Vaughn and I checked ourselves in to an economy hotel in Chelsea and began exploring the city, walking for miles with no particular aim or destination. We roamed the length of the West Side Highway, along the Hudson River, oblivious to the fact that the landmass on the other side was New Jersey; we scurried like mice through the crooked maze of Greenwich Village, ducking in and out of clothing shops and record stores, bars and cafes; and we luxuriated in the majesty of Central Park, that great, democratic oasis of rolling green and sequestered, wooded pathways, in the heart of New York City—the perfect rejoinder to anybody, like my friends back home, who find Manhattan harsh and unbeautiful.
And, of course, we ate. Our first stop was the Gotham Bar and Grill because back in London, at my favorite bookshop, Books for Cooks, I’d seen a book about cooking with port that featured a dish by Gotham’s chef, Alfred Portale, that was finished with a port reduction. The chef, known for his artful presentations, stayed in my mind, and at Gotham I had my first taste of succulent Maine lobster, in a salad with avocado and caviar. As with Vong in London, I was amazed by the quality of food Portale was able to put out in a restaurant that looked to be serving about two hundred lunches. At Daniel Boulud’s eponymous restaurant, I was struck by how much fresh life he was able to breathe into his unmistakably French menu with dishes like sweet corn soup with watermelon and peekytoe crab. At Gray Kunz’s Lespinasse, I enjoyed a roasted turbot with citrus confit, and there too was impressed by the vibrancy and flavors, as well as the ambitious menus relative to the number of seats. Executing that level of artistry across so many meals was still unimaginable back in London or Paris. At Bouley and Bouley Bakery, I discovered that food in the classic French mode was alive and well in New York, even in the hands of an American chef.
After ten days, as it had after my time in Paris, the very thought of returning to London was something I almost couldn’t bear. I was like a bluefin marlin that had been hooked. I printed my CV and gave it to a number of chefs around town, including Alex Lee at Daniel and the sous-chef at Lespinasse, but on hearing that I didn’t yet have a working visa, both of them gave it right back to me. And so, even though I didn’t have a job waiting for me in Manhattan, I flew back to London, paid my rent with a few consulting gigs, secured a visa, closed my bank account, and set a date to return to New York City. For good.
Halibut Jamón
My tribute to the cultures of both smoked fish and cold cuts in New York City. Jamón, Spanish for “ham,” is the name I apply to my cured local halibut. I apply a vadouvan spice mixture to the fish and cure it for eighteen to thirty-six hours, depending on the fattiness of the fish, then thinly slice it as one might a sturgeon or smoked salmon. (In this recipe, I call for twenty-four hours of curing, which should be adequate regardless of fattiness.)
The Halibut Jamón is pictured with a yuzu sponge, mandarinquat (a tart cross between a mandarin and a kumquat), goat cheese Chantilly, and green mango chutney—each contributing a distinct sweetness or acidity that complements the natural sweetness of the fish and the spice in the cure. You can also serve the cured fish on its own or even on a bagel as you would smoked salmon. The recipe for the Halibut Jamón can be found on this page.
“The Bagel”
This wintertime canapé was inspired by my first formative days in New York City. Having been raised, since my teenage years at least, on morning croissants—the baked good of choice among Michelin-level cooks in the UK and Europe—I was caught by surprise at the popularity of bagels among New Yorkers. As emblematic as they are of the city, I’ve never quite warmed up to them. They’re just too dense and leaden for me, especially first thing in the morning, which is a painful time of day for most cooks. But I appreciate it as a part of the landscape, a local institution. And so, in the “when in Rome” spirit of an adopted son, I created this tribute to New York’s favorite morning tradition. It’s roughly the size of a quarter and flavored with orange zest. Another dimension is achieved by smoking the yeast. In short, if I were ever going to begin my day with a bagel, this is the one I’d do it with. The recipe can be found on this page.
ANAGO/FOIE GRAS/PISTACHIO CRÈME This dish of foie gras wrapped in warm sea eel, then seaweed, and paired with lightly toasted, unsweetened green pistachio ice cream was inspired in part by my first taste of sublime Japanese seafood in the sushi restaurants of New York, as well as by a dish of eel and foie gras that I admired at Martín Berasategui’s restaurant in the Basque region of Spain—both filtered through French cuisine. To me, this dish oozes sex appeal, like gazing at Monica Bellucci.
