To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  Jacob was a total pro, and I would have been delighted to have him. But the night he trailed with us was one of our disastrous nights, and after service I sat down with him and apologized. I was certain that there was no way he’d come to work at Atlas after what he’d seen at Le Bernardin the night before. He blew my mind when he looked at me and said, “I saw your food tonight, and I can see the potential of where it can go. I can see what you are trying to do, and I see that with the right people on board, this will be the best food in New York City.”

  I was humbled. “Thanks,” I said.

  “I want the job.”

  I could hardly believe it. I hired him.

  That exchange was especially heartening because I was beginning to realize that one of the biggest challenges—at least to a cook with my depth of experience—wasn’t the food. As the menu was taking shape, I was able, more able than I’d thought possible, to conceive and execute my own dishes. I had plenty to learn and years of development ahead of me, but the fundamentals were in place and I was happy with what I was turning out.

  No, the bigger challenge was management. At least, that was the challenge here in America. I didn’t realize until I was on my own, hiring cooks for the first time, how lucky I’d been to work in the rarefied air of those Michelin-starred kitchens in London and Paris, and even for Bouley here in New York. Those restaurants drew the most talented cooks like moths to a flame. Everybody who comes to work in those kitchens is up to the task, possessing a complete set of skills and knowledge of the fundamentals. In those kitchens, you showed up to work, got your instructions for the day, and could do whatever was asked of you.

  But generally speaking, in a green kitchen like the one at Atlas, the cooks were more of a mixed bag and far more dependent on constant nurturing. I didn’t appreciate this, so I had no idea how to hire properly. If somebody came from a kitchen like Daniel or Jean-Georges, my instinct was to consider them world-class material automatically. But those pedigrees didn’t mean the same thing then as they might have back home: just because somebody had worked for the best didn’t mean that they were the best or that they had the same motivations I did. It never occurred to me that somebody who had worked in top kitchens could be a slacker or simply not very good. And so I made some bad hires, and, to be honest, I didn’t suffer them very well. If somebody sank rather than swam … well, let’s just say that I wasn’t standing ready with a life preserver; I was more likely to sack them on the spot. What can I tell you? I was young, and that was the example I’d been shown as a young cook.

  But my attitude, to the food and to my staff, did pay off. Toward the end of September, the restaurant’s publicist announced my arrival in an item that was picked up in the weekly “Chefs on the Move” roster in the New York Times:

  Paul Liebrandt has come to his new job as executive chef at Atlas on Central Park South from Bouley Bakery and, before that, from London (Restaurant Marco Pierre White and Pied-a-Terre).

  —Florence Fabricant, New York Times, September 20, 2000

  Doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it was the first time I’d seen my name in the New York Times, and it was exciting. Every moment was now tinged with pressure, because once you announce a new chef in the press, a restaurant is on high alert. Today there are more critics and bloggers than you can keep track of, but in those days there were just two reviewers we really, truly worried about: Hal Rubenstein from New York magazine and, above all, William Grimes from the New York Times.

  Over the next month, I found my groove. Other dishes I introduced included a tempura of rouget and langoustines, paired with a pink grapefruit and seaweed salad; and a wild king salmon, with clams and a pumpkin curry. I didn’t just lavish attention on first and main courses; I wanted every part of the meal to be memorable. For an amuse-bouche one night, I served a salsify soup topped with a slick of Belgian white beer and a thin slice of roasted quince—layer upon layer of flavor to welcome each guest to the restaurant.

  My kitchen might not have been ready for the critics, but I was. I knew that the night one of them showed up, if the front of the house recognized them, that I’d do just what I’d done for my audition: go to town and improvise, shut out the rest of the world and cook for them. And sure enough, one night, about a week after the announcement in the Times, Jimmy came into the kitchen, looking stunned and confused.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Hal Rubenstein just walked in the door.”

