“It was still European technique,” says Burke of the American style at The River Café. “It was different names. They call it steak au poivre; we called it black pepper steak. We’re serving local fish instead of Dover sole. Cooking is cooking. It’s still cooking the European way. We’re sautéing. We’re grilling. Instead of a brandy sauce we’re making a bourbon sauce for the steak. It’s not that much different at that stage. We’re buying fiddlehead ferns. You’ll never see that. Charlie’s buying stuff from local [purveyors], stuff which Larry started. Charlie’s putting some menus together. They’re not hypercreative yet. Him and I together—I’m doing specials, but not all of them. Charlie writes them, too. But then I get to write them and as time goes on I start writing more. We made a very good team.”
“We were making Maxim potatoes—overlapping slices, brushed with clarified butter and baked—back then, we were trying to do them and it was so hard to do; we had too much oil in the pan and it was so hot and there were no Silpats,”* says Murphy. “Dave was fascinated with consommés; we made all kinds of consommés; who even makes a consommé now? I remember, doing brunch, he would have six mini English muffins with six quail eggs and six types of hollandaise. Can you imagine prepping for that? But we were down for that. It didn’t matter. We’d come in early for that. And we got paid a shift rate, nothing was hourly, so it was seventy-eight dollars a shift, and the shift could be eight hours or the shift could be sixteen hours, it didn’t matter. This is now becoming our life. If you were worried about the money then you didn’t fit in, and the universe was going to kick you out.”
Of the English muffins, Hayden recalls that “one day at brunch, early in the morning, we decided we were going to do quail eggs Benedict. So we started making English muffins. Nobody in that kitchen had ever made an English muffin. Okay, you pull out the books, you figure it out. So we’re making this little griddle. It wasn’t on the menu, so anybody that ordered anything we sent out a few quail eggs Benedict, as a starter, just to see if people liked it. Just this little half muffin with a little tiny over-easy or sunny-side-up quail egg on the top with a piece of bacon we were smoking in the back. Stuff like that would happen all the time.”
“I was a why not guy, not a why guy,” says Burke. “Here’s why we do onion soup with Gruyère cheese. I’m like, well, why does it have to be only onion soup that has cheese on it? Why can’t I do a minestrone with cheese on it?”
Hayden recalls Palmer and Burke as something of a Lennon-McCartney duo: “They would always try to outdo one another,” says Hayden. “I remember Charlie made a cold lobster soup. It was made with shells, cream, tarragon. It was fucking phenomenal. But it was cold. And he served it with poached lobster and a beautiful, almost like a tarragon timbale, like a custard. It was so elegant. It was very reminiscent of something you’d see in a Georges Blanc cookbook. That blew me away. That’s when I knew he was the chef that everybody thought he was . . . and there were a lot of times where the cooks on the line would say, ‘Hey, Charlie, I was reading this article last night about morels. Do you think we could get some morels in?’ And the next thing you knew, morels showed up. It took chutzpah. You told Charlie what you thought, then he took it and then he would draw it up on the plate. We just had so many rotating specials. Charlie would have specials written up for the entire week so you knew every minute of every day what you were doing. Nothing came from left field. It was all well thought out. We ran like a machine. It was the best. The best learning experience anyone could have. I went back to school after my internship, and before I graduated, I was like, I can’t wait to get back to New York. I’m wasting my time at school.”
The unbridled energy and adventurousness of the Palmer years at The River Café are summed up by many who were there by a smoker the crew built: “We built a smokehouse in the building,” says Palmer. “We got this huge, basically walk-in cooler and piped in the smoke source. And this is all out of a book, you know? A DIY project, totally. But it was great because we’re going to smoke all our own salmon. We’re going to smoke sausages. We’re going to do all that stuff. We created a curing room. You didn’t even think about it. You just said, Okay, there’s some space over there. I remember we sent Neil Murphy out to this place out in Brooklyn and he brought back this walk-in cooler for nothing. It was out of a junkyard. I don’t even know how he found it. We knew we had to have a big, big container.”
“The locker room was thirty or forty feet from the side of the restaurant,” says Murphy. “We got an old double-door fridge, took the guts out, popped a hole in the side, put an aluminum manifold in it. We wanted to cold-smoke. We smoked everything: salmon, squab, quail, shrimp. One time we must have left twenty sides of salmon in there and we overcooked them, hot-smoked them. We had twenty sides so we made consommé, raviolis, rillettes. We never let any of that go to waste.”
