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It would be weeks on the hot line before I had a real conversation with Chef Bouley himself, the ghostly, swift-moving presence responsible for this machine. I soon learned that his unpredictability was the hallmark of the Bouley kitchen. To his cooks, it was the unfortunate consequence of his insane creativity. All night long Bouley cooked personally, off menu, shuttling between his side-by-side restaurant kitchens, for countless VIPs—friends, celebrities, known gourmands. He’d show up at 6:00 P.M. in the middle of the first seating rush toting a case of Concord grapes, throw it on someone’s cutting board, and say, “I want you to clean these and steep them in the lobster-port sauce,” totally kinking the cook’s flow. Or he’d drop a box of scallops in the shell onto the cold app station and say, “Shuck them, save the coral roe, sauté it, and put it in small dice under the ceviche,” forcing that cook to wedge himself onto the hot line to find space on the flat-top dining service. This put all the cooks on edge and constantly in the weeds—but it kept Bouley’s own improvisational inner demon on track. Even without the last-minute arrivals, not a single night went by without Bouley throwing a wedge into the gears of dinner service. I thought this was how all kitchens were.
I didn’t know what to expect of a chef with one three-star and one four-star New York City restaurant, but I suppose it was something more distantly managerial: I didn’t expect him to cook the fish or plate the food himself. Or to wear formal dress shirts and cuff links beneath his chef coat, like he was playing 007, a Bond masquerading as a chef. Or to talk to me.
“You’ve got the orange powder over here?” he whispered steamily in my ear.
I quickly dropped the piece of schnitzel I was breading back into its crumb bath and started flipping through my tiny ring-bound notebook as his impatience mounted. Orange powder?
“She doesn’t have the orange powder?” he said to Mario. “Where in the hell is my orange powder? It was in a little foam cup…” And he started to ransack my station.
I’d come to learn that the orange powder—made by grinding candied, dehydrated orange peel to a dust—was one of the many extra things I was expected to have on my station for these moments when Bouley decided to come in and go rogue, which was nightly. In addition to the regular printed menu, he had a running list of dishes that he was constantly changing, working on, reinventing.
He’d tell the fish cook, “Give me the garnish we did for the axis for that guy.” (Axis being the kind of Texas venison we used.)
“Which was that, Chef? The lobster beet setup?” Reduced beet juice, red wine, and truffles.
“No, no.” Bouley sighed, basting sturgeon with foaming, browning butter. He threw his spoon into the metal spoon bin. “Go ask Shea, he’ll know.” Meaning the dish he did next door at Bouley. Meaning that the cook should leave his station, walk outside, go into the kitchen next door at Bouley, and ask Shea, the meat cook, for the “axis setup Chef did for the guy.” Shea, deeply weeded in service himself, would just laugh and send the cook back with a saucepot of celery puree, sautéed wood ear mushrooms, and a pot of mushroom réglisse sauce. Most of the time he guessed right.
As Bouley cooked and plated, you could see him juggling proportion and generosity: what was just enough, what was just a hair too much, what degree of excess would sink the diner into a kind of delirium. Trained in cutting-edge kitchens in France in the late 1970s, he absorbed his mentor Roger Vergé’s preference for light vegetable-based sauces over the old-school meat reductions and then took it one step further; his culinary mind tripped on the sauces. Some of them seemed to have been devised by plumbing the depths of the color itself. The mango-curry-saffron mixed far-flung flavors, but tasted like a totally natural fusing of the elements that make yellow. Ocean herbal sauce—composed of three herb oils as well as fennel, celery, and garlic purees—mined the color green. His sauces were so vivid they were almost libidinous—virile and romantic at the same time, like him. One look at his plates identified the guy whose eyes conquested all female passersby to be the same one who had also personally picked out the dining room’s gaudy tasseled velvet pillows.
His food was precise, but not so tight that it blocked out artistry. There was a looseness, a drunken glee for cooking that was very pronounced here. A Bouley consommé wore a technically incorrect shimmer of fat on top, as thin as gold leaf, which effectively lubricated the happiness going down. It was the industry norm to gently shake off the juices that erupted when you cut into a filet of medium-rare meat, so as not to dilute the sauce, but when the meat cook did this, Bouley shot him a look and said quietly, “I want that venison juice.” The cook complied, his eyes transfixed to the translucent bloody dome that grew by the second on the venison’s cut edge, threatening to flow a river through his pale celeriac puree. It made little sense until you just accepted the fact that juice was juice. Cooking was about sensation, about carnality, and Chef was certainly no prude.
This kind of cooking required real knowledge—cooks who could hit the outer edge of perfection, who trusted themselves enough to color right on top of the lines, not inside them. When the service was bumpy and we weren’t hitting it, Bouley slipped down the line and whispered hotly into the space between me and the meat guy, “Don’t give me what I ask for. Give me what I want.”
“What the hell did he say?” my comrade hissed, but I just shook my head. There was no time to answer. Hot plates were hitting the steel piano. Bouley threw his cautions as effectively as a ventriloquist, shooting whispers across the line. He had a way of mumbling a criticism so that it hit its intended recipient right in the basket. The one I often caught was “The potatoes are too loose.” He was right, of course. They were supposed to flop softly, but mine looked like they were melting. When I looked up, Bouley was onto the next thing, gently pinching one of six plated langoustines on the pass. He hesitated for a minute and then punched his thumb through the ivory flesh. And the next one. He angrily crammed all six langoustines into a rough ball and started stacking the brittle porcelain Bernardaud plates, one on top of the other, making it sound like a stack of poker chips. The captain who was waiting for the course moaned and steered his head out the door.
“Come on, people,” Bouley muttered sarcastically. “Oh, let’s just hurry up and make shit.”
The entire weight of the diner’s experience hung in the balance as the long minutes ticked off to the table’s refire and replate.