To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  Still, I didn’t have any illusions. I didn’t think that one minute I’d become a chef and the next minute my name would be written on the plates or lit up in four-star glory. I had more to learn than I already knew. But I knew that until I took the chance of becoming a chef, of devising my own menu and managing my own crew, I would never grow into that position. And I felt that I had amassed enough knowledge and technique, and had enough ideas scribbled and sketched in those notebooks I’d been keeping, that I was ready to take the first steps down that path—and that any owner or owners who took me on would be in good and capable hands. My entire adult life had been about becoming a chef, and I knew that the transformation would continue for years to come. But I had to actually be enlisted as a chef in order to take those precious next steps.

  The general manager, an affable but somewhat disheveled man named Jimmy, greeted me when I arrived for my interview. I’m not one of those cooks who shows up in a T-shirt and denim. Jean-Georges Vongerichten taught me that, not directly, but by example. You show up in a suit. It makes a difference. People see all of that and they figure you for a man, not a boy. I was dismayed to learn that Jimmy wasn’t just the GM; he was also acting as the chef. What was that about? True, he had once cooked in some top kitchens, even Gray Kunz’s at Lespinasse, but you can’t just tap the GM—a guy who no longer cooked on a daily basis—to be the chef. Cooking doesn’t work that way, like a switch you can just turn on and off. If they thought that it was, I figured the place was in bad shape. I had no idea how right I was.

  Formerly a dentist’s office, the restaurant had undergone an expensive build out. The dining room was amoeba-shaped with irregular sight lines, but well-apportioned, with generous space between the tables and a pleasing view onto the park. The horse-drawn carriages gliding to and fro outside were a regal touch. The menu, though, was odd: buffalo steak with Hoppin’ John sauce? Really? And what was with the cottage cheese and fruit available on the dessert menu, priced at $22, no less? (I’d later learn it was to accommodate friends of the house who dependably followed the latest dieting fad; at the moment, it was Atkins.)

  A meeting was scheduled with the owners, a husband-wife team. Atlas didn’t serve lunch, so we met midday in the dining room, with the summer sun pouring in through the windows that faced the park. After all the usual pleasantries, they asked if I could do a tasting for them at lunch the next day. I agreed and didn’t ask them any more questions, because frankly I didn’t have any. I needed a restaurant, a proper restaurant, and they had one.

  “Do you want to give us a list of what you’ll want?” the husband asked.

  My response, driven by my successful improvisations at Bouley, caught their attention. “I’ll just have a poke around the fridges and see what you have, and I’ll make something from that.” I paused, then added, “But if you could have some artichokes and caviar on hand, that’d be lovely.”

  Eyebrows were raised. I guess they thought me brash, and I guess they were right. As I saw it, I was about to burst out of the cook’s cocoon and reveal the butterfly within. There was a feeling of anticipation and confidence welling up in me, and the plain truth was that I couldn’t wait to get into that kitchen and show what I could do. My plan was to improvise a meal like my hero Gagnaire: working like an octopus at the pass, taking this and that from here and there until before any of us knew it, he had fashioned new and unheard-of dishes from out of thin air. That was the way I aspired to cook, and I planned to put it all on the line and cook that way for my audition lunch. If I couldn’t deliver, I figured, then I wasn’t ready for the job.

  “All right,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

  I informed Jimmy that I’d come back around nine thirty the next morning, and left. I played it cool for my date with destiny and strolled into Atlas the next day at ten o’clock, to find Jimmy panicked by my thirty-minute tardiness. “They’re coming at one o’clock,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only four people.” As it turned out, it would be six—including pastry chef Della Gossett, Jimmy, the sommelier, and a friend—but none of that concerned me.

  In hindsight it was a foolish way to go about an audition menu, but what can I tell you: I was a confident twenty-four-year-old. I meant what I’d said to the owners. I was going to go into the walk-in and spin six courses out of whatever I found there. And what I found was promising: lovely Granny Smith apples, pristine diver scallops, striped bass, lamb, and the artichokes and caviar I’d requested.