“Charlie—you know, you want to try something? We’d try it,” says Burke. “And you had the manpower to do it. And you could sell anything at The River Café. I made smoked kidneys. I made kidneys taste like bacon, served it with calf’s liver. Instead of bacon and onions, I’d do leeks and kidneys. We could sell anything because we had forward-looking customers but also a lot of tourists. We had a lot of Japanese people that came in. You wouldn’t make something in vain. It would sell.”
All of this was undertaken in addition to the daily demands of the kitchen, and the crew wore the workload as a badge of honor.
“We were inundated with prep,” says Hayden. “It was unbelievable, the amount of work it took that we had to get ready for service every single day. . . . We were better than other kitchens because when I heard about all the people that would do the vegetable blanching, that was all our responsibility. There was no guy that blanched the vegetables. Every cook was responsible for getting his veg, sauce, and proteins together. That’s why I had a big head.”
The long hours and like-mindedness produced a pack mentality: “We were like a gang,” says Murphy. “I loved that. You never had to worry that somebody was going to take you down because other guys were going to watch out for you. That was the vibe. If one guy couldn’t get set up on time, somebody’s going to help you. If the grill guy gets fifty orders and the sauté guy gets ten, he had your back, you didn’t even have to ask. . . . We all loved each other. Love is a strong word. To where you’ll fucking almost die for that guy for whatever reason, that’s how we felt about each other. . . . It was a pretty amazing feeling. You rarely get something like that.”
Hayden remembers the restaurant as fiercely supportive and friendly competitive: “There were times where we would race each other from the minute we got in the door to see who could be set up with their station, all their mise en place,* everything they needed to do for that day. Because I worked a fish station and the fish station at The River Café was two people. Then there was a sauté guy and a grill guy. And so me and Neil Murphy, we would bet that we could set up faster and better and be outside a half hour before service started.”
The long days, punctuated by peaks and valleys, created an extraordinary need to blow off steam. Between prep and service, Murphy and Hayden would knock back multiple double espressos, meet out back on the barge, and while the other cooks sucked down cigarettes, get each other pumped up for service, wrestling and pinning each other down and screaming “Are you ready!” in each other’s face. It was extreme, even by River Café standards: “I think the rest of the folks thought we were crazy,” says Hayden.
After hours, as with most kitchens (then and now), alcohol was a must. Most of the time, says Murphy, the crew would hit a bar. “We would go out every single night and suck down a bunch of beers,” he says. Occasionally, “we would sit out on the deck at The River Café and we would drink all night for free, sometimes till four in the morning. I never wanted to leave.” (Murphy recalls the bridge as a presence: “This big, looming, ugly-beautiful, historic piece of art.” He also recalls that “when there were jumpers, they would close the b
ridge and we would be slow for several hours.”)
Once or twice a month, says Murphy, Burke might arrange for the team to meet with another restaurant’s crew across the river in Manhattan, and “we would drink and do blow all night.” (The drinking actually began at the start of service. “There were two cases of beer put on the line, on ice, at the beginning of the night,” remembers Murphy, who found himself “half-hammered by the end of the night,” which impaired his cleanup: “You’d just dump everything into the garbage.”)
“That’s one thing that brought us all together,” says Murphy. “If you didn’t come out and drink with us you were on the outside.”
They were magical times at The River Café, but as for Forgione before him, Palmer’s days were numbered from the get-go, because—mostly due to the example of the French nouvelle cuisine titans—he had realized, “Hey, we’re the engine in this business, we should own it or be a partner in it.” He told O’Keeffe that he needed to become a partner or push off. O’Keeffe, not one to make decisions quickly, considered it, and considered it, and considered it, until Palmer realized it simply “wasn’t in his DNA.” Over lunch at La Grenouille, Palmer told him about an offer he had to become a partner in another restaurant. “I said I thought it was too good to pass up,” says O’Keeffe, letting another future all-star slip away.
“WE WERE DOING THE FLAVORED OILS FIRST.”
