Feature

The Return of the Prodigal Chefs

Toques of the Town: Keller with his then-boss Daniel Boulud, at the Westbury Hotel in 1983.

(Photo: Daniel Boulud)

In the dining room at the French Laundry, nothing breaks the serene calm and pursuit of pleasure. With its pale walls devoid of art and the muted lighting, the effect, oddly enough, is of a sensory-deprivation tank—the room fades away; the other diners become invisible and inaudible. The experience of a meal is as artfully orchestrated as a symphony. All one notices is the bright tablecloth, the waves of aromas, the succession of textures, the attack and recession of flavor. As I recollect a meal of truffles and custard, poached lobster, and pig’s ear and yuzu pudding, I recognize a giddy sense of longing that I felt as a teenager: infatuation.

As Keller seeks to direct a meal of many intensely focused small acts, Gray Kunz creates by adding layers, ingredients, and accents to any recipe almost ad infinitum—yet he produces a dish that makes a single statement. What is striking is how many ingredients he can draw on from his taste lexicon. Star anise, black onion seeds, lavender flowers, sumac, Indonesian kecap manis, and honeydew juice are no more or less exotic to Kunz than salt and pepper. He tastes, retastes, seasons, reseasons, calls for this ingredient or that, and slices so fast that his blade is like the blur of a hummingbird’s wing. You won’t get his attention when you talk to him, but if your execution is wrong, he might show you how to do it in a manner as gentle as that of a Montessori-school teacher. Or, if you’re some diffident line cook who should have known better, you’ll see his ire before he speaks a word, because Kunz’s face reddens with emotion, quickly followed by colorful imprecations in any of the five languages he speaks.

A few years ago, when we were working on our cookbook, we organized it around flavors (which is how chefs create recipes). One day I suggested to Kunz that we make something based on bitterness, or at least that we use that taste as a starting point. It was a crummy late-November day as we trudged in the rain to a depressing city supermarket. With an ordinary, shrink-wrapped supermarket chicken as the base of our meal, Kunz conjured.

“Bitter, okay, let’s start with almonds,” he said and flipped a pack of shelled almonds into the shopping cart.

“Now to balance it, something fruity,” he mused as his gaze lit on dried cranberries. “These will be exactly right because cranberries have a bitter edge but some sweetness.”

Shallots came next, because Kunz likes shallots whenever he can work them into a recipe. They broaden flavor with their aroma and underscore any sweetness in a dish. Leeks work to similar effect but are a little more focused, so he picked some of them, too. He was getting up a head of steam at this point. “Okay, some vinegar for acidity,” which brightens taste. “I think we’ll use cider vinegar because apples are a fall item and so are cranberries.”

He paused to consider his next move. “Apple-cider vinegar, cranberries. It feels New Englandy. Let’s go for sweetness with maple syrup to balance things out. And nutmeg—that will give it a bouquet that keeps the flavors from getting too diffