To the Bone

by Paul Liebrandt

  COLD SWORDFISH AND PERSIMMON TERRINE WITH RICOTTA A refreshing and whimsical dish from Corton, this is designed to tease and awaken the palate with its ceviche of fish, sweet fruit, and the ricotta’s lactic quality.

  There was a subtext to these impromptu meetings, a sense that I was being welcomed into the fold, that approval was being conferred upon me in a not-so-secret society. In accordance with this, it felt natural to ask advice, and much of what I got in return was essential to my career. A highlight of this period was when my muse, Pierre Gagnaire, came to dinner at Corton (alas, he didn’t remember my working for him). In an English-French conversation that lasted about ninety minutes, he told me, “Be true to yourself.” It was heartening and reaffirming. I’d always been true to myself, but it wasn’t always easy. (Gagnaire’s visit was also momentous for another reason: I’d never had a chance to tell him what an impact he’d had on me, and finally got to say the words, “You changed my life.”)

  Smoked Caramel and Pomegranate

  Just as I did when I was a young boy, I continue to go to the movies in my adopted home of New York City, sometimes on my own and sometimes with Arleene. There’s only one thing missing for me here in America: Butterkist, the British concession stand favorite that I so enjoyed with my dad at the movies.

  This smoked caramel and pomegranate dish runs that craving through the auteurist mind of a cinema-loving chef. I’m particularly proud of the interplay of textures and flavors in the mouth and with the pomegranate caramel, composed of pomegranate juice, isomalt, glucose, and a pinch of malic acid. After it’s baked, it can be pulled into whatever shape you like. Its origins lay in childhood, but the connotations for my restaurant customers couldn’t be more adult. Its regal combination of caramel and smoke might make you feel like you’re sitting in a red leather armchair, perhaps in Scotland, sipping an aged Balvenie—a surprising but perfectly logical marriage of a childhood treat and a sophisticated adult indulgence.

  This company and acceptance was all perfectly lovely, but it also had the quality of a dream. None of it would be real until I felt the sword of the Michelin Man on my shoulder, dubbing me into stardom. The Sunday prior to the announcements, I was out to dinner with Arleene, our mutual night off, and I was a wreck. Michelin had only been a part of the U.S. dining landscape since 2005. But for those of us who came up in Europe, The Michelin Guide had been around for more than a century and remained the final word on your success or failure. I had spent my early years in Michelin-focused Europe, and it would mean the world to me. I was so consumed with anticipation that I cannot even remember where we went or what I had for dinner that night.

  The morning of the day the Michelin news was to be released, I was surprised at home with an early-morning cell phone call. It was The Michelin Guide’s director at the time, Jean-Luc Naret. On hearing his voice, I had a feeling that fortune was about to smile on me, because Naret was known for delivering exceptionally good news himself, phoning first-time star recipients and those moving up from one to two or two to three.

  “Paul, I wanted to be the first to tell you,” he said. “You’re going right in with two.”

  I exhaled and released a pressure that had been steadily mounting since I first became a cook. I thanked Naret for the call and headed off to Corton, a little-boy grin on my face. On arrival at the restaurant, I looked over my kitchen, the cooks going about their work, same as they were in similar kitchens all over the world.

  I called everybody to attention, had them get into formation along the line. I detected a collective shudder. They’d known that the Michelin verdict was imminent but had no idea if this was to be a celebration or a firing squad. I took a long pause, for effect, to own the news by myself for just a moment longer before sharing it.

  “We got two,” I said.

  The celebration was muted. It had taken so much work to get there, and there had been so much anticipation, that it hardly seemed real. Everybody nodded and smiled. We took a break and had coffee together. And then we got back to work.

  “THE MARINE” From Corton, this dish of oyster, green apple, onion meringue, and shallot cream evokes one of my favorite scents, the essence of the ocean, so perfectly captured by the French term for sea foam, écume de mer. That faint oceanic smell never fails to take me back to my first days at St. Aubyns.