David Burke’s path to The River Café was longer and more convoluted than his predecessors. Known as a wild man to this day, his reputation has obscured his chops, which were among the most impressive of any of his contemporaries.
Burke grew up in Hazlet, New Jersey, a better-than-average student for a cook, blessed with the ability to retain information and mentally organize it; in time, he’d graduate early from high school. He was also industrious, with a bruising paper route, and competitive, especially in wrestling, which could bring out the beast in him. Like many tri-state-area kids, his first interest in cooking came not from food but from the kitchen environment, discovered in a dishwashing job in a local hotel at age fourteen. There he was mesmerized by the chefs and cooks, their butchery skills, and the camaraderie of the kitchen.
In 1980, when he was eighteen, came The Culinary Institute of America and a weekend gig private cheffing for a hotel owner at his Catskills home. Burke simply couldn’t stop screwing around with food. In the private chef gig, he made snails bourguignonne, but wrapped the snails in chicken tenderloin. He externed at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, Texas, taking a night job in another restaurant to pay the rent. Then it was back to New Jersey and the Fromagerie in Rumson. Though just the broiler man, Burke was beginning to experiment in earnest, and the owners, Hubert and Marcus Peters, were open-minded, put his dishes on the menu—the first was a riff on poularde demi-deuil with a stuffing of ricotta and spinach between skin and meat creating a three-layer effect when roasted.
In his second year at the CIA, he dabbled in cooking competitions. After graduating (named Most Likely to Succeed), he cooked for a family in Norway. In the interview, his prospective employer asked him if he could make certain dishes; he rattled off the recipes and approaches he’d take to create them, from memory. He got the job, traveled around Europe, too poor to eat in the best restaurants, but made a study of the menu boxes out front.
Back in the States, he took a saucier position under Waldy Malouf at La Crémaillère. He was swiftly promoted to sous chef, stayed on for two and a half years, then took a job (with the assistance of André Daguin) at La Rapière in Mauvezin, France. He dined at Michelin three-star restaurants, catching the attention of the chefs with his enthusiasm and appetite, ordering dishes beyond those featured on the degustation menus. (Bocuse joined him for a glass of wine; Pierre Troisgros gave him a kitchen tour.) Back in New York City, he took a job as fish cook with a young, newly arrived chef named Daniel Boulud at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée.
Bored with the style of the food there, he jumped when mentor Malouf recommended him to Palmer at The River Café, where Palmer’s laboratory style absorbed Burke’s burgeoning creativity, and on the menu went such dishes as shrimp and ginger wontons and oysters with watercress on roasted peppercorns. After a year, he took six weeks to return to France, work for Georges Blanc, Troisgros, and Marc Meneau.
One day, when eating a slice of pizza, Burke noticed the red oil that oozed onto the plate: “Oil from the cheese and tomato. It was red. It looked pretty on a plate. I’m like, I can flavor oils, man! Then we started making them colorful. Curry, tomato. Now I’ve got a lighter sauce.” The flavored oils were deployed for economy and elegance: “I had tuna tartare on the menu and I had horseradish with ginger in it and I didn’t want the pieces. I wanted it to be smooth. So I took the peels and made oil. I didn’t throw shit away. I was using the peels and made oils. Now we pour that oil in the tartare, you get the flavor.” To this day, Burke maintains that he was employing flavored oils before Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who came to New York City in 1985 and took over the kitchen at Lafayette, became famous for them among many other flourishes and innovations.*
“Now I’ve got a pretty plate. I got color. Listen, I worked at River Café. I had to get people’s eyes on the plate, not out the window.”
In December 1987, he discovered that Palmer was on his way out. Burke was supposed to leave with Palmer, become his lieutenant in his new venture, but O’Keeffe offered him the chef’s position.
“Buzzy, I can’t take this job. I’m not qualified,” said Burke.
“You’re qualified,” said O’Keeffe. “Everyone in the building says you are.”
Burke felt that before he could assume command of the barge, he needed to know more about pastry. He reached out to Michel Richard at Citrus in Beverly Hills, offered to work for free, but Richard refused him. Burke told O’Keeffe he wanted to go to Gaston Lenôtre in Paris, and O’Keeffe backed him.
“I came back to the River as the chef. I brought a pastry chef back with me and then we just started rocking and rolling,” says Burke. “We put twenty-four desserts on the menu.