With the decision to remain in New York City came the need to find work. And so, when I returned to Manhattan a few months later in summer 1999, I was a cook in need of employment. Too embarrassed to return to Daniel or Lespinasse after they turned me away for lack of a visa, I walked in off the street and handed my CV to Brian Bistrong, a soft-spoken, gentle soul who was David Bouley’s chef de cuisine and chief lieutenant.
Bistrong scanned the document—his eyes widening as he worked his way down past the legendary establishments, one after the other—then looked up at me and said, “You want my job?”
I was both flattered and taken aback. “No, I’m new to the city. I just want to cook.”
Brian hired me on the spot. I later learned that after I left, he pinned my CV to the employee bulletin board and showed everybody the hit parade of European chefs I’d worked with. There was already a serious crew at Bouley. In addition to Brian, there was Galen Zamarra on meat, Doug Psaltis on garnish, and Eric Greenspan on fish, and all have gone on to successful careers in their own rights. It was an all-American crew, and the introduction of a foreign kid was conspicuous, to say the least. My accent was more pronounced than it is now, creating a bit of a barrier and prompting people to ask if I was from Scotland or Ireland.
I was chef de partie on the fish station. Josh DeChellis, who had helped open Union Pacific, was the a.m. fish guy, so we ran it together for a few weeks, before I was promoted to sous-chef and more kitchen-wide responsibility. Josh and I got to be buds. I enjoyed his joie de vivre and some of his hilarious kitchen colloquialisms, especially his use of the word guy. Josh is from New Jersey but worked in California for a while, and that laid-back vibe shows up in his language. “Hey, can I take my guy and ride it in your guy?” he’d ask. Eventually, I decoded his shorthand and discovered that he was asking to braise his lamb in the jus I was using for another preparation. To a cook of my background, it was like another language altogether.
In addition to the upscale dining experiences on offer in New York City, I quickly began to explore the international cuisines of the city, taking the lead of my kitchen colleagues. One of the things that struck me straight away about American kitchens was that the less taxing days left the cooks with energy to burn at the end of the night. Befitting the hour (when most upscale establishments were closed) and their budgets (one thing that was the same on this side of the Atlantic), each cook had a regular itinerary of so-called ethnic joints, casual eateries where the foods of other cultures were served. Just as I’d gravitated to London’s Chinatown as a child, I was drawn to many of these restaurants and fascinated by what I found and tasted there.
Josh also introduced me to high-end sushi at Sushi Yasuda and Japanese cuisine in general, filling in blanks I’d been left with after my introduction to some key ingredients at Gagnaire. I had never tasted products such as Santa Barbara uni or Japanese kinmedai, and the simplicity and cleanliness of the cuisine, not to mention the utter perfection of the fish itself, was a revelation to me—one of those moments when I saw ingredients a little clearer, opening a new chapter of food and cuisine in my life.
BLACK OLIVE GNOCCHI, OCTOPUS, GOAT MILK CHANTILLY Another tribute to my sushi-love, this one centered on octopus. Believe it or not, I didn’t realize it looked like a Japanese flag until I saw this photograph. (The recipe for the Black Olive Gnocchi can be found on this page.)
I also made time, when I
could afford it, for some high-end dining. The talk of the town at this time was a kitchen wunderkind named Rocco DiSpirito, a former chef de partie from Gray Kunz’s kitchen at Lespinasse who had exploded into national prominence at Union Pacific in the Flatiron District in 1997.
DiSpirito used a lot of Asian techniques and ingredients, but with a fundamentally French sensibility. Some of his dishes were simply rendered but noteworthy for the combinations. One early signature was a bay scallop and uni served on the half shell and enlivened with tomato water and mustard oil. Another dish audaciously combined watermelon, calamari, and cilantro. I, along with much of the New York City dining cognoscenti, was knocked out and saved up my money to eat there every three or four weeks.