  It was a funny day. The news wouldn’t be officially released until a party planned for that evening, so although I knew what had transpired, few others did. The only plaudits that rolled in were from fellow inductees and multi-starred chefs. Daniel Boulud, a generous soul who was elevated from two stars to three that day, sent me a text saying, “If I were fourteen years old today, I’d want to come work for you.”

  But I have to be honest: Earning those stars offered me temporary satisfaction, which is the only form of satisfaction a chef can afford to indulge in. Within an hour, I felt a desire to harness our sudden momentum and push to the next level. Maybe it’s because I’m the son of a military man or because I was professionally raised by perfectionists, but I found myself immediately restless, just as I was at Atlas after receiving three stars from the Times. I grabbed a menu and ushered my sous-chef, Ari Weiswasser, over to a banquette.

  “This isn’t three-star food,” I told him. We took the whole menu apart and began thinking of ways to further refine each and every dish. That might sound severe, but the truth is that chefs—real, working chefs—don’t think about “making it.” Because the moment you do, you’re finished. The nature of a chef’s work is unique because we have to re-create our success from scratch every day. Yesterday’s triumphant service doesn’t mean anything to today’s customer. And the experience of the happy loving couple at Table 12 has no bearing on the group of four at Table 16. You re-create and reaffirm your success with every plate that leaves the pass. Yesterday doesn’t mean a thing. And neither does the first seating that just wrapped up five minutes ago. It’s all about the next one. For all that’s different in my profession since I started cooking, that’s one thing that will never change.

  BEEF/CRAYFISH/ALMONDS/MORELS The dance and play of flavors in this springtime dish served at Corton remind me of cooking at Pierre Gagnaire, with its mingling of fifty-day-aged black Angus beef and crayfish. The cooking is very precise: the crayfish are cooked for exactly three minutes and forty seconds in a court bouillon, then brushed with almond oil.

  Black Sesame Crème

  with Purple Potato Ice Cream and Cashew Paste

  This dish from Corton, pictured on this page, sums up my feelings about the intersection of life and food. Put aside for a moment the techniques required to create it, and appreciate everything it allows me to say: an expression of wonder at life moving all around, and yet, at the center of it all, the purple potato ice cream. I didn’t conceive the dish with this in mind, but when I look at it, I recognize that I am that ice cream, surrounded by new influences and ingredients, new ideas and inspirations, trying to make sense of it all and to answer the question, Who Am I?

  It’s the query that keeps me looking forward and backward in time, drawing on the past even as I shape my future. Decades from now, when my work is done, I hope to have solved the Puzzle of Paul, at least on the plate. In the meantime, I will continue to revise and rewrite my menu—a biography expressed in a dozen or so dishes—until it’s all clear to me, until everything I’ve learned and done comes together the way it was meant to.

  I just hope there’s time enough to get there.

  EPILOGUE

  Inever did get the opportunity to push for that third Michelin star, at least not at Corton. In July of this year I left that restaurant and opened the Elm, a new restaurant in the white-hot neighborhood of Williamsburg in the borough of Brooklyn, New York. At the same time, a signature Paul Liebrandt restaurant in Manhattan is in the planning stages. Yet much remains the same. Every morning, around ten, I wave all the cooks in my kitchen to the pass for a meeting. It’s one of the few moments before the dinner hour t
hat we set our individual work aside and come together as a unit. As I brief them on menu changes and other news of the day, I can’t help but marvel at the continuum in which we all participate. It often seems mere days ago that I was in their position, a young cook, standing amid a sea of blue aprons, eager to learn and to prove myself.

  KAMPACHI/HUCKLEBERRY/ROSE/DAIKON Lightly cured kindai madai from Japan, mountain huckleberries, and a veil of pickled daikon. The use of rosebud powder as a sort of paint was inspired by the paintings of Cy Twombly.

