To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  Vongerichten himself arrived on the scene a few weeks prior to the opening and made quite an impression on me: a slender man dressed from head to toe in black Prada, he exuded the calm aura of a spiritual guru. The first day he showed up, gliding through the kitchen with his beautiful girlfriend on his arm, I was awestruck. He was such a contrast to the beaten-down chefs I’d seen throughout London that I couldn’t help but stare at him. “That’s a chef?” I remember thinking to myself. Jean-Georges was the first chef of his level that I really got to interact with, and I took an instant liking to him. He may not have been in whites for that first visit, but he was a chef’s chef through and through, and he knew the nuts and bolts of the kitchen and the cuisine.

  He also had a mastery of all the ancillary requirements of the modern chef. He greeted visiting journalists gregariously, offering them personal tours of the kitchen and dining room, and was utterly at ease during all of the photo shoots leading up to the opening of Vong London. Vongerichten was also a celebrity on the same level as our bold-name guests. When we opened, Mariah Carey was a frequent diner, and when he visited her table, it was all hugs and kisses, as though he were one of her gang rather than a kitchen slave. Another frequent guest was one of my favorite directors, Luc Besson, whom Vongerichten had gotten to know when the filmmaker was in New York making The Professional and became a regular at the original Vong in Midtown Manhattan. When the London restaurant opened, an early lunch visitor was soccer superstar Pelé, who ordered the salmon wrapped in feuille de bric, sliced and served with a citrus vinaigrette. I made it for him and was thrilled when he came back the next day and ordered the same thing.

  All of that had nothing to do with cooking but everything to do with success. Where even a titan like Marco pretty much chained himself to the stoves, Jean-Georges showed me a different aspect of being a chef—a stylish, high-living ideal that was undeniably appealing.

  Beyond Jean-Georges, his imported team of cooks was less antagonistic than what I was used to. They were free of the tensions that coursed through the London cooking scene, like the Marco-inspired abrasiveness of many chefs or the generations-long tensions between French and British guys. Jean-Georges’s cooks were serious and specific—they knew what the chef wanted and how to guide us there, but they weren’t aggressive about it. Their attitude was industrious and collaborative, and this, too, was refreshing. The kinder, gentler environment also fostered a new and rare kitchen friendship: an Aussie named Jason, whom I’d met during a “stage” at La Tante Claire between working at The Restaurant and Vong, had also taken a job at Vong. He and I began dining around town on days off and when we could afford it, trying the better restaurants in hopes of edifying our palates.

  I didn’t love everything about Vong. The restaurant, after the fashion of its New York City mother ship, had a window into the kitchen that let the guests see us cooking, which was a first to me. Because we were on display, we were part of the décor, and so all the cooks had to wear colored skullcaps, with a different color for each section. They were polyester, hot, and itchy, and drove me crazy. But my meager issues were nothing compared to the disdain exhibited by the cooks who ran the other food service for the hotel, especially the head chef, an old-school British guy who would make a point of leaving his classic, haute, Savoy-esque food up on the pass for hours, so that as we walked by, we’d have to see it, as if to say, “See what we do.”

  It was a perfect illustration of what was going on in London cuisine at the time. The old guard were being left behind, both stylistically and in the media, by forward-thinking chefs, both homegrown and imported, and they didn’t like it one bit.

  As the kitchen came together and I got to see more and more of the repertoire, I was impressed by the food. The base recipes were rock solid, the flavors were fresh and clear, and the dishes I worked on made an impact that is still with me today. There was a lovely lobster dish of curry paste that I’d make by combining shrimp paste and red, yellow, and green curry pastes, and sweating it down; then I’d add apples and carrot, then turmeric, chiles, and lemongrass. We didn’t really cook out the apple and carrot flavor, so they remained in the foreground. For service, we’d warm it up and finish it with a spoonful of whipped cream—it would soufflé up, right over the top of the lobster—and a chiffonade of cilantro. It was simple but very tasty. We also made a langoustine saté that was served over a piped-out shrimp and langoustine mousse. But the main thing was the sauce: we added a puree of fresh oyster and a pinch of lime leaf to a sauce based on a vin blanc, a traditional sauce of white wine and cream.