One day, while savoring some fresh air outside Bouley after the dinner service, Josh, who’d worked at Union Pacific, was on the phone with DiSpirito. He abruptly handed his phone to me.
“I’m looking for a sous-chef,” DiSpirito said.
“I was just offered a sous position here,” I said.
“Great,” he said. “Good for you.”
Things were looking up for me quickly in New York City. For the first time in my life, I was a sous-chef, at Bouley, and I took advantage of the autonomy it brought to begin feeling my oats in the kitchen, running my own stuff on the menu. With visions of Gagnaire and his gift for spontaneity still fresh in my mind, I began improvising dishes: combining apple and lime puree with almond cream; lobster-poached butter with chanterelles cooked with sansho pepper; and other compositions.
After just seven months on the job, Bouley had his chef de cuisine, Galen Zamarra, terminate me. I was never quite clear on the reasons, but the truth was that I was happy to be cut loose because I was emboldened by how my personal creations were working out in the kitchen, looking to make the leap to my own chefdom, and perfectly happy to be pushed out of the nest.
And so, with spring in the air and the sense of optimism and possibility all around, I answered an ad in the New York Times: the owners of a restaurant were looking for a new head chef. The time to leap was now.
Santa Barbara Uni/Black Kombu Gelée/Spring Pea Puree
It wasn’t until I came to New York City that I had proper sushi, which to me is about as close to perfection as food can get: pristine natural product expertly shaped and minimally manipulated. One of my favorite delicacies quickly became Santa Barbara uni, so naturally compelling, with a complex mouthfeel, that you needn’t do anything to it. This dish pairs uni with black kombu gelée (made with a lemongrass-infused dashi base) and a vegetable puree that I change with the seasons and my mood: sometimes I make it with peas, sometimes with carrots, sometimes parsnips. I also sometimes shave raw black truffles over this dish for an earth and sea effect.
Squab and Plum
The first time I visited a New York City Korean restaurant, where little grills are embedded into the tables and customers barbecue their own food, I almost set myself aflame. Rather than cooking my beef piece by piece, as you are supposed to, I put all of it over the grill at once, causing a terrible flare-up. Despite this traumatic beginning, I quickly came to love Korean food, and this dish of squab and plum, which looks French, tastes distinctly Korean and honors that discovery in my early New York days. It combines squab with plum and a kimchee consommé. Other touches have nothing to do with Korean food but round out these flavors nicely, such as a liquid yogurt gnocchi, which brings a lactic element to the plate, balancing the barbecue flavors.
TOE IN THE WATER
In the spring of 2000, I took a meeting with the owners of Le Gans, a sixty-seat restaurant in the meatpacking district, on the fringe of the West Village—one of those industrial, cobblestone regions of the city that time seemed to have left behind. The neighborhood has since become trendy and restaurant-laden, but at the time was barely colonized, save for a bistro Keith McNally had just opened called Pastis, and Le Gans, named for Gansevoort Street. The owners, two Moroccan gentlemen, were wary of hiring me. They had a good thing going, having earned two stars from the Times and wanted to be clear with me that they were running a French bistro.
I assured them I could do bistro food, and I did: Paul bistro food. There was a salad topped with goat cheese croquettes and dressed with a fig vinaigrette; dourade tartare with black olive jelly and microgreens; and rabbit leg stuffed with squid and chorizo, cooked with a shellfish and squid ink jus. Simple stuff that I was able to execute with the meager staff—just myself and two other cooks. It was such a modest space, with such a skeleton crew, that there was no sense of truly arriving as a chef in my own right, though it was gratifying to set my own menu.
Looking back, I have to admit that it wasn’t really the right food for the place or the neighborhood. But I was a young chef, full of ideas, and looking to stick my toe in the water. Some friction soon developed between me and the owners, highlighted by a somewhat absurd exchange we had every morning: I would tell one of them that we put milk in our tea in England, and he would snap back, “No you don’t!” as if he had greater insight into my homeland than I did. The ritual was a reflection of our larger differences.