  His anxiety only amused me, because I was psyched. This was the moment I had waited almost a decade for, and I had a cockiness that only a twenty-four-year-old chef—blissfully unaware of the possibility of failure—could enjoy. It was my first time cooking for a critic, the moment of truth every young cook dreams of. I couldn’t wait.

  “Let’s go!” I said. “Let’s get him down, then!”

  Rubenstein and his party sampled, among other dishes, the tempura and the lamb, as well as wild striped bass with a red pepper–saffron stew and the pasta I was serving at the time: tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms and truffle “perfume.”

  As if poor Jimmy wasn’t nervous enough already, in the middle of Rubenstein’s dinner, he staggered into the kitchen—this time looking as though he’d been shot through the heart, his face pale, his shirt drenched in sweat, the very personification of panic. As if the words meant impending Armageddon, he informed me that William Grimes had just shown up as a customer and been seated.

  My reaction could not have been more different from his. Bring it! I thought, clapping my hands together. Let’s get it on.

  I shouldn’t have done what I did next, but I decided to just improvise the food, supplementing and upgrading the dishes Grimes ordered. I rolled pasta à la minute, filled it with foie gras, shaped it into a tortellini, and topped it with foie gras consommé enlivened with a bit of lemon paste. It was a crazy thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself.

  I asked one of the waiters how Grimes was doing, and he told me that he couldn’t tell, because he was reading the paper with one hand and manipulating his spoon with the other. So I waited for his bowl to come back, and when it did, it was as clean as it was when it came out of the dishwasher. We were doing great!

  But my cooks seemed distracted, stealing glances in the same direction. I followed their gaze and saw that Jimmy was pacing around in the corner, positively flipping out under the pressure.

  Something took over in me right then, the same sense of ownership, of leadership, that I’d seen displayed by any great chef I’d ever worked for. I knew that calm heads always prevail and that it’s their responsibility to instill calmness in others, even if it has to be by intimidation. And so, I swooped in on him like a predator.

  “Listen,” I whispered. “If you can’t calm down, leave the floor.”

  Jimmy pulled himself together, and we got through that night. Grimes came back with three guests the next time, and Rubenstein returned twice more. Even before the reviews ran, word was starting to get out around town, at least among foodies and cooks. The restaurant’s business picked up. One night, I was out with Tom after work—we used to hang out at Blue Ribbon Sushi in Soho or at Whiskey Park just down the street from Atlas—and at the next table were another group of cooks.

  “You hear about this guy Paul Liebrandt?” one of them said to his buds. “Guy’s doing nine preparations of tomato. Insane shit.” It was a compliment. I was so new on the scene that people knew my name but not my face. I was also realizing that being from London lent me an air of mystique here in New York, where—for reasons I don’t quite understand—there are almost no high-profile British chefs. I felt like a mercenary.

  Despite all the chatter about us in knowledgable food circles around town, we were only doing about sixty covers a night in a restaurant with sixty-four seats. Maybe, I thought, what we’re doing is too adventurous, not for everybody. It wasn’t even for all my cooks. One day, that October, Jason sat me down and told me that he just didn’t connect with my food, that it wasn�
�t for him. He was more interested in what Thomas Keller, whose French Laundry Cookbook had just debuted, was doing.

  I wasn’t very mature about that kind of difference in those days. “Just leave now, then,” I told him in a huff. “I don’t want your notice. Just go.” He went on to work at Chanterelle for a number of years and then to The French Laundry, before becoming executive chef of Michael Mina’s RN74 in San Francisco. About the same time, I brought in David Coleman, a sous-chef who had been the lieutenant to Rocco DiSpirito at Union Pacific.

  Grimes reemerged for his third visit on Halloween night. I had a cook friend from Bouley who used to go hunting in Canada, and he had brought me some wild ducks from his latest outing. I had the birds in the walk-in, with the wings and feathers still intact because I didn’t know what to do with them.

  “Tell him we have a special of Wild Mallard Duck Cooked in a Salt Crust with Black Truffle and Red Currant Gelée,” I said to Grimes’s waiter. Grimes took the bait, ordered the special, and I was off to the races. I did a salt crust over the body of the duck, but left the wing intact, bending it back so it fanned out like a peacock. I tied the body to a brick to keep the wing back, and put it in the oven.