  There was real freedom in Jean-Georges’s food, not just in the rule breaking, but in the unabashedly big flavors, the spice, and the acidity that I’d never encountered in such a sophisticated setting. Asian ingredients are part of just about every chef’s larder these days, but it was borderline revolutionary at Vong and very exciting: new flavors unleashed by French technique. During an era in which the food in Michelin-worthy restaurants was rigidly classical, having food of this caliber produced with the same methods and at such incredible volume was template-shattering.

  Southeast Asian food—with its lime leaf, lemongrass, chiles, palm sugar, and fish sauce—was a whole new world: fragrant, alive, intoxicating. The use of a variety of citrus at Vong was a revelation to me, the first time I’d seen certain distinct acidities in cooking. I’d used lemon in classical French cuisine, but Vongerichten called on quite a bit of other citrus, such as mandarin and especially kaffir lime. It began a love affair between me and this family of fruits, which has only grown and developed over time. I think of lime as the femme fatale of the citrus world, a seductive, perfumed experience unto itself that can overtake you if you’re not careful. It’s a fruit that brings out the explorer in me. I’m endlessly fascinated by its possibilities, not just of the juice itself but also of the oily skin and even of the intensely fragrant leaves. There’s a distinctly female sexiness to lime that compels me. Today a number of limes find their way into my cuisine, such as Persian limes, limequats, and mandarinquats. But it all began at Vong, with what at the time seemed an audacious yet perfectly natural mingling of French technique and Asian flavors.

  As a chef who sometimes thinks in terms of colors, lime also epitomizes green. The 2.0 version of my signature Green Apple–Wasabi Sorbet is served atop a frozen lime half, the apple, wasabi, and lime united by their common color. Also new to me at Vong was the opportunity to plate my own food. In other kitchens I’d worked in, we’d deliver our work to the pass, and the chef would plate and fuss over it until it was just right.

  Through it all, Jean-Georges continued to impress. First, he was just a good guy. I didn’t get to cook side by side with him because he was too busy running around, keeping tabs on all the moving parts of his growing restaurant group. But I still remember the day he took the time to ask me to make him the langoustine saté, and his complimentary and enthusiastic appraisal upon tasting it. Early on in Vong’s business days, he took a bunch of us chefs on a tour of an Asian supermarket, curious about what ingredients were available locally. Spotting some sesame bars that he knew from overseas, he bought a handful and handed them out to us. As we stood outside the market, tasting and hanging out with the boss in a way I never had before, he talked to us about his time in Bangkok and how they cooked there, contextualizing the snacks we were eating by describing how he’d discovered them at open-air street markets in the Far East.

  My entire experience of Jean-Georges planted a seed in my head, a curiosity about New York City: Vongerichten was born and trained in Europe, but had found his great success in Manhattan. Everything about him was refreshing to me, from his open, approachable attitude to the freedom in his food. Proud Brit though I am, I can’t help but admit that this was all incredibly refreshing to me. To a kid who never felt quite at home amid the stifling scene in London, Jean-Georges made me want to see where he came from.

  His fame, and pursuit of fame, also flew in the face of what I
have to admit is a stifling aspect of British culture: the idea that you cannot get too big for your britches, that only certain people are preordained to make it, to achieve a certain level of success. The uniqueness of his food—the unapologetic trumpeting of Asian flavors in a refined context—was also something that I didn’t think a Brit would have been capable of in those days. Marco, god among men that he was, still operated within the template of classic French cuisine and came up in a time when one had to be validated by the imprimatur of the greats. Vongerichten, on the other hand, created something altogether different, which he somehow made seem utterly natural.

