Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by Andrew Friedman

  “He was like a rock star,” says Traci Des Jardins, who cooked for Palladin. “He was like Mick Jagger. He was skinny, wiry—but so intense. I can remember him coming over and tasting stuff I was making and looking at my station and talking to me and talking to Joachim [Splichal] about me. He was like this curious force, like this animal in the kitchen. And you could just tell he was taking in all of it. He was looking at every cook. And he always remembered what each person was about and what they did well—that guy made sauces, and she was the fish cook. He never forgot. He was a force.”

  “He really to me should be considered an American chef,” says Jasper White. “Jean-Louis was a magician. He was the chef of chefs in the U.S. Forget about the cerebral part of cooking. Let’s just talk about skill. Jean-Louis, if he did a tasting menu for you, he could cook as long as you could stand it, he could just keep putting stuff out. But not only would he do a course, but if there were four of us at a table, and let’s say the combination was shrimp and corn, he didn’t do one dish with shrimp and corn and all four got it; he did four dishes so you’d have a tasting menu where every course had four different dishes on it. It was freaking mind-boggling but he could accomplish it. And I know it was a flow of creative genius because he didn’t sit around and read books and stuff. He was out partying all the time, smoking and drinking. He was a lot of fun to be around. I think a lot of chefs would agree, anyone who really knew him would say that he was the chef of chefs in America. It was too much too fast for an ordinary human; I don't know how he did it. It was an endless flow of, like, every chef that ever lived funneled into this energy. He was brilliant.”

  The book was also noteworthy for its geographic breadth, including chefs such as Amy Ferguson from Houston, Texas; Robert Rosellini from Seattle, Washington; and Richard Perry from St. Louis, Michigan.

  “THERE WERE TWO PEOPLE STANDING WHERE I USED TO WORK.”

  For all the focus on new American food, these were also productive years for American chefs operating in the French tradition. In 1985, Drew Nieporent, a 1977 graduate of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration who had worked on cruise ships and at such New York hotspots as Maxwell’s Plum and Tavern on the Green, opened Montrachet, installing chef David Bouley in the kitchen. Nieporent had discovered Bouley across the country, at lunch at Sutter 500, the gig to which Vergé had dispatched him from Le Cirque. Bouley cooked Nieporent a tasting menu, which the restaurateur still recalls as one of the best he’d ever eaten. He raised the money to open Montrachet—named for a Burgundy wine-growing region—on the edge of Tribeca, which wasn’t much more developed than it was when Odeon opened years earlier. He hadn’t realized it in San Francisco, but as he saw the chef’s food up close on a daily basis, he realized that “Bouley was literally pinching, like, the lobster salad or there was a Girardet dish. Basically David took a dish from Troisgros, Girardet, Vergé. But I think in David’s head he was elevating the dish because he’s that skilled. So he didn’t see it as taking the dish.”

  Nieporent dressed like a waiter on the service floor, wearing the standard-issue Montrachet uniform. Remembers Daniel Rothstein, who had previously worked with the Waltucks at Chanterelle and helped Nieporent manage the front of house at Montrachet: “We all dressed in a uniform. It was silly. It was all black with a silver tie. Drew dressed just like that. Because he worked. He was a waiter. I mean, he was the maître d’, but he didn’t want to distinguish himself. He liked that, and he also felt he could be sort of undercover, too, sometimes, so people didn’t know him. He was on the floor. He would bring out dishes. He had no problems with that. He had no attitude. That guy was working. He was working the floor. He was dressed like everyone else.”

  Before long, Nieporent and Bouley were at odds, in part because Bouley—who brings an artistic temperament and manner to the kitchen—took his sweet time, keeping people waiting inordinate lengths of time for their courses, a bad fit with Nieporent’s tendency to overbook.

