“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 can’t think of another instance in which a minor kitchen fire in which no one was hurt made A1 of the Times. So far what’s striking is that the buzz (another word I’m not fond of ) has been tremendous, but there’s been no even slightly snarky subtext, which you’d sort of expect with any place that’s “the” place to be yet no one, essentially, can get into. That’s pretty un-New York. Also, no one seems dubious of the scale of Per Se’s ambitions, however you choose to define those. When Alain Ducasse opened, all that basically anyone could talk about were the prices; it was the same sort of resentment people back then reserved for dot-com multi-millionaires. In contrast, I haven’t heard a negative word about Thomas or Per Se. I think people are genuinely curious and, in an odd way, feel privileged that Thomas is going to be giving them a chance to experience his mastery without making them plan a summer vacation in Napa.
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 Inter
net 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.)
Bruni has short, straight dark hair, dark eyes, and a lively, engaged manner, hyper-alert to nuance and detail. He’s apparently lost quite a bit of weight since his days as a political reporter—photos from the Columbia Journalism Review show a man with a healthy appetite. He’s quite trim now, and young-looking. Born in 1964, he could still pass for an eager-eyed grad-school student. Bruni seemed to me on the two occasions I’d met him to be very smart, and also very thoughtful, even sweet (which I mention because it contrasts the jaundiced, snarky, one-upsmanship common in New York media circles, not to mention the arrogance that can result when a reporter becomes overly accustomed to the power conveyed by The New York Times). Bruni never reveals how many times he visits a restaurant, though surely it varies depending on what he feels he needs in order to review a place properly. I asked him about Ruth Reichl’s recent book about her career reviewing for the Times, which is loosely structured on the various costumes she’s used to conceal her identity, and he seemed slightly annoyed by the pressure of expectation that might put on him. He doesn’t wear wigs and doesn’t intend to. Mimi Sheraton, a former Times restaurant critic, also had a recent memoir out and felt strongly that anonymity was critical to reviewing restaurants well. Other critics take the stance that a kitchen can either cook or it can’t, and if it can’t there’s very little that a restaurant can do to change that fact, whether they know the Times is in the house or not. Reichl agrees with this, but she also makes an excellent case for the former position with her well-known review taking away one of Le Cirque’s four stars for shabby treatment when she was disguised as a helpless nobody and star treatment when she went as The New York Times Restaurant Critic.
The job cannot be an easy one. Reichl notes that she was physically ill in the days leading up to the publication of her Le Cirque review, so nervous was she about potential uncaught errors and general fallout. It’s among the most visible posts in New York journalism. Bruni seemed to be unnerved by the Web site devoted to making fun of him (who wouldn’t be unnerved by an anonymous amateur taking potshots at your prose style?).
Russ Parsons, at the Los Angeles Times, furthermore noted how hard life seems to be after you turn in your guns of Navarone and stop being the critic for The New York Times: “It’s amazing how that one job seems to be a dead end for so many talented people: Craig Claiborne, John Hess, Mimi Sheraton, Bryan Miller. Ruth is the only one so far who has been able to enjoy a strong second act. It remains to be seen what Bill Grimes [Bruni’s predecessor] will do, though the book-review job sounds pretty sweet.”
They all surely are aware of the power of their review and so write with considerable care. How does Bruni award stars? (Always a contentious subject among critics, that is—to use stars or not?) Ultimately, he said, what you need is “a solid impression in your gut—what is this restaurant?…How happy am I?”
For Keller the wait was nerve-racking. It’s one thing to feel the anticipation of the review at each Bruni sighting. It’s another emotion when the fact-checkers call and the photography department requests a photo shoot. Keller tried to downplay the importance of the review. He kept saying to himself and to the staff, according to Cunningham: “A newspaper doesn’t define us, doesn’t define who we are.” But he was obviously bracing himself for a disappointment. Four stars matter to him. He put stars on the main stove hood above the pass at the French Laundry, where everyone who entered the kitchen would see it, a symbol the servers faced when they picked up food at the pass. He wanted that constant reminder to maintain four-star standards. How could he possibly ask his chefs and his servers to maintain four-star standards at Per Se if the paper of record deemed them worthy of three, or fewer. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, one of Manhattan’s most cutting-edge chefs, chef-owner of the four-star Jean Georges, opened a high-end steak house on the opposite end of the fourth floor from Per Se, and Bruni had a month earlier given the restaurant a single humiliating star. And simply because your restaurant was ultra-expensive high-haute French with great pedigree and refinement didn’t grant it automatic four-star status, either. Bruni was soon to remove the fourth star from Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, opened by the chef famed for his Michelin stars. You couldn’t know what Bruni might think of Per Se.