  It wasn’t that I had outlandish ideas of my own yet, but the oppressive structure of British kitchen life, reflective of the country’s class system, silently bothered me, almost to the point of depression. And so, here was Jean-Georges, a jet-setting, Prada-wearing original, commanding attention on the world stage as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The fact that he found all of this success in New York City, I reckoned, was all I needed to know.

  Thai-Spiced Blowfish

  This Thai-spiced blowfish has a crust of red curry paste and burning laurel leaf, and I sometimes augment it with fresh coconut juice poured over it at the table. We didn’t serve this dish at Vong, or even a version of it, but I probably wouldn’t have come up with this abstract and sensuous connection of French and Thai food had I never cooked there. The recipe on this page produces a streamlined version of the dish. I suggest serving it like a tandoori with no additional sauce—let the natural juiciness of the fish speak for itself.

  The restaurant opened strong, was packed every lunch and dinner, and earned Best Newcomer of the Year from the Evening Standard. It was an exhilarating, dizzying month and a half. But when Jean-Georges himself got on a jet plane to his next adventure, the air went out of the enterprise for me. He said he’d see us all in six months, and the time stretched before me like an eternity. My infatuation with the flavors had settled down in Jean-Georges’s absence, and all I was left with was the volume of customers waiting to be satisfied. I fell into a semidepression, and whether I knew it right away or not, began to search for something new.

  Around this time, my lunchtime dining tour took me to Pied à Terre, where a chef named Richard Neat had earned all kinds of attention and buzz by going against the Marco grain and creating something distinctly his own. Where White’s food was grand and perfect, but elemental—a beautiful piece of meat, flawless sauce work, and garnish—Neat’s was intricate, with more ingredients per plate, harmonized as though he were drawing on the canon of classic cuisine, when in fact, some of the ideas were unique to him. And so with my pal Jason, I made plans to drop in one day and enjoy the astonishingly inexpensive lunch prix fixe, available for a little more than twenty pounds.

  What I encountered at Pied à Terre blew my mind. I still remember the dourade, gently cooked, with a lovely ratatouille and white bean quenelle and a sardine and onion puree. (Where had he thought of that puree?) Neat had cooked under Robuchon, and from the books and magazines I had read, I recognized the influence. The same went for my meat course of pork, prepared several ways including a crispy pig ear, braised cheek, and stuffed trotter. It was elegant food, but groundbreaking in its identity, a personalized rendering of state-of-the-art French cuisine.

  My wandering professional eye couldn’t help itself—I wanted out of Vong and into Pied à Terre. One night, just a few days before Christmas, I prepared all my mise en place and quit, telling the chef I was leaving and not coming back. It was an irresponsible thing to do, a violation of the code between cooks. To give no notice was bad enough, but to leave on the spur of the moment was unforgivable. I wasn’t proud of it then or now, and I regret it to this day. But when I look back, I realize that I was simply young and in love, smitten with Richard Neat’s food and powerless to stop myself from impulsively pursuing it.

  A TASTE OF FRANCE

  London 1996

  I didn’t realize the kind of chef I myself might become one day until I went to work for Richard Neat at Pied à Terre at the age of twenty-one. Part of the reason was timing. I had chosen cooking as my vocation years earlier and sacrificed the last of my teenage years to pursue it, but had necessarily maintained the image of myself as a foot soldier rather than a commander, not indulging in fantasies of My Future. What would have been the point? When you spend more than a dozen hours a day engaged in the repetition of a handful of tasks, imagining a grander position is a sure recipe for discontent. And besides, I hadn’t earned the right to think of myself as a chef.

  But now I had grown from a boy to a man, and the chef within was feasting on a rich diet of influences—the techniques and compositions offered not only in the kitchens of L’Escargot, The Restaurant, and Vong, but also in those I’d dined in around town. Physically, I had grown to my current height of six feet four inches and had the kitchen confidence, the swagger, of a mature and confident cook.