  JAPANESE SARDINE WITH YUZU-RICOTTA WHEY AND FRESH CHICKPEA Come to Scandinavia … via Japan. We call this dish “Smoke and Winter” on my menu, where we serve it during the dead of winter. The Japanese sardine, more gently flavored than its European counterpart, underscores the crispness of the season. The smokiness of the trout roe combats the sardine’s chill, as does the warmth of the yuzu-ricotta whey and the grilled peanut oil that dresses the chickpea.

  Can it really have been twenty years since I first took knife in hand, since those formative days when I needed a Simon Davis to take me under his wing and show me the ropes? It hardly seems possible. I still remember my first day in a kitchen, my failed cooking experiments at home, my fledgling sense of mastery over the fundamentals. There are moments when I gaze over my cooks and—for a millisecond—forget what year it is. Am I back at Marco Pierre White’s in London? Pierre Gagnaire’s in Paris? Maybe it’s because so much about so many kitchens is the same: The harsh lighting. The white tiles. The persistent Morse code of knives tapping on cutting boards. Baby-faced cooks in their aprons, learning on the job, simultaneously overwhelmed and exhilarated, and, in direct contrast, the hardened young veterans, swaggering about. It’s like that in kitchens all over the world.

  But the disorientation doesn’t last long. I’m the chef now, responsible for the restaurant’s vision, and for the kitchen’s success or failure. But things have changed, and so have I. I’m a stern leader, and I expect a lot from my brigade, but I also try to be more supportive than most chefs were when I was coming up, to offer a more nurturing environment, to not simply throw newcomers to the wolves. Tough but fair would sum it up nicely.

  The Food—my food—has been a constant evolution, a process of self-discovery carried out in public, on the plate, and evaluated by everybody from customers to critics to those who opine on the Internet and in the blogosphere. The evolution continues today. I’m not one to dwell or to wallow. My menu has always changed often, and I hope it always will. I don’t seek or desire a set menu of signature dishes that I can lean on. Maybe it’s because I’m such a fan of music, an ever-changing medium in which artists release new works with regularity, that I don’t want my food to become stagnant, but rather to evolve on an almost daily basis. Even my most popular dishes are eventually retired or temporarily retired, even the From the Garden starter that drew such accolades when Corton opened. I could have served that until the end of my cooking days, but it’s my fervent belief that once you start resting on your laurels as a chef, you have set yourself on the path to obsolescence.

  It will be an evolution for me to have two venues under my leadership at one time, each offering its own singular style of cuisine and providing me an opportunity to give voice to different sides of my personality, to create menus and experiences that conjure distinct tones, moods, and points of view.

  The Elm offers a less formal version of what we did at Corton or will likely do at the new Manhattan restaurant, with a focus on the building blocks of cooking, of letting the ingredients speak for themselves. We focus on fundamental techniques, emphasizing the nature of each dish’s primary ingredient. (In some ways, I’m reminded of the two dining venues at L’Escargot, with a casual restaurant downstairs and smaller, more refined venue on the second floor.) Fine dining is a rewarding milieu in which to work, but it’s not for everybody. The Elm offers Paul Liebrandt food in an environment that is more affordable. It’s food that marks a return to my culinary roots and to the kind of food we chefs like to eat ourselves—truth be told, most of us keep it simple when we dine out.

  Beyond the invigoration that comes from having new outlets for creativity, the new restaurants will afford me the chance to grow as a chef, to learn to trust my team in ways I’ve never had to before. At the same time, I still enjoy cooking, still crave the tactile pleasure of butchering fish or making fresh pasta, and still revel in the challenges and rhythms of a service—all the things that drew me to this business in the first place. As I continue to grow and develop, my goal will be to never lose sight of the young man who began washing dishes one summer and fell in love with cooking. It’s that passion that has never waned and that will see me through the good and bad times ahead as I continue to define myself through The Food.

  FOIE GRAS/CRAB/RED CABBAGE/ELDERFLOWER The red cabbage, purple mustard, and huckleberry set a mood, anchored by the foie gras, crab, and creamy mustard at the bottom—a study in food as tone.

