At the same time, the exercise of cooking at Papillon left me with a new appreciation for simpler pleasures, expertly executed. So, alongside the above, I made room for a squash soup adorned with a pasta preparation that had haunted me since those L’Escargot days—langoustine tortellini. But most dishes were studies in unabashed excess. I wanted to really push the envelope at Gilt, to use the spectacular setting as permission to take each and every course as far as I could, to flex my muscles and show what I could do. A foie gras torchon, enveloped by a beet gelée, for instance, was etched as an arresting tribute to architect Frank Gehry.
If you wanted a simple roasted chicken, Gilt was not the place to find it. Our chicken was served as a dizzying array of dishes under the name Milk-Fed Poulard, Petit Farcie, Malt-Smoked Oyster Crust, and Crushed Black Truffle Jus. In it, the chicken leg was presented in a ballotine stuffed with truffle and chicken mousse; the wing was confited and served with smoked oyster butter; a hot chicken consommé was presented with squash fondant glazed with Szechuan pepper; and a cold jellied consommé was topped with crispy skin, black truffle, and garlic crème—all with other, smaller dishes served alongside.
At Gilt, I wanted each dish to be like Christmas morning for the table, the waitstaff showering the guests with as many beautiful packages as the square footage could contain.
Cod Cheek with Smoked Bone Marrow and Black Trumpet
I introduced this labor-intensive dish, pictured on this page, during my go-for-broke phase at Gilt and have tweaked it over the years. The cod is cooked very gently, and the bone marrow is poached in a cardamom-enhanced escabèche. Also here are octopus, cuttlefish, and grapefruit, all complemented with a viscous sauce made from cod bones. At the end of the day, this dish is all about texture, the protein in the marrow pulling the flavors together.
Red Abalone
with White Truffle and Gnudi
This is emblematic of the culinary wanderlust I experienced after Papillon and of the lengths to which I went in preparing food at Gilt. This dish offers my distinctly non-Italian take on Italian food, relocating white truffle and gnudi to an unfamiliar environment. For a seafood dish, this is remarkably meaty, owing to the toothsome abalone (we aged it for a few days almost as you would a piece of beef, to bring out the natural umami flavor) and the earthy truffle. One of the cardinal rules of Italian cooking is to not combine fish and cheese, but the ricotta in the gnudi marries perfectly with the other elements. The dish is put over the top, and belongs forever to Gilt, thanks to a caramelized abalone consommé—an almost oaky, surprisingly nonfishy broth added to the cup at the last second. The gnudi are elegant, made with no flour or semolina (although the finished gnudi are rolled in flour to form a skin on their exterior), consisting of just a touch of ricotta and some Parmesan cheese for the high note it adds. They are poached in a light white abalone beurre monte, truffle butter made with the trimming of the abalone in the dish. You can find the recipe for White Truffle Gnudi with Abalone Butter on this page.
There was another reason for my ambition at Gilt. In 2005 Michelin, the arbiter of culinary success in most of the world, launched a New York City guide, and I desperately wanted in and at the highest level. Thomas Keller’s Per Se was awarded three Michelin stars, and, from day one, I wanted my work at Gilt to be a bid for similar enshrinement. That might seem foolhardy, but it remains my belief that if you don’t challenge yourself, you simply can’t grow as a chef.
When the Times reviewed Gilt, the new critic Frank Bruni wrote a mixed assessment, praising my technique and some dishes, but finding others too busy. “[Paul Liebrandt] is not a vacuously flamboyant bad boy, as his detractors have claimed,” wrote Bruni. “He’s an evolving young artist who needs to draw sharper distinctions between his greater and lesser ideas.” There was encouragement and validity in that comment, but I was too crushed by the ultimate verdict—two stars, in one of the grandest rooms in town—to hear it. Even in the midst of Gilt’s opulent dining room, I was at the low point of my career. In a moment that was mercifully not included in A Matter of Taste, I barked at Sally to “turn the camera off” as she captured my dismay and heartbreak.
