The Reach of a Chef (34 page)

Too long for p/u

No sense of urgency

Need to engage people

He wants his trainees on the line acting autonomously, calling back the orders, which they aren’t doing. The cooks aren’t in sync.

One voice in the kitchen

While the staff is progressing, Keller on opening day still says, “I’m nervous.” Small glitches continue to pop up—the ticket printer is malfunctioning, some people smell smoke from the fireplace in the dining room, a toilet backfired on a hapless gentleman customer.

When I see Cunningham, she has a big grin on her face, and I comment on it. The smile not diminishing a watt, she said, “It’s fear,” and the grave intensity of her eyes says she’s not kidding.

But ultimately the opening would scarcely feel like an opening, at least back in the kitchen, because everything was already begun. Keller and Cunningham had now opened four restaurants and knew what they were doing. Keller gave speeches to front of the house and back of the house before service on Monday, February 16, fairly standard words of encouragement and gratitude.

“I hope it’s an extraordinary experience,” he told the servers, standing above them on the raised section of the dining room. “I have no doubt it will be every night. We want to give our guests an experience they can remember…. Our goal is to have an impact on everybody we come into contact with…. Thank you for your hard work and dedication. Thank you.” He begins a round of applause and departs.

Cunningham has noted he’s gotten awfully chatty and speechifying of late.

Keller heads into the kitchen and gathers the cooks. “Can I get everybody in here at the pass?” The cooks are slow to gather—cooks don’t normally do pregame motivational huddles. Michael Swenton, another Laundry veteran, starts to sauté off some cèpes in a very hot pan, and they smoke and sizzle loudly. Keller, annoyed, says, “What are you doing? Are you hungry?” Michael, having already got them in the pan, says, “Cooking mushrooms, chef.” What could he do? Swenton shakes his head. I imagine the cooks thinking,
What’s with this meeting? We’ve got things to do, it’s almost service, and he wants to get sentimental?

“This is it,” Keller says, “this is the beginning. We have guests coming tonight. This is our big debut. It’s a great moment when you open a restaurant.” He tells them that the success of it hasn’t come from him. People have been spellbound by the room, by the food, he says, “but also by the quality of the people in this room. You have made the standards here very high.”

He thanks Benno, Ziebold, Swenton, Knell, and numerous others by name for all their work both here and at the French Laundry.

“Look around you,” he concludes. “Look around and remember this. I don’t want you to forget it. Thanks.”

He claps to signal the end of the speech and all applaud, and then, at last, they can get back to their work, setting up the pass, wiping down stations, checking mise en place one more time, Knell and Swenton going over order-fire-pickup instructions with the line cooks they’re training.

Soon Benno calls out, “Ordering for two! One lango, one foie gras, one sturgeon, one mackerel, one duck, one pork,” and the restaurant is up and running.

“Nobody can remember a better opening,” Keller would say the next day.

The entire week leading up to the opening had been celebratory, filled with the top food journalists and celebrities, such as Bruce Spring-steen and Sarah Jessica Parker, wandering through the kitchen. All of Keller’s meticulous planning had paid off. And his decision to shut down the French Laundry had been a masterful stroke, giving him the time to focus his attention on Per Se and to prove to New York that he was as committed to this place as to any. And they seemed to be buying it. There was none of the lampooning Ducasse received on his entry into New York. All the proper sacrifices had been made. The gods, apparently, were pleased.

As if to underscore the grace of the opening, the first paying customers at Per Se delivered Keller to his cooking roots and brought to this opening night a circular element that delighted him. Their names were Art Sherin and Sue Horsey, and when they finished their meal—he had a nine-course chef’s tasting and she a vegetarian tasting—they asked that their menu be signed by the chef. The server took away their menu but returned and told the couple that the chef had invited them back to the kitchen—he’d like to meet them and thank them as the restaurant’s first customers. They were thrilled.

A short couple in their late fifties, Sherin and Horsey were led back to the kitchen, where Keller remained off to the side observing service and taking notes. He’s already got the first dollar bill the restaurant has earned, and he wants the couple who paid it to sign the first ticket, which he intended to frame.

They entered the bright kitchen smiling and chuckling nervously, apparently thrilled and surprised by this invitation. Keller beamed and greeted them warmly.

“It’s an honor,” Sue Horsey said, shaking Keller’s hand. “We knew you from La Rive. That’s how we knew about you, that’s why we came.”

La Rive!
This had been Keller’s idyll.

A remote restaurant outside Catskill, New York, run by René and Paulette Macary, a French couple, La Rive was a simple country place in the European tradition. Paulette wrote out the menu daily, Keller cooked French country fare in the small kitchen with no other help than Paulette’s octogenarian mom, who peeled his shallots and picked his beans. Keller lived in a cabin behind the restaurant. He built a smokehouse for his meats. For the first time, he developed relationships with his purveyors, the Hudson Valley farmers who sold him their food. Here he taught himself to skin and to butcher rabbits, and learned the importance of treating his food with the intense care he would become famous for. It was here that he received his first attention from the New York media (Gael Greene and Raymond Sokolov, who wrote a survey of Hudson River Valley restaurants). And it was here that he learned to cook and appreciate offal, which the Macarys loved, despite the fact that American restaurant goers in the early 1980s weren’t exactly familiar with roasted veal kidney, calf’s brain, pig’s ears, and braised tripe. This, too, would become another facet of Keller’s renown.

La Rive was truly where Keller the young man, age twenty-five, began his transformation into the Thomas Keller of the French Laundry. At La Rive he cooked alone, experimenting and studying, teaching himself. And here now in this new Mecca were two people, greeting the world-famous chef, who with a handshake returned him to that period of his life on Per Se’s opening day.