  RECIPES

  “PAPA” Pierre Gagnaire, our culinary father

  A Note About the Recipes

  Quantities of many of the ingredients in the following recipes are expressed in both volume and weight. For the best, most successful results, I encourage you to use a kitchen scale (inexpensive digital models are readily available to purchase online and in many kitchen supply stores), because weight is the only guarantee of precision. This is especially relevant in recipes that call on additives such as xanthan gum, Gellan, and Activa, where exactitude is a prerequisite for success. The volume measures are provided for your convenience, to give a sense of approximately how much of a given ingredient is required, but weights should be your guide as you prepare and cook these recipes.

  COMPOSITION POMMES DE TERRE

  MAKES 6 SERVINGS

  FOR THE POMMES MAXIM

  2 large Yukon gold potatoes, preferably refrigerated for three weeks, peeled

  ½ pound (2 sticks, 227 grams) unsalted butter, melted and clarified (see Note)

  1 tablespoon (25 grams) Crisp Film (see Sources)

  FOR THE ALIGOT ESPUMA

  6 large Yukon gold potatoes, preferably refrigerated for three weeks, peeled

  ¼ cup (50 grams) whole milk

  ¼ cup (75 grams) water

  1½ cups (150 grams) Laguiole cheese (Comté may be substituted)

  0.38 gram xanthan gum (see Sources)

  Fleur de sel

  Freshly ground black pepper

  1 large (26.5 grams) organic egg white

  FOR THE POTATO FONDANT

  2 pounds (1 kilogram) large Yukon gold potatoes, peeled

  1 teaspoon (5 grams) fleur de sel, plus more for serving

  ¼ pound (1 stick, 113 grams) unsalted butter

  3 tablespoons (50 grams) duck fat (see Sources)

  4 teaspoons (70 grams) Brown Chicken Stock

  2 teaspoons (10 grams) truffle juice (see Sources)

  Freshly ground green peppercorns, to taste

  MAKE THE POMMES MAXIM

  Use a cylinder cutter to punch the potatoes into long cylinders. Use a paring knife to trim the cylinders to 1 inch long, then slice each cylinder on a mandoline into quarter-size circles. You should have at least 100 pieces.

  Fill a large bowl halfway with ice water. Set aside.

  Fill a medium, heavy pot with water and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium, add the potato circles, and cook for 1 minute. Remove the circles from the water with a slotted spoon and transfer to the ice bath. Once the circles have cooled, drain them and spread them out on a paper towel–lined sheet tray. Place additional paper towels on top of the potatoes and gently pat dry, replacing towels as necessary until no excess water remains.

  Preheat a convection oven to 300°F (149°C) with the fan set to 3. Combine the clarified butter and the Crisp Film in a medium bowl. Whisk together until fully incorporated. Transfer the butter mixture to a large, heavy pot and place over low heat. Add the dried potato circles.

  Se
t a sheet tray upside down and top with a Silpat liner. Remove a small handful of potatoes from the butter, letting the excess butter drip off. Arrange 9 potatoes in an overlapping circle on the Silpat (each coin overlapping about 50 percent, with the 9th piece lifted to overlap the first). Add a 10th potato over the space in the center. Repeat with the remaining potato circles, arranging the rounds to fit all 10 completed circles on the tray.

  Top the filled tray with another Silpat and place a very flat heavy metal tray on top (to press down on the potatoes). Transfer the tray to the oven and bake for 11 minutes. Rotate the tray and bake for another 11 minutes, until the potatoes are crisp all the way through and translucent with a very light sheen, but not browned. If more time is needed, keep rotating the pan and baking in 2-minute increments, until the potatoes are cooked.

  Remove the tray from the oven and cool completely, keeping the potatoes covered with the second tray. Once they are cool, uncover the tray and carefully remove the potato pieces. Trim the potato rounds into perfect circles. Store the circles, layered on parchment paper, in an airtight container until needed. (The circles can be stored for up to two days in a dry, cool place. This recipe produces 4 more circles than you need; choose the most perfect ones for the dish and use the rest as a garnish.)