  I’d never done an audition menu before, and I quickly discovered that this is one of the more pleasurable bits of cooking a young chef can engage in. It’s just you, and you get to perform all parts of the process, from basic prep to cooking, plating, and finishing dishes—there aren’t any cooks to manage or waiters to contend with. The entire enterprise rises or falls on the strength of your performance. Oh, if only cooking were like that every day!

  The first thing I did was take a moment to commune with all those ingredients, to engage in the kind of dialogue I knew that Neat and Gagnaire did with The Food. Your mind—knowing what the possibilities are and what your hands are capable of—leaps ahead several steps, presenting you with a menu of possible outcomes. Where most people see an array of fruits and vegetables, fish and meats, you see a meal. And so, with very little actual thought, I knew that I would serve the scallops raw, as a tartare, enrobed with a green apple gelée, and finished with a regal coat of caviar. The artichokes called out to me next: I decided to pair them with sour oranges, green apple tapenade, and a warm vinaigrette enlivened with chorizo (after the style of that rouget dish I’d seen Gagnaire make), and serve all of that with the striped bass. For the meat course, it would be roasted lamb loin with a pickled ginger and black trumpet crust with sautéed chanterelle mushrooms and baby marble potatoes alongside.

  I procured a sheet of paper and made myself a work list, then had at it, silently converting ingredients into food, calling on some of my favorite tricks of the trade. To make the apple gelée, I juiced the green apples, clarified the juice to separate out the starch, put it into a quart container, then waited for it to separate. Then came my favorite trick. Most cooks would skim the foam off the top, but somewhere along the way, I’d learned to punch a hole in the bottom and let the clarified portion drain out; then I poured that through a coffee filter to further refine it. For dessert, I sliced pineapples, made a vanilla and chile syrup with a touch of orange juice, and set some raspberries to macerating. While they did that, I butchered the lamb, cleaned and cooked artichokes, made a compound butter of garlic, thyme, shallot, and minced pickled ginger (come service time, I’d cook the mushrooms in that, along with the jus from the lamb). I saved a few easy tasks that didn’t involve cooking for last, such as shucking the scallops.

  There were other cooks in the house, readying their mise en place for dinner service, but I didn’t call on them for anything, except to ask for a bucket of ice or another stack of mixing bowls. Otherwise, it was head down and all business. As far as I was concerned, for those three hours, there wasn’t another soul in the universe.

  The time flew by, and when Jimmy informed me that my “guests” had arrived, I was ready.

  To give a full sense of the way a meal at Atlas might unfold with me at the helm, I started them with an amuse, a gazpacho of cucumber with lemon crème. While they sipped on that, I prepped the scallop tartare on chilled plates, applying slivers of the gelée ever so gingerly, then topping with the caviar. Before the runners took the plates out to the dining room, I studied my handiwork and nodded. It was as I’d pictured it a few hours earlier.

  Next, I turned my attention to the fish course. I was flowing by this point, just riding a wave of instinct and muscle memory. And within minutes, there was a wind at my back—the knowledge that I was doing well, evident by the fact that the plates from the first course came back clean (every chef’s measure of success or failure). After the fish, out went the lamb, followed by desser
t. I bound the raspberries and topped them with thin sheets of pineapple, like a ravioli, serving it with a quenelle of vanilla ice cream and tonka beans over the top. For good measure, I followed this with classic vanilla sablés (French butter cookies), to give a sense of the full breadth of my training.

  At the end of the meal, I was summoned to the dining room where I was promptly offered the job, at $61,000 a year.

  “Fine, great, I’ll take it,” I said. It was a typically green and unseasoned decision for me. I didn’t ask about health benefits or bonuses, or equity, or any of the things a more seasoned chef or businessperson might have asked. But what can I tell you? All I wanted was a kitchen to call my own and a chance to begin the process of self-expression and self-discovery essential to developing as a chef. I took the weekend off to collect my thoughts and planned to hit the ground running the following Monday.