  What followed was pure, instinctual cooking. Where did the idea for that duck come from, the combination of black truffle and red currant? I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. It was the reward for sleeping in the restaurant, the way your brain starts to work when you devote more than a decade to The Food. It’s not a linear thought process: it’s creating a mind-set that breeds inspiration. When the duck was cooked, I put it on a silver tray and had the waiter present it to Grimes. I stood at the porthole and watched his face light up.

  I felt great about that night and had a good enough vibe that I thought we had a chance at three stars. But in the next morning’s Times, Alain Ducasse at the Essex House received three stars, and the air went out of my optimism. I felt, without hesitation, that Ducasse was operating a four-star restaurant. But by most people’s estimations, he had made all the wrong public relations moves since his arrival in the States, and so was denied his four.

  Wow, I thought. If he’s getting three, then there’s no way we will. We are not Ducasse.

  Tomato

  I didn’t devise some of the dishes on this page and this page until years after Atlas, but these three tomato preparations recall the tomato tastings I first began serving there. In addition to demonstrating my own development, they illustrate the incredible product available to a chef in New York City, where local tomatoes—such as those from nearby Eckerton Hill Farm—are as magnificent as any you will encounter anywhere. The dishes on the following pages include raw, partially cooked, and cooked tomato preparations, demonstrating the breadth of possibility with one ingredient. These are among the simpler dishes in the book; it’s not easy to find perfect, or even near-perfect, tomatoes, and when I do I like to respect them, doing as little as possible to them, the ultimate example being the heirloom tomato offering on this page.

  LEFT: A composition inspired by two styles of Spanish gazpacho, one featuring yellow tomatoes, the cube on top based on an ajo blanco. The stripe in the center is a quenelle of burrata ice cream and black olive paste.

  RIGHT: Black Prince tomatoes with albacore tuna confit, wrapped in smoked lardo and topped with a savory tomato financier.

  Heirloom tomatoes with yellow plum extra-virgin olive oil and smoked fleur de sel. (The recipe for the oil is on this page.)

  Just before Thanksgiving, Hal Rubenstein reviewed us in New York Magazine. It was a very nice review, praising my “deftness with unexpectedly appealing combinations,” but this was before the magazine had its own star system, so this didn’t have the weight or clarity of a Times review.

  Later that same week, I got a call from the photo desk of the New York Times … and that’s the call you look for. The Times always took a photograph of the dining room to accompany the review, and usually took the picture late in the week prior to the week the review would run. But the Times rep threw me a curveball when he told me that they were also going to photograph my Green Apple–Wasabi Sorbet. A food shot as well as one of the dining room? I’d never heard of that.

  “Let’s just say that he really, really likes your restaurant,” he said.

  A photographer came by that Friday and took a picture of the sorbet as I drizzled a thin stream of olive oil over it.

  On Monday, Grimes himself rang me up, his standard fact-checking call. How did I make the pig trotters, he wanted to know, and other technical bits. When he asked my age, I told him twenty-five, even though I was just twenty-four, because I thought the extra year might add some legitimacy to my chefdom. He didn’t give anything away, so I got off the call as clueless about what to expect as when I’d answered the phone.

  In those days, the Times critic made a weekly appearance on New York 1, a local cable news channel, on Tuesday night. With a cloud of winking electronic tiles obscuring his face and maintaining his anonymity, he would discuss the next day’s review with the anchorperson, and the whole thing built up dramatically to the moment of truth: the revelation of the number of stars. That Tuesday, we all kept our eye on the little television in the back office. Shortly after eight o’clock, Grimes made his appearance. I could tell right off it was going to be a good review.

  “There is a very interesting new place called Atlas,” he said, “and a young chef named Paul Liebrandt who is redefining French food.”