“I knew how to cook classic food. I knew a little bit about what modern American ingredients were. And then I just said, ‘Listen, I’m going to do it my way. I’m going to take chances. I’m going to twist it. And I’m going to craftsmanship the hell out of some of this stuff, too.’ And listen, I made the chocolate Brooklyn Bridge.”
The bridge was one of the great pieces of cleverness in restaurants at that time—a miniature chocolate replica of the restaurant’s neighboring landmark. “They sell $25,000 worth of Brooklyn Bridges a year. Maybe more. And Buzzy will never take it off the menu. They make it smaller but—because I had some pastry knowledge then, I said, ‘Listen, that’s what I want. I want to sell it for two. I want it to be the iconic dessert of this place.’ . . . I’m not a pastry chef, per se, [but] I like to be in that. I like theater desserts. I like people to take that Instagram, [or] mental shot before Instagram, take it home, you know? Because it ends your meal with a smile.
“I think I was one of the guys that was more concerned with entertaining the public with presentation and great combinations and ahas,” says Burke.
Burke was so proud of his food he once asked O’Keeffe to drape the windows so diners could focus on it. “He thought I was fucking nuts,” says Burke, who recalls O’Keeffe simply walking away, shaking his head, unwilling to even dignify the request with a verbal response, though Burke does recall a moral victory the night Chicago chef Jean Banchet and La Côte Basque’s Jean-Jacques Rachou came to dinner and turned their chairs away from the windows, telling O’Keeffe, “We came to look at the food.”
Burke ran a demanding ship at The River Café. Paul Zweben, a young cook from New Jersey who had been working in restaurants and bakeries for almost ten years, graduated The Culinary Institute of America, interviewed with Burke, told him he had been an executive sous chef in his last position at the Pavilion Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. Burke, himself just twenty-four at
the time, was unmoved by his status and offered him a cook’s position at $8.75 an hour.
Zweben was all too happy to take the demotion. On his way into the office, at the tail end of lunch service, he’d been mesmerized by the kitchen, which he described as “magical. I saw all these cooks moving around like it was a ballet.” He also sensed the machismo that had been a defining characteristic of the Palmer era: “There was a tremendous amount of testosterone in the room. You could just feel it. You could feel that this was a competitive kitchen, and if you were going to survive in it, you had to do whatever it took to survive.”
“We all worked six shifts a week, so you basically worked four days or four nights and then you did a double. So you could work literally from, you know, two in the afternoon to one or two in the morning, then you would be back the following morning at seven and you would work literally eighteen hours and then you would be off for a day or two. And that’s how it was,” says Zweben.
The drinking culture also continued. The only moment that presented itself for Zweben to talk to Burke about becoming a sous chef was after hours. “We were at a bar and it was four in the morning and everyone had left and I was like, This is the time for me to talk to him about becoming a sous chef. And we went to a bar that was closed that actually opened for us at four a.m. So the gates go up and the bartender’s like, ‘Hey, David.’ And I’m completely wasted out of my mind. And I think we drank until, like, seven in the morning. And he drank gin and tonics, and I think I actually tried one that night and almost vomited. But it’s just how we did it. So you know, we would work—basically we would get into work if we worked the night shift anywhere between twelve and one or two. You would be completely wired at midnight. By midnight we would start drinking. As we were shutting down we would have a couple beers in the kitchen, and then it was time to go out. And we would go out and drink hard pretty much every night.” (Diane Forley, one of the few women to work at The River Café in the 1980s, recalls the kitchen: “That was like walking into The Culinary Institute of America; everybody had their toolbox. It was very intense,” she says. “Not many people came in off the street, the way I did. It was very hard.” Forley began as a prep cook, but lobbied for the position of tournant [roundsman], who fills in on every station as needed. “David finally put me there and that for a woman was a big deal. There weren’t any women line cooks. It was just guys, even garde-manger, so I became one of the guys. I was there for so long, they ignored that.” Forley abstained from the after-hours binge drinking, but even at the restaurant, during working hours, she remembers The River Café as “more of a wild kitchen. It had an army-like, military feel to it. I think they liked the regimented part of it because it kept them in order; people liked feeling like they belonged to that.”)
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 21