Michael Ruhlman - The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity

Boys Themselves

The Making of a Chef

The Soul of a Chef

Wooden Boats

Walk on Water

House

COOKBOOK COLLABORATIONS

The French Laundry Cookbook

A Return to Cooking

Bouchon

Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing

BEYOND THE KITCHEN

VIKING

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First Published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright Michael Ruhlman, 2006

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ruhlman, Michael, 1963
The reach of a chef: beyond the kitchen / Michael Ruhlman.
p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4295-2278-X

1. CooksUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

TX649.R8 A3 2006 641.5092dc22 2005057908

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FOR DONNA, ADDISON, AND JAMES

who extend my reach in ways I could never have foreseen

Part One: The Chef Has Lost His Shoes

1 Its Not the French Laundry, Per Se

2 The Morphing Chef

3 Shadow Urge

Part Two: CIA Revisited

1 Cant Go Home Again

2 Doctor Ryan

3 A Kinder, Gentler Kitchen

4 Waiting for Bibimbap

Part Three: The American Chef

1 Edge Cuisine: Grant Achatz

2 The Romantic Ideal: Melissa Kelly

Part Four: The Power of the Branded Chef

1 One Thing Leads to Another

2 The Branded Chef

3 The Outpost and the Rollout

4 Emeril and Rachael

Part Five: The Chefs at 10 Columbus Circle

1 Per Se

2 Masa

3 Thomas and Masa

I entered the Per Se kitchen through the back door at seven P.M ., more than an hour after service had begun on what ought to have been a normal Thursday night, to find chaos. Per Se is Thomas Kellers ultra-luxurious and fantastically expensive Manhattan restaurant, one of the countrys temples of haute cuisine, a hushed world of urbane refinement and grace on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center overlooking Columbus Circle. Normally during service its like a watchmakers shop. Tonight its a circus.

It had been six years earlier that Keller sat on the back deck of my home in suburban Cleveland, beneath a towering black locust tree on a perfect July evening. He had then but a single restaurant, not four. He had no books, no lines of porcelain or silver, no signature-engraved knives for sale. He may have been, at that moment, cresting the apex of his professional career, the artist-monk of the French Laundry, financially successful, lionized in the press, admired by colleagues. His Napa Valley restaurant had one year earlier been called the most exciting restaurant in America by The New York Times. It became so popular that reservations were almost impossible to come by.

Hed gotten here by the relentless pursuit of perfection. He had always sought perfection, but he was careful to clarify for me on that summer evening that perfection is not an end, but rather a direction. Perfection doesnt exist, hed said, because once you reach it, its not perfect anymore. It means something else.

He was in a calm place mentally, relaxed, away from the day-to-day responsibilities of running and cooking for the French Laundry, summer birds and humming insects a backdrop for his thoughtful voice, words that would conclude his story in a book I titled The Soul of a Chef.

We had been talking about cooking and how a person takes a single, fundamental lesson from youthsay, from ones mom on how to clean a bathroom so that it shinedand translated that into everything one would do later in life. We spoke, that is, of how standards are created and of how Kellers standards had become him: that to extricate his standards from his personality would be to end him altogether, so that he would cease to be recognizable as Thomas Keller.

Keller had, since that suburban-pastoral moment of peace and reflection, brought those standards to bear on a bistro, elevating French classics to a four-star level. Then he opened another, this one in Vegas, the food Gomorrah of America. Working with his designers and the prominent porcelain manufacturer Raynaud and silversmith Christofle, he helped design and put his name to lines of fine dining products. If he was going to be a brand, he said, he wanted that brand to be like Herms. His cookbooks were so lavish that they were sometimes criticized for being too fine (and too big) to actually use. Like everything Keller put his hand to, they seemed sprinkled with magic dust and sold in big numbers.

And here he was, in the fall of 2004, at the helm of his most ambitious project yet. He had returned to New York, the city from which hed departed in defeat in 1991, and he intended to succeed big with Per Se. He was now one of the most famous chefs in the world, after all. He had the magic dust. His Manhattan shrine to haute cuisine would have a kitchen bigger than the dining room. The dining room would have a huge wood-burning hearth and a sweeping northeastern view of Central Park. It had cost a staggering amount of money for a restaurant, and some in the business thought hed never be able to pay it back, given the profit margins of a four-star Manhattan restaurantKeller hoped it would be four-star, that is. He couldnt abide just three stars. But that was not up to him, but rather to a New York Times reporter named Frank Bruni.

Wary of the press that had given six-star Michelin chef Alain Ducasse such a powerful thrashing for his perceived arrogance and his expensive menu, Keller wooed the media, going so far as to close down the French Laundry to demonstrate how absolutely committed he was to this new Manhattan restaurant.