Keller made plane reservations to arrive September 7, the day before the review would appear. It was an especially influential Wednesday because it was the first day after Labor Day, when all of New York City returns from summer vacationing and gets back to the work of living in New York City. A big review was warranted to open the fall season, a review of the most hyped, the most ambitious, the most written-about restaurant in the controversial Time Warner Center.
Keller had wanted to be there when the news actually arrived. But by the time he walked in the back of the kitchen, the review was on the Internet and a copy had been printed out and was handed to him immediately. The headline read, “The Magic of Napa With Urban Polish,” and the piece concluded, “But this restaurant shoots straight for the stars. And it soars high—and often—enough to grab four of them.”
Was the decision to give the restaurant four stars even close? Apparently not. Nearly a year later, Bruni confessed: “I was really, really bummed when I knew it was my last meal at Per Se.”
Keller and Cunningham and their staff had done it. Keller had returned to Manhattan and had earned four stars from the Times. He now led four-star restaurants on both coasts.
CHAPTER 2
Masa
Per Se was the first new four-star restaurant in Manhattan since Alain Ducasse at the Essex House received its ranking from William Grimes in 2001, three years earlier, bringing the total to five. Amazingly, New York’s next new four-star restaurant was named just a few months later. Notably, it was not French, or French-based, as all the others were; it was Japanese and specialized in sushi, the first Japanese restaurant to earn four stars in more than twenty years. But perhaps most amazing of all, this restaurant, Masa, was right next door to Per Se, its equal in ranking but its antithesis in spirit. In a city of thousands of full-service restaurants—Zagat surveys nearly 2,000 of them, and says 174 “note-worthy” restaurants opened that year—two of New York’s four-stars were side by side, four stories and three escalator rides from the street in a retail mall.
Regardless of place—this unusual mall situation—just the idea of this particular restaurant, Masa, was controversial. It was rumored to be the most expensive in the United States—you had to fork over four bills just to sit down at the bar. The place demanding this sum was not Alain Ducasse or Le Bernardin or Per Se, promising the elaborate preparations and expensive ingredients haute French cuisine was famous for, but rather raw fish and sauces often no more elaborate than a really good soy or a squeeze of a limelike fruit called sudachi. Moreover, the chef-owner, Masayoshi Takayama, had been in the States more than twenty years, but his English was limited, and so it was hard for the public to get to know him—profiles and interviews of the man were hardly revealing of why his skills as a chef were worth the astonishing prices. The two restaurants where he’d made his reputation in Los Angeles sat ten people at the bar (and twelve more at three tables), so his business was physically restrictive in addition to being financially exclusionary. And last, the chef didn’t want to be known outside his re
staurant, shunned attention, couldn’t care less about reviews. In the age of the celebrity chef, Masa Takayama, age fifty, was an anomaly.
Solidifying the controversy over this chef and restaurant in the mall was, as it happened, the most controversial of the food writers at the Times, Amanda Hesser. In her final column as an interim reviewer before Bruni took over, a tumultuous term marked by infuriated restaurateurs and chefs and one “Editor’s Note,” Hesser did not give any stars to Masa. Instead, she, and the Times, did the unprecedented: She gave the restaurant four question marks. This was a surprising thing to read on Wednesday morning in the conservative and fiercely edited New York Times. In much the same way that Reichl had said that Le Cirque was two different restaurants depending on who you were, Hesser explained that Masa was two different experiences depending on where you sat. If you sat at the bar to be served by Masa himself, it was four stars. If you sat away from the bar at one of the four tables to Masa’s left, it was three stars. She would not commit to either, and left it to Mr. Bruni to be decisive in the paper of record.
At the end of the year, he was:
Masa, despite its chosen peculiarities and pitiless expense, belongs in the thinly populated pantheon of New York’s most stellar restaurants. Simply put, Masa engineers discrete moments of pure elation that few if any other restaurants can match. If you appreciate sushi, Masa will take you to the frontier of how expansively good a single (and singular) bite of it can make you feel.
The chef and owner, Masayoshi Takayama, who operated Ginza Sushiko in Beverly Hills before relocating to Manhattan, does not present you with a menu or choices. You are fed what he elects to feed you, most of it sushi, in the sequence and according to the rhythm he decrees. You do not seize control at Masa. You surrender it. You pay to be putty. And you pay dearly…. Lunch or dinner for two can easily exceed $1,000.
The Reach of a Chef Page 31