  Green Apple–Wasabi Sorbet

  with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and Maldon Sea Salt

  One of the dishes I added right off at Atlas was a palate cleanser: Green Apple–Wasabi Sorbet with Extra-Virgin Olive Oil and Maldon Sea Salt. It was a telling exercise in developing a dish instinctually that began with a combination that intrigued me: crisp, tart green apples and icy, hot wasabi. It was a satisfying sorbet, but I wanted it to have more of a presence in the meal, to linger on the palate. So I turned to an olive oil from Provence, which actually has a slight hint of banana, what I think of as a greenness. I finished it off with a grain of Maldon sea salt, perched atop the sorbet like an ice flake. By the time the dish debuted on the menu, I had the idea of waiters finishing it at the table with a drizzle of the oil. The sorbet became my signature palate cleanser at Atlas, though I retired it for years, only revisiting it in 2011 at Corton. The recipe can be found on this page.

  It turned out that, for the worst of reasons, Atlas as I inherited it was a great place for a fledgling chef to develop a feeling of confidence because it was in such disarray that you couldn’t help but feel like the long-awaited savoir. On my first day, I was staggered to discover that the cooks, used to preparing dinner for just a few customers each evening, were turning up in the middle of the afternoon. It was about as cushy a job as you could get, or as they could make it, and as antithetical to my way of working. I was also shocked to see one of the guys start butchering meat—a task performed first thing in the morning in every kitchen I’d ever worked in—at five o’clock in the afternoon, half an hour before we opened.

  On a technical level, most of the staff was plainly out of their league. I remember the first day I got there, they had tried making foie gras terrines. One was overcooked, a second wasn’t seasoned properly, and neither was the third. One after another went into the bin until finally I put an end to it.

  “Guys, you know what that stuff costs, right?” I asked them. My first day on the job, and I was already going after my crew for being oblivious to food costs—just like a real chef. I didn’t hurl any terrines or langoustines, as I’d had hurled at me back in those London days, but it was those lessons that prepared me to toe the line when I saw this abuse. And it was the hard work I’d done back in the day that allowed me to stop everything and hold an impromptu tutorial in the finer points of terrine making.

  Before too long, a terrible dichotomy was at work: my confidence in my own ability was swelling, but I had very little faith in the cooks. Nevertheless, I felt great urgency to overhaul the menu and replace the existing items with my own. My goal was to replace at least two dishes each week so that by the time we (hopefully) drew the attention of critics and diners, a cohesive menu would be in place.

  Ayu with Red Wine, Huckleberry, and Spinach

  Today I look at this dish, pictured on this page, a version of which I first served at Atlas, and think that I must’ve concocted it after a visit to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, because the visual composition is so undeniably inspired by Mark Rothko. The centerpiece of the dish is ayu, a sweet freshwater fish from Japan that, believe it or not, tastes like melon, a by-product of the fish’s diet. It has a very fine texture. Traditionally it is grilled, but I find that technique overcooks the delicate flesh, so instead I roll it into a ballotine and poach it, having a bit of fun with its shape. The ayu is paired here with huckleberry “cannelloni” and garlicky spinach. The recipe for Red Wine “Cannelloni,” from this dish, can be found on this page.

  It wasn’t long before having the freedom to do my own thing opened the floodgates of creativity. I was combining ingredients in new ways, and my style was quickly beginning to take shape, with what I would eventually come to think of as “graphic” presentations. A parsley and licorice soup encircled by bite-size salt cod beignets verged on kaleidoscopic. Clearly inspired by Gagnaire, I stuffed pig trotters with braised pork, then topped them with an attention-grabbing foie gras foam and paired them with a little salad of pickled anchovy and cucumber relish to cut the richness of the dish. (It sounds outlandish, but the combination of salty pork and tart pickles will be familiar to anybody who’s ever sampled from a charcuterie plate.)

  Having newly fallen in love with sushi, I was eager to incorporate sushi-inspired influences on the menu. So there was a freshwater eel with a red wine glacé served on a bed of watermelon. Another tribute to my sushi-love was rosettes of raw bigeye tuna topped with Granny Smith apple ravioli and sauced with lime puree and soy vinaigrette.