  “I don’t know if they were ever friendly,” says Rothstein. “I certainly didn’t feel that from Bouley. He just looked down on Drew. And Drew has a big ego. . . . One of the things I was impressed by with Drew: Drew sucked up to the important people. He knew them by name, gave them the best table. All over them. But if you pushed him far enough, there were customers, if they pissed him off, I saw him throw people on the street twice. Drew overbooked. It was the hottest restaurant. He was going to take advantage of it. He was going to make money. So people were waiting at the bar for a long time. They’d made the reservation a month in advance or two months in advance. Sometimes people would get really angry. Someone got really angry at him and he just went off on him. He’d say, ‘This is my restaurant. I’m the owner. You can’t talk to me that way. I’m not serving you. Get out of here.’

  “He was very ambitious,” remembers Rothstein. “He would say, ‘I’m going to be the next Joe Baum.’ He knew everybody. I mean, just the way he remembered your name. I couldn’t believe it. Some vice vice president of CBS would walk in the door. Maybe he’d met the guy, but he knew who it was. He must have studied the papers. He understood that with these important clientele and the rich, powerful people in New York, you know them by name and you greet them. He was amazing that way.”

  Nieporent also took no chances where critics were concerned. “The different owners would call each other and they would try to get descriptions,” says Rothstein. “No one had a really good pic. If he thought there was a reviewer, he might call someone who had seen them to come over and take a look in the dining room. I think what Drew did, which Karen and David [Waltuck] wouldn’t, if it was a reviewer, he would stop the kitchen. I mean, every restaurateur wants to make a perfect thing. But Karen and David would be sort of like, ‘Whatever.’ They wanted it to be good, but no one else was going to suffer for it. [At Montrachet,] other people would probably have to wait longer.”

  Kerry Heffernan, who had cooked with Bouley at Le Périgord Park, returned from a stage in Europe circa February 1986 and joined his old chef in the kitchen at Montrachet.

  “I was garde-manger,” says Heffernan. “And garde-manger there, it sucked, because it was a tiny little space. And you had to make an eggplant terrine every day, which meant slicing and frying a case of baby eggplant, making a pesto, making a red pepper coulis, baking off a custard in a terrine mold, you know, the bottom of the terrine mold with two half moons of goat cheese into it, and then layering this eggplant, pepper, pesto, probably fifteen layers, and then the pepper coulis had a little gelatin in it so it would hold together. And then you had to get it set and then slice it and then lay it on a plate and then warm it and serve it with a parsley sauce. It was still a wonderful dish. It was a beautiful dish.

  “In those days I wasn’t quite aware of what was happening in the dining room. It was a bit of a mystery. We went in early, we busted our ass, we got out late, we drank Pabst Blue Ribbon. It was intense, but it was fun. There was a camaraderie.”

  The restaurant earned three stars from the New York Times, but like more and more chefs in New York, Bouley had designs on opening his own restaurant and was making moves in his free time. The situation led to Nieporent making his own moves, worthy of Michael Corleone.

  “Bouley was taking calls,” says Rothstein. “The phone was on the bar. He would be in the dining room. He was on the phone all the time at the end. And Drew was pretty sure he was talking to this investor, which turned out to be true. He would invite him; the guy would come in for dinner. So Drew started to feel like Bouley was just flaunting it. And that he was going to leave. It was pretty bad. I mean, I understand Bouley, you know, Drew was extreme that way. But they just broke down. They just were not a good pair. And I think Drew felt [Bouley] was going to leave and he wanted to be preemptive. That was pretty bold of Drew. I was impressed that he was confident enough to [do that, with three stars on the line]. And he kept those three stars.

  “This is the thing,” says Rothstein. “He loved the
restaurant but he was a businessman. And he is a businessman. He knows how to make money in a restaurant, which is not an easy thing to do. Basically that’s the story of the conflict between him and David Bouley. David Bouley was an artist and didn’t care at all about money, and Drew watched every penny.”

  With plans to fire Bouley, Nieporent began training a phantom crew, because he knew that the cooks would follow the chef out of loyalty.