PORK SHOULDER WITH BABY RADISH, CONFIT TURNIP, AND TAMARIND This is hearty elegance in an autumnal dish from Gilt. The pork shoulder is marinated in a brine-like mixture with a white beer base, then cooked very slowly sous vide and gently caramelized on the skin to produce a suckling pig–like texture. This is a very nice recipe that uses an economical cut of pork, with the beer imparting a yeasty flavor that marries well with the shoulder. It would be well-paired with tamarind, pumpkin puree, and artichokes that have been braised in apple cider. The recipe for Beer-Brined Pork Shoulder can be found on this page.
The night of the review was a roller coaster. Of all the nights he could have picked for a visit, Alain Ducasse, a three-star deity in my eyes, dropped in for dinner that night and made it his mission to pick me up off the canvas.
“How old are you?” he asked, noting my obvious despair.
“Twenty-nine.”
He waved his hand in the air. “You’ll have many more reviews,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine.”
But, as it turned out, for reasons unrelated to the food or the critics, I was doomed at Gilt. As any number of chefs can tell you, working with a union hotel crew can be a nightmare, and Gilt did nothing to reverse that conception. There was a sanctioned laziness by many hotel employees (not my own crack team in the kitchen) and also mysteriously high food costs that I began to investigate, demanding spreadsheets and other reports from the main office. Before I knew it, I was sacked, along with my entire team, including the pastry team. My Michelin hopes were, at least for the time being, quashed. I later learned that the costs were likely part of a shell game being run by one of the owner’s representatives, who was accused of embezzling millions of the company’s assets. But by the time this all came to light, it was too late. Gilt was no longer mine, and I was a free agent again, seeking my next restaurant, the next place to continue my evolution.
Beet-Hibiscus-Glazed Foie Gras
with Trevise
This glazed foie gras, which I first made at Gilt, has its structural origins in L’Escargot’s foie gras terrine with a Sauternes gelée, and offers yet another example of how influences from even one’s earliest cooking days can find their way into dishes in later life. I’d go so far as to say that any dish that you make or observe on a regular basis stays with you, but especially memorable are those you came into contact with early in your career, because your repertoire and knowledge were so limited at the time you first spotted them.
I didn’t prepare the terrine at L’Escargot myself. Upstairs, we served hot foie gras preparations. But downstairs, in the more casual restaurant, they served the terrine with small cubes of the translucent gelée alongside. Though expertly rendered, there was nothing especially new about that terrine, but whenever I passed by, my eye trained on it, much more than with the hot foie gras upstairs. I think it’s because of the precision and order of a terrine. My first experiences with foie gras were so calamitous and messy; a terrine represented an ideal, a summit to be climbed. In the years since I became a chef, I began enrobing terrines with gelées, which makes for a lovely visual and also pairs each mouthful with what I consider the perfect amount of sweet complement.
But this dish didn’t begin with my remembrance of L’Escargot or even of its foie gras terrine. Rather, it’s my homage to the architecture of Frank Gehry, whose work I became enamored of on a trip to his Guggenheim building in Bilbao, Spain, in 2004. That admiration found its expression in this dish: the thought, abstract in nature, found grounding in the glazed foie gras. From there, I added a beet and hibiscus croquant, black olive en croquant, trevise, and a shiso leaf.
In flavor and appearance, this composition represents the way I’d always like to cook but am still striving to attain. One of my aspirations as a chef is to be able to give physical voice to a flicker of i
nspiration like this. I feel I attained it here, but it was a transcendent and fleeting accomplishment, an exhilarating moment in which I assembled a dish the way authors speak of merely following their characters as they take on a life of their own. Because of the graphic nature of my cuisine, I’m sometimes asked if I consider cooking an art or a craft. I reject the question. This dish is both lovely to look at and, if I say so myself, delicious to eat. Cooking does not exist in binary terms. Art or craft? It’s both.
The recipe for Beet-Hibiscus-Glazed Foie Gras can be found on this page.