Nevertheless, I had a good time at Le Gans. I was living in a rented room in another cook’s apartment on MacDougal Street in Manhattan’s fabled SoHo (never mind that the name was borrowed from London), and Le Gans’s neighborhood was colorful in its own right. Often I’d do some of my prep work outside and would look up to see James Gandolfini, at the height of his Sopranos fame, hanging out outside his apartment and smoking a cigar. “How you doin’,” he’d say with vintage New York delivery. When I left the restaurant at two in the morning, I found myself in the company of groups, packs, of transsexual prostitutes, who I saw so frequently that I began to know some of them by name. (Hi, Shaniqua! Hi, Kiwi! Strawberry!) It was also an exciting time for me to be in New York because the great French chef Alain Ducasse was opening his restaurant in the Essex House and there I was, at the very same time. Not that I put myself on the same plane as that living legend, but it was still thrilling to be a chef in his company.
Because so many up-and-coming cooks knew me from Bouley, word began to get around that something interesting was going on at Le Gans. A lot of cooks came in after service, including Josh and a talented whisk named Tom Rice, a friend of Josh’s from his Jean-Georges days whom I’d met one night hanging out at a downtown watering hole called Liquor Store Bar. One day, Josh called me and said, “Rocco’s coming in,” and that evening I did a tasting menu for him and a date, featuring, among other dishes, a carpaccio of dourade with green olive oil, black olive gelée, and fresh tomato paste; and a yogurt panna cotta with delicate candied tomato gelée.
At the end of the meal, I came out to the table to say hello to DiSpirito, and his appraisal was enigmatic: “Everything exceeded my expectations.” As I walked away from the table, I couldn’t help but think to myself, What the fuck did that mean?
I also had my first experience with the chef-owner dynamic. One of the owners had a hair-trigger temper and would lose it constantly. If a customer bothered him, he would kick him out, and he’d threaten to fire front- and back-of-the-house staff for any transgression on a daily basis.
That summer, after just two and a half months in the job, I took my girlfriend of the time to Paris for a week. I returned to a kitchen that I scarcely recognized. I could feel it the moment I walked in—the same sensation, I imagine, you get when you realize your home has been broken into. It just felt different, and upon closer inspection, I learned that things were different. Everything had been moved around, and much of it had been changed. I rummaged through the refrigerator and all of the mise en place was altered: instead of chorizo, black olive jelly, and squid ink jus, there was mustard vinaigrette, canned artichokes, and jarred asparagus.
I slammed the door closed, ran into the dining room, and pulled a menu from the stack in the compartment built into the maître d’s podium: it was the exact menu they had before I came to work there. Frisée sa
lads, croque monsieur, steak frites, profiteroles. Bistro 101.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on: they were going to push me out. I didn’t really care, because I didn’t want to be there, but I’d be goddamned if I would give them the satisfaction of firing me. When they showed up later that morning, I asked if we could sit for a moment.
“Listen,” I told them, “I did some thinking while I was away, and I don’t think this is going to work out. I’m giving you my notice.”
They looked at each other and could barely contain their relief.
“It’s probably for the best,” one of them said.
For once, we were in total agreement.
SHADES OF GREEN
Afriend tipped me off that a relatively new Midtown restaurant named Atlas, not yet a year old, had lost its chef. Freshly in the hunt for a new position after the coup of Le Gans, I phoned them up and inquired about an interview.
Atlas was way up on Central Park South, the three-block stretch of 59th Street that frames the southern edge of the park. I knew next to nothing about this region of Midtown. My life had been downtown, living in SoHo, working for Bouley and then at Le Gans. But I liked the location. It didn’t have the grittiness of downtown or the elegance of the Upper East Side, but I appreciated the international vibe on the street—lined with posh hotels that drew a moneyed, global clientele—and the majesty of one of the world’s great urban parks across the way.
Truth be told, despite my short-lived stint at Le Gans, I wasn’t truly ready to make the quantum leap to chef at a restaurant like Atlas, a proper establishment in a prominent location and staffed with a full complement of cooks. Nobody is. Until you actually do it, there are simply too many responsibilities you haven’t had, too many decisions you haven’t made, too much pressure you haven’t had the privilege of bearing. I was only twenty-four. Relatively young to be handed the keys to the kitchen of a place like Atlas. But something told me that I could handle it.
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