  “I didn’t understand how to do it,” says Nieporent. “So I basically trained an entire kitchen at a friend of mine’s kitchen. I had a chef and four cooks. His name was Brian Whitmer. He had been sous chef to Bradley Ogden. I couldn’t hire another chef to replace a chef. I had to hire a friend.”

  Recalls Heffernan: “Memorial Day rolls around and Drew says, ‘You guys are going to get two days off. You’re going to get Sunday off, you’re going to get Monday, too. But take your knives and your shoes and all your stuff out of your lockers because we’re going to exterminate and that stuff gets everywhere.’”

  When Bouley showed up after the weekend, Nieporent had packed all of his belongings into a van. “Here are the keys to the van. All your stuff’s in there,” he said. Bouley, says Nieporent, was incredulous: “So he comes down to the restaurant and he walks in, he sees that whole crew was cooking . . . and what was interesting is I knew we’d make it because the next day, we always had one-hundred-plus covers on the book. And one of my very best customers, I see they’re walking towards the kitchen because a lot of people would walk into the kitchen if they knew David. And I stopped them. ‘Oh, we want to thank David. Tonight was the best meal we ever had here.’ It was the first day of the new chef. I went, ‘Oh, it’s his birthday. I gave him the day off.’ Which I didn’t realize it but it had been his birthday the day prior.”*

  “So we come back on the Tuesday and the only person he had fired, to my knowledge, was David,” remembers Heffernan. “Everyone else was still employed but there were two people standing where I used to work.”

  “And what he did with the next [chef],” says Rothstein. “It was basically Drew. Brian Whitmer was the next guy. . . . He was a nice guy. It was completely different. Drew was basically executive chef and was saying, ‘This is what I want.’ They worked on the menu together. Brian would do it. Brian had his own ideas, too, but Drew was very controlling. You know, he sort of wasn’t going to let that happen. And amazingly, they were able to keep three stars there for a while.”

  A young Thomas Keller, who had worked at various Midtown French restaurants and at La Rive in the Catskills, took his first stab at opening his own place in December 1986, partnering with Serge Raoul, owner of the popular SoHo bistro Raoul’s.

  Rakel (the name was a mashup of Raoul and Keller) was a bit of a mutt, representing Keller’s and Raoul’s sensibilities: Keller, a dead-serious perfectionist, had a piano kitchen,* insisted on absolute cleanliness at all times. Meanwhile, the artistic Raoul positioned a camera on Varick Street, featured a closed-circuit television in the dining room, projecting the traffic outside. He enlisted Tom Colicchio as sous chef. (Heffernan, who had become friendly with Colicchio during a stage in Auch, used to meet up with him after service, to “talk about our crazy bosses.”)

  “WE FUCKED IT UP.”

  The devastating “Black Monday” stock market crash of October 19, 1987, rippled through the industry. Some restaurants closed. Others reconsidered their formality and pricing. The party line is that the economy claimed the Waxman-Master empire, but Master was already feeling it slip through their fingers months earlier. Tensions among him, Jonathan, and Janie—exacerbated by Melvyn and Janie separating—grew, and the three were quickly becoming overextended, including a Jams in London.

  “It was an accident waiting to happen,” says Master. “I don’t know what we were thinking.”

  By July 1987, just three years after Jams launched in New York City, the party was breaking up: Master told Colman Andrews of the Los Angeles Times that “all our restaurants have really been more in Jonathan’s character than mine” and that he longed to open a restaurant in the vein of Washington Square Bar and Grill and Stars in San Francisco. Sagebrush Canyon, with a Western theme, was still going forward in SoHo, with the Jams team as investors only, while a plan for an L.A. branch of Hulot’s was scuttled.

  By 1988, Bud’s had been closed, Jams London was sold off. Waxman renamed Jams J.W.’s.

  Karen Rush, who waited tables at J.W.’s, remembers witnessing the decline of the restaurant: “Orders start coming in COD; there’s your first clue. You know, the wine isn’t really being restocked. There’s some shrinkage going on. And then the announcement that we’ll be closing for a week or two to do some renovations.”