Beetroot-Blackberry Meringue
with Beetroot and Red Currant Sorbet
These vibrant, light-as-air meringues were part of the Flavors of Winter offering at Gilt, where they were paired with a tart-sweet beetroot and red currant sorbet. The meringue is simpler than it looks, made with beetroot juice, dried egg white powder, and gelatin; it’s the shape that makes it appear complicated, the planetary curvature suggesting Mars. (My private joke at the time was that this composition was an expression of both my alienation and my anger toward the hotel and its staff.)
The meringues are prepared on acetate sheets in a food dehydrator, a once-obscure piece of equipment that is now readily available to home cooks; you can even buy one at Bed Bath & Beyond. I highly recommend them, not just for this recipe, but for creating a variety of snacks and garnishes.
The recipe for Beetroot-Blackberry Meringue can be found on this page.
Ruby Red Shrimp
and Reindeer Lichen
The exceptional flavor of ruby red shrimp is the foundation of this light ballotine, glazed with pimiento pepper gelée, warmed, sliced, and served with reindeer lichen (sea moss), which has a nutty, almost mushroom-like quality. We present this at the table with light and creamy grits made with a consommé from the shrimp, an homage of sorts to a favorite of the American South: shrimp and grits.
FINDING MYSELF, FOR NOW
After Gilt, I spent a few years in the culinary wilderness, consulting for a variety of restaurateurs. While it was a period of relative professional stagnation, it was also a time of personal evolution. While at Gilt, I had met and fallen in love with a member of the service team, a captain named Arleene Oconitrillo, and our relationship had flowered into a full-fledged, long-term love affair. We decided to move in together, into an apartment in downtown Manhattan in 2006.
Relationships are never easy, and those between restaurant professionals can be especially trying. But for us, it was a perfect fit, each encouraging the other in our work, while forgiving each other our scarcity of leisure time (though we did our best to spend our Sundays together, a tradition we continue to this day). About a year after we moved in together, we adopted a dog, a “Hispanic Jack Russell” named Spencer who added immeasurably to our lives, bringing out a side of me I’d never seen before, an almost paternal instinct that made me want to be a better person.
Having been the chef at a number of restaurants, and being a little older, I finally had a chance to reflect on just what I wanted my food to be. It was a powerful and productive time for self-reflection. Just as one matures through the years, so too does one’s food. I came to a number of conclusions about what I wanted to do next. First and foremost, I wanted to continue to push myself and my cooks to execute at the absolute highest level. Second, I wanted to remain true to myself and my food, to continue to evolve and not take backward steps in order to feel more secure or stable. Third, I wanted to honor the other side of the equation, the pure pleasure of the guest, more than I might have done in my earlier years, to yoke my abilities and passion to the expectations and cravings of the diner. And fourth, I wanted to earn those Michelin stars.
From the Garden
This dish (shown on this page), our most celebrated upon Corton’s opening, is my homage of sorts to Michel Bras, the French chef whose deft and artful touch with vegetables was legendary and inspirational, and whose restaurant I had once eaten at. The simplicity of this plate is deceptive because vegetables are so much more delicate than, say, a piece of beef: cooking them is all about feeling, almost intuiting, where they are in the process. For example, cooking a carrot sous vide means ensuring that all of the natural carotene remains inside. I remember saying to my cooks that I wanted the vegetables for this dish “not too cooked, not too raw.” This ever-changing composition could include as many as thirty-eight types of vegetables on one plate and require three cooks to assemble it.
In summary, I wanted to create a menu and a dining experience that were equal parts ambition and accessibility, and to, as they say here in America, knock it out of the park.
In 2007, a mutual friend arranged a coffee between me and Drew Nieporent—the garrulous restaurateur behind such successes as Nobu and Tribeca Grill—who was looking to do something with his space on West Broadway in TriBeCa, the original site of the long-shuttered Montrachet, a restaurant of great historical significance since it launched the careers of Drew and of David Bouley. For our future collaboration, we worked with designer Stephanie Goto to create a look that was sophisticated but understated—we wanted to create a kind of hushed dining temple, with a Zen-like serenity. For its name, we settled on Corton, borrowed from an area of Burgundy, linking the restaurant to its past as Montrachet.
