absolute favorites, can pile on the pounds over time. “Yeah,” he admits reluctantly, “a lot of chefs are, like, fat. I’m a little scared of that.” Still, while classmates collate baseball stats, Nick memorizes the names of alpha chefs: “El Bulli in Spain is the best restaurant,” he says. (Fodor’s describes El Bulli, on Catalonia’s Costa Brava, as “a global phenomenon” that offers a 35-course taster’s menu of techno-dishes made with foam of smoke, rosewater bubbles, and air of carrot.) “Ferran Adria the chef there, is a genius,” Nick declares, wiping his face with a corner of his Ralph Lauren Polo shirt. Nick Normile’s Great Expectations really began to gel last year, when he signed on for a Saturday morning “Shopping With the Chefs” experience at Lacroix at the Rittenhouse. “That day I served a terrine of foie gras wrapped in prosciutto, and chicken with a sous-vide egg, and the kid ate everything,” recalls Matthew Levin, executive chef. “I was shocked. He wiped the plate and ate someone else’s leftovers.”"I was surprised that this 13 year old came by himself,” Levin says. “People four times his age find that intimidating.” Impressed, Levin offered him an unpaid apprenticeship. For two months, Nick has been showing up at Lacroix on Saturdays, scrubbed and properly outfitted in a white double-breasted chef’s coat and traditional checked pants, to watch and do. How unusual is that? “He’s the only kid here,” Levin says. “That’s self-explanatory.” “I don’t coddle him,” executive sous chef Michael Fiorello says, wrist-deep in an apricot mushroom duxelle. “He does a grown-up job, and I treat him like a grown-up.” Nick, who smiles about as often as your typical 14 year old - which is to say never - lights up in spite of himself when he talks about being in a kitchen like this, treated like one of the guys in a clubhouse. “It’s just so cool,” he says, suppressing a grin.