  I also recast the restaurant’s standard roasted chicken as a poached chicken topped with a chicken liver and artichoke foam. I served it atop another flavor combination borrowed from Gagnaire, basmati rice tossed with tarragon, mushroom, and chestnuts. (Eventually I would make the dish into an event, offering it for two on the menu.)

  While much of the inspiration came to me naturally, the execution was taxing, the most taxing work I’d done since much earlier in my career. Just as I’d worked nearly round the clock as a teenager in London, the focus these dishes demanded of me—not to mention the ongoing task of further refining them while also developing new ones—found me sleeping at Atlas most nights. I was so consumed with The Food and getting it right that I literally lived in the restaurant. I would work until two in the morning and be so tired that I’d curl up on a banquette in the dining room or under Table 1 right on the floor, and crash there. My alarm clock was the vacuum cleaner operated by the dishwasher in the morning. When I heard that, I’d stand up, reorient myself, go into the kitchen, wash up in the sink, and get right back to work. At the end of each week, I’d have grown a beard reminiscent of Paul McCartney’s in his Let It Be days, then go home on Sunday, shave, and clean up for the week ahead.

  That might sound crazy, but that’s what it took. That’s what was required to chip away at my menu while also dealing with the other issues that a chef has to manage, such as purveyors and the press. Nobody had heard of me in New York, nobody was out there waiting for me, but I knew that this was my chance to make an impression, to stake my claim. And the only way I knew to do it was to pour myself into it entirely. That’s what it takes to be a chef. Your life needs to be constantly about The Food. It’s not a switch you can turn on and off.

  This devotion paid dividends as ideas began to lead one to the next like dominoes. As the last of the late-summer tomatoes came into season, I introduced a first course featuring seven different preparations of tomato—including a tomato sorbet topped with caviar; heirloom tomato petals with slices of burrata cheese with Maldon salt; and caramelized tomatillos and pureed baby heirloom tomatoes set on a puddle of tomato gelée, with cilantro and basil over the top. There was also a toasted baguette spread with tomato paste, a salad of pistachio and Parmesan with tomato croquants, and a tomato terrine. As September wore on, I added as a main course a cannon of lamb with braised artichokes in a coffee-cardamom fumet, and off I went into the autumn, invigorated by the possibilities of a new season.

  KINMEDAI/BLACK TRUFFLE/PEACH Don’t know what to say. It works. Though pictured here with yellow peach, the less common white peac
h, with its blossomy quality, works beautifully with the earthy truffle and the fragrance of the kinmedai.

  Ironically, as my repertoire grew, my team shrunk. My menu, and what it took to achieve it, was a big challenge for a staff used to much less labor-intensive food. Within a week, two cooks walked. After another week, another two left. I was down to two guys. It was no fun being down so many staff members in the kitchen, but it was an opportunity to build up a team with guys of my choosing. Fortunately, one of the guys left was Jason Berthold, a young kid from Michigan who was just getting started in his career and had deft hands and a good work ethic. And one of the new chefs on board was Tom Rice, just back from a stint in Monaco working for Alain Ducasse, who was only too happy to come on board. I don’t use words like badass to describe cooks, but if I did, Rice would be the reason I changed my policy.

  It was tough to attract new talent because of the ongoing tension between the front of the house and the kitchen. The restaurant was run as a sort-of club for the regulars, so no reservation requests were denied, and the place was packed during prime time and downright empty on the fringes. Often, we’d go down in flames in the kitchen, drowning in tickets and the knowledge that customers were waiting an hour between courses. Adding insult to injury, I’d often spy the waitstaff in the corner drinking coffee and shooting the breeze—not an ounce of pride in our collective work.

  In the midst of this chaos, a young cook named Jacob Proofer trailed with me for a night. He had been cooking in New York City since the age of nineteen and was looking for a new job. The night before he came to me, he had trailed in the kitchen of the legendary seafood restaurant Le Bernardin. Jacob had an interesting past: he had been discovered when he was nineteen and spent five years as a fashion model, traveling the world and living the life. But he couldn’t stand it, and returned to his true love—food.