With my new mission in mind, and with Arleene on board as our general manager, I began planning the menu, revisiting some successes from Gilt, simplifying them even in name, dropping the “Flavors of” from their titles and simply calling them “Early Spring” or “Winter.” I also scaled down some dishes—the foie gras torchon would still be served with a beet and hibiscus glaze, but shed its accompaniments of foie gras royale and brioche and quail egg composition from Gilt. It was invaluable to have Arleene alongside for this period of my life, somebody who had only my best interests in mind and understood me, in some ways, better than I did myself. With her and her impeccable taste and instincts at the helm, I wouldn’t have to second-guess decisions being made in the front of the house.
Even I could see that my food sparkled with a new clarity and focus. Balancing the thematic exercises such as the seasonal tributes were more conventional offerings, such as a velouté of Jerusalem artichokes served over peekytoe crab, and a squash soup paired with tempura porcini mushrooms and a porcini relish, a tribute to the coming fall.
The build out of the restaurant took ages, as is unfortunately commonplace in New York City. Finally, just before we were set to open, the financial crisis of 2008 hit, throwing the world in general, and the restaurant industry in particular, into a tailspin. But we decided to stay the course—what choice did we have?—and launched as planned on October 1, without adjusting our menu or our ambitions.
The dish that drew the most attention right out of the gate at Corton was From the Garden, an ever-changing selection of vegetable preparations, artfully arranged on one plate, and a visual knockout when it arrived at the table. It was a pure expression of my sensibility, but also something that food lovers of all stripes and levels of sophistication could embrace. My evolving approach and maturity were captured in a single offering. Every dish on the menu bore the mark of my palate and my graphic visual style, but in a more universally accessible package.
Despite the backdrop of financial calamity, we were an instant success, drawing food enthusiasts, writers, and bloggers in equal measure. The reviews for Corton were rapturous: three stars from the New York Times (with an implication of possible four-stardom ahead) and four out of five stars from New York magazine. The James Beard Foundation nominated us as Best New Restaurant, and Food & Wine magazine proclaimed me one of the nation’s Best New Chefs. The Times review was especially gratifying after the disappointment of Gilt; best of all was the headline, “Imagination, Say Hello to Discipline.” I couldn’t have written a better credo myself.
All of this attention was gratifying and—to be honest—a relief. The quips of dissenting critics, the misstep of those Papillon dinners, those years at sea betwee
n restaurants … I was finally able to let it all go, to do my work in a state of security and serenity, knowing that, at long last, New York considered me as much a part of it as I had always considered myself.
SAFFRON VANILLA FUDGE Even though the acclaim for Corton meant New York had embraced me at last, this dish suggests that maybe I was homesick after all. It’s a tribute to classical British fudge, flavored with green tea, saffron, and salted British butter, and is slow cooked for four hours.
The recipe for Saffron Vanilla Fudge, Banana Ganache, Matcha can be found on this page.
DUCK/CARROT/MEYER LEMON An encapsulation of my mission at Corton is a variety of duck and carrot preparations. I challenged myself to devise as many iterations of those two primary ingredients as possible, such as a duck torte with salad, cold terrine of duck with carrot meringue, and duck sausage with carrot noodles. It was a revisiting of my entire career, from my young cook days, where I was schooled in never wasting any part of an ingredient, to where I had arrived in my own kitchen at last.
The recipe for Duck Leg Torte, a dish I originally served as part of a multi-preparation duck course, can be found on this page.
By the following fall, there was one more critical hurdle looming on the horizon. That October, The Michelin Guide was to announce its class of 2010.
It had been a Michelin month for me leading up to this moment of reckoning. England’s Heston Blumenthal and Spain’s Juan Mari Arzak—both three-star gods—had each been in to dinner at Corton, and I had visited with them at the end of their meals. The visits quickly turned into mentoring sessions, with each of them offering me unfiltered advice, the kind of knowledge that could only be imparted by toques of their caliber. (The same thing happened when I was passing through Yountville, California, that season, and had breakfast with Thomas Keller.) Because I had been on the radar for almost a decade, ever since I first came on the New York scene at Atlas, there was a feeling around the culinary world that I had arrived, and Corton had become a mandatory stop for great chefs passing through New York.
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