They live in Freeport, Long Island, Horsey explained, but they used to live in Woodstock. “There weren’t a lot of places to eat up there back then,” she said.

Keller signed their menu, and they each signed their order ticket. Keller shook their hands again, still grinning like a boy, and said, “Thank you! Thank you for coming. I really appreciate your being here.”

Sherin and Horsey were led back to the dining room, still chuckling and shaking their heads happily.

Cunningham had watched the encounter. Keller turned to her and said, “The last time they had my food was at La Rive.” She smiled and returned to the dining room. Keller still can’t believe it. “Wow,” he says. “That was twenty years ago. Full circle.”

The following Sunday, hours before the restaurant began the final service of its first week, the hoods seemed to be malfunctioning. The kitchen had begun to fill with smoke. Joshua Schwartz was in his kitchen, behind the Per Se kitchen, which was also filling with smoke. It became eerie, Schwartz said, because he, and others, quickly realized that nobody was cooking anything.

The entire staff was evacuated from the restaurant, and when Keller next returned he saw that the wall separating the two kitchens had been smashed in and New York City firefighters were dumping heavy gushes of water from their hoses down into the broken wall and all through that section of the restaurant—including the Bonnet range, a Rolls-Royce of cooking tools—to extinguish the fire burning within the wall.

The beautiful kitchen and brand-new Manhattan restaurant would be shut down by an electrical fire before it had been open a week. The closing of the French Laundry, the work of all these people, all the planning, all the celebrations leading up to its opening, the successful wooing of the New York media, all of it came to a soggy, smoking halt.

The next morning, February 23, on the front page of
The New York Times,
the headline read: “Chef’s Lofty Dream Is Set Back by Fire at Columbus Circle.”

To all those who had worked toward the opening of this restaurant, most of all to Keller and Cunningham, the electrical fire felt like a tragedy. To just stop like that. It seemed impossible. How could this be? But as Monday wore on, it was clear that Per Se would be shut down for weeks.

And yet, after the inevitable sense of dismay and disbelief and crushing discouragement had begun not to hurt so much, once a week or so had passed and everyone got used to the facts and the staff made plans for other work, travel, and stages, even this setback, though costly and frustrating, had its benefits: a chance to perfect the kitchen and the food, and more media coverage. A writer for
New York
magazine named Alex Williams contacted me for a story he was writing about Keller. The magazine had already written one about him and Gray Kunz, who was also eventually to open on the third floor of the building. When I asked why another article on Keller, Williams responded in an e-mail:

I spoke with Eric Ripert about Keller and the mood among chefs regarding his opening a restaurant so self-consciously bucking for four stars. Among themselves are they quietly resentful of his ambitions, I wondered, which arguably could be construed as arrogant, and does Ripert personally worry about what it might do to his business eight blocks south? “It would be politically incorrect” to say anything negative about Keller and his restaurant, Ripert said, even if you wanted to be snarky. Ripert may need to do something to generate more press for his four-star restaurant, Le Bernardin, he said, but “we all want Thomas to succeed. If he succeeds, we succeed.” And if Keller doesn’t succeed, Ripert concluded, then that theoretically prevents others from raising the bar for themselves. Keller’s being there only raises the standards for everyone else, and that was a good thing.

Keller was able to reopen Per Se on May 1 with considerably less hoopla than the first time, but he had to fly out shortly thereafter back to Yountville, where the French Laundry was reopening after a four-month overhaul. But he couldn’t even be at that! He was obligated to be on the set of James L. Brooks’s new movie
Spanglish,
about a chef of Keller’s prominence, for which Keller had been hired as a consultant. I’d spoken with him that night by chance—it was almost the only time to reach him, when he was in transit to or from an airport. Here he was in a car bound for the San Francisco airport as his restaurant, his baby, was celebrating its reopening. It killed him. But life was irrevocably sped up by now—no going back, not with Bouchon and Bouchon Vegas, the second book in the works, plans for the inn across from the French Laundry under way, and the Bouchon bakeries in the works, both next to Bouchon Yountville and one in the Time Warner Center, the four-star California restaurant to run, as well as the new restaurant, for which he desperately wanted four stars.

On Sunday, May 30, before Per Se had been open a full month, Cunningham spotted Frank Bruni, the new restaurant critic for
The New York Times,
seated with three other people. It was possible and perhaps likely that this was not his first visit. “I’m sure he dined at Per Se before that or after that, but wasn’t recognized,” she said. Two weeks later, she saw him at the French Laundry. In the second week in July, she saw him again at Per Se. After three confirmed sightings, it was obvious that Bruni would be reviewing the restaurant sooner rather than later.

The power of
The New York Times
review cannot be overstated. That at least is the feeling of Manhattan chefs, especially those who run high-end restaurants. And it’s the reason that, when Bruni began reviewing (his first column, for Babbo, three stars, appeared on June 9, 2004), his photograph was quickly circulated via the Internet and shared by restaurants. The media gossip site, gawker.com, posted his picture on April 8 below these words: “For all our maître d’ friends here on the isla bonita of Manhattan, a few photos of Frank Bruni, the
NYT’
s new restaurant critic. No one likes to be surprised by a food critic, right?” Bruni’s mugshot is likely as frequent in restaurants as signs reminding employees to wash their hands.

The higher the high-end restaurant is, the more damage the
Times
critic can do. Eric Ripert, for instance, said as far as he was concerned, the matter couldn’t be more straightforward: “If we lose a star, we go out of business.” (“Only the Four Stars Remain Constant,” the headline would read over Bruni’s four-star review of Le Bernardin.)