  About a week into the renovation, Waxman called Rush: “I have some good news and some bad news.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “We’re closed.”

  “All right, Jonathan. What’s the good news?”

  “You don’t have to work for me anymore.”

  “We fucked it up,” says Master. “I mean, Jams London was ridiculous, trying to do that. We had all these uniforms from Alexander Julian, the designer, that were shipped over. Jonathan wanted to have all those over there. They were all the wrong size when they arrived. It was a clusterfuck.”

  “It happened quickly and unraveled quickly,” says Flay. “Part of the problem was that Jonathan didn’t have any backup. You need backup. I think Melvyn was incredibly charismatic, a good front man. But underneath being the front man you also need a foundation. Jonathan was by himself. It didn’t seem that way but he was by himself and he had these three properties and he was going to open others. All of a sudden they’re doing photo shoots with Jonathan in his fucking robe laying on a bed. There are some things you just don’t do. You get caught up in it all and all of a sudden you’re at a photo shoot and some photographer says, ‘You know what would be a good idea?’ You have to say no because people don’t forget that shit.”

  Says Master, still rueful after all these years: “It sort of was tragic, because what we had was, I think, so special. No one in New York had seen anything like it. It really, really was different. Everybody who was anybody was at Jams. It was incredible. It was an amazing high. But I think honestly that we forgot kind of who we were, where we were going, and what we were doing and what we had. And I was not a good administrator. I would say that right off the bat. Jonathan’s strength was he was a fantastic teacher. He wasn’t in the kitchen much. He was always off eating somewhere else or he was always off going to Paris. I mean, you’ve heard that, I’m sure, from everybody about Jonathan. And that was one of his biggest problems. He just didn’t want to be there.”

  Rakel, which downscaled after the crash, was also assumed to be a casualty of the economy, but Keller is quick to expand: “There’s never one reason that anything fails. It’s an accumulation of a lot of different things, some of them small, some of them big. The big thing of course was the downturn in the economy. That was huge. That affected a lot of people. But a lot of restaurants thrived in that period in New York City. So what was it about Rakel? Well, we didn’t have a sound business structure there. Accounting was void. There was really no accounting, so who knew what we were spending or how much we were making or where we needed to cut, where we needed to add? I mean, I had no clue.

  “The managers that we hired weren’t sufficiently skilled in accounting. They were really good dining room managers. They knew some procedures. I was a good chef but I wasn’t a good businessman. I mean, I had a clear vision on what I wanted to do from a food point of view. Was I able to maintain food costs? Evidently not. Was I able to maintain labor costs? Evidently not. So was it the best location? Not really. You know, we thought it was a great location, but in actuality, I mean, Christ, you have the Holland Tunnel three blocks south and the traffic is just ridiculous. You can’t get to the place at certain times of the day. So what we thought was great in proximity to Raoul’s and SoH
o, it just didn’t work. So a lot of different things. Poor design, poor name. Rakel? Is that a really good name? Most people thought of Raquel Welch.

  “It had a lot of good things about it but a lot of confusing things about it as well. Was it fine dining? Was it a bistro? Serge, his popularity and success at Raoul’s was evident. And the struggles at Rakel were evident. It’s like, why can’t we be more like Raoul’s? So he’s struggling with me; his partner, you know, has a clear vision on food, and he has a clear vision on the success. It was a struggle. . . . Rakel was going to change, and Serge, we came to an agreement that, you know what? In order for him to have an opportunity to make his money back, you know what I mean? He’s running the whole thing, right? And Serge is an extraordinary man who was an extraordinary supporter of me and did an extraordinary thing for me and several things after that that I’ll be forever thankful for. . . . He wanted to change it. He needed to make the restaurant successful so that he could at least get his money back. And I appreciated that. He appreciated the fact that I wasn’t the person that was going to make it successful. So we agreed to part ways and to modify the restaurant and bring it to casual and call it Cafe Rakel.” (Keller went on to consult for David Liederman at Chez Louis and for John Clancy’s, a Greenwich Village fish house.)