  Grimes went on and on about the menu, describing the décor and the service and spending a great deal of time on lovingly detailed food descriptions. At some point, I stopped breathing. It sounded for all the world like a three-star review. But was that really possible?

  “So how many stars?” asked the anchor.

  “Three,” said Grimes, and I ran into the dining room and took a victory lap, screaming, “We got three stars!”

  The customers burst into applause. Arriving at the hostess podium, I saw that all six lines on the telephone were lit up, and not just for reservations. Other chefs from around town were ringing up to offer congratulations. (Amusingly, another hot young chef later called to congratulate me, when I’d already heard from mutual friends that he was royally enraged that I was right in with three.)

  It was a great night. I took my cooks out for burgers and beers at the Corner Bistro, an old watering hole in the West Village, and we stayed out late into the evening, savoring our moment of triumph. Despite all the ups and downs, the comings and goings of the staff, the annoying cluster of insiders and their cottage cheese and special requests, we had pulled it off. And at just twenty-four, I was the youngest chef ever to attain three stars, even though the Times told the world that I was twenty-five. I only had myself to blame for that one—the one moment of professional doubt I’d had in months.

  The power of the Times was instantaneous. We had done sixty covers on Tuesday but did one hundred on Wednesday. The next day, the celebration continued—calls and flowers from chefs and restaurateurs. The Telegraph called up from London. And the Times itself ran more than just a review: it was a love letter, with photographs of the food. Even Jason called to congratulate me, telling me I was right all along. Haughty young thing that I was, I wasn’t very nice, but we both laugh about it when we run into each other today.

  By the middle of the day on Wednesday, I had shifted gears. All right, I thought. Now we go for four. Now it’s time to work harder. Because now everybody’s going to come in.

  The next few months were like a dream. Riding high on the strength of that review, and constantly revising the menu, I felt that I arrived. My little kitchen crew and I were like a rock band, working like maniacs every night and going out after hours for drinks or sushi. We didn’t tear up the town like some of our colleagues, but we had a good time, and when we see each other today, it all comes rushing back in a torrent of happy memories.

  If there was a disappointment during those months, it was that not everybody sha
red Grimes’s enthusiasm for what I was trying to do at Atlas. The most violent dissenting view was expressed by Jonathan Gold, critic for Gourmet magazine at the time, who penned a scathing, downright personal evisceration, unprecedented in the pages of the publication.

  The only thing that alleviated the sting of the Gourmet review was a letter I received from a fellow young chef, who expressed dismay at the attack and felt compelled to encourage me to continue trying to break new ground. He and I had never met, but he had recently left The French Laundry and was making a name for himself as chef at Trio restaurant in Chicago, where he was advancing his brand of so-called molecular gastronomy. That chef has gone on to be a brilliant success in his own right: Grant Achatz, who today presides over Alinea restaurant in Chicago.

  Fortunately, that bad review was just a speed bump. My crew and I had a fantastic next six months, constantly changing the menu and welcoming the food cognoscenti of New York into our dining room. A highlight for me was that Thomas Keller and designer Adam Tihany dined at Atlas several times, studying blueprints between courses. (Little did I know they were planning the restaurant Per Se in the Time Warner Center just down the street.) I also had the honor of being treated like royalty at other restaurants. When I took my crew to Ducasse for lunch, the maestro himself prepared us a menu, then took us on a tour of his kitchen.

  And yet, I must admit that I did make mistakes at Atlas, many of them. Though I wanted to be a chef, I was also exceedingly young to have become one. Most chefs spend years as a sous-chef to one or more mentors, developing under their auspices and tutelage before stepping into the spotlight on their own. Instead, I thrust myself out there after just a few months as a sous. And so, without the benefit of an editor, there were dishes that, looking back, I would not have served today: barbecued eel with chocolate glaze and watermelon comes to mind. But on the other hand, I look at dishes like phases in my life, and I had to go through those phases to get where I am today. I just wish that some of them might have been passed in private or in consultation with somebody who knew better. But what can you do? The past is the past.