  I had also developed what you might call food fluency. Having spent the better part of the past few years developing the vocabulary and grammar of cuisine, I was ready to think and speak in complete sentences, if not paragraphs. I had a mastery of basic ingredients and technique, and even a bit of a knack for the exotic complements of Vongerichten, but lacked any instinct or inclination for how to put it all together in a way that would distinguish and represent me. Neat would change all that by causing a sea change in my perception of food as a means of self-expression.

  When I started at Pied à Terre in January, the chef had just received his second Michelin star and was cooking the most of-the-minute modern French food I had seen in all of London. Neat’s food was hypercreative and—most important—superpersonal, to an extent I’d not seen before. He wasn’t just cooking; he was actually saying something with the food, expressing himself on the plate, as compared to most of his contemporaries, for whom quality and consistency were expression enough. As for what he was creating, each composition was nothing less than a graphic work of art that inspired a reaction in the customer. He had a modernized nouveau sensibility that was more Parisian and feminine in its level of detail and elegance than Marco’s robust style, with lots of little, dainty elements on the plate. When the dish arrived at the table, it wasn’t just food that was being delivered; it was something that demanded at least a moment’s attention and contemplation before the conversation was resumed and the meal consumed.

  Where flavors were concerned, Neat’s were classical, but the ways in which he deployed them were unheard of. Rather than the requisite foie gras and Sauternes, or rouget and bouillabaisse-inspired dishes—combinations that it seemed everybody in town was drawing on—Neat served dishes that could only have been dreamed up by him, such as rouget tartare, date paste, and cauliflower puree. The earthiness of the rouget and cauliflower played against the sweetness of the fruit, conjuring a sort of classic umami flavor but in a distinctly French way.

  Moreover, the precision and elegance of the plating, and the intricate techniques employed to attain them, left everybody else in the dust. For example, there was a croquette that required the cook to fold chicken mousse and crabmeat together, pipe that into a leek, roll it in plastic wrap, then unmold it, bread it, and fry it à la minute. I’d never seen a leek used in that manner, nor would I ever have thought to use it that way, and such flourishes were the rule rather than the exception in Neat’s food. Another of his signature dishes involved a snail encased with chicken mousse, poached and rolled in dried morel mushrooms so it maintained its natural coiled shape. This was served atop potato fondant with garlic confit below and baby girolles (chanterelle mushrooms) all around. As if that weren’t enough, we’d shave tagliatelle-like ribbons of asparagus, blanch them, use a fork to wind them into a perfect bobbin, and set that in the center of the plate, with a garnish of chervil and a spoon-over of chicken jus and the snail’s braising liquid.

  Sometimes the preparations were simpler, but it was all fresh and exciting�
��even some revelatory decisions about otherwise familiar dishes, such as a crab and skate terrine that we served cold rather than hot. Some dishes were distinguished simply by the precision they required, such as langoustine tortellini cooked as they were at Robuchon to a degree of doneness (cuisson) specified by the customer, and the petit fours made from little opera cakes that we’d cut into 1 × 1-centimeter cubes.

  Neat’s food upped the game, operated on a level above what I’d experienced before, in terms of both sheer technical wizardry and that incredible, visceral reaction it inspired. Audacious didn’t even begin to describe the summary effect; it was nothing less than a man sharing everything of himself with the guest—his talent, craft, vision, and palate. I wasn’t in the dining room to witness it, but I loved the connection Neat’s food made with diners, and I only had to see my own reaction to glean this. I also loved the feeling of ambition his food rebooted in me. Having developed the full complement of basics, I was ready for new challenges as a cook, and the intricacies of Neat’s cuisine asked that of me, while providing constant inspiration.

  The kitchen at Pied à Terre was minuscule, much too small for the fourteen of us who worked there, and Neat was a big man—not Marco big, but imposing to be sure. For all of his uniqueness, he wasn’t above trying to be a little like Marco himself, growing his hair long and wearing sweatpants in the kitchen. Moreover, his menacing air was underscored by an eye that wandered at times; he scared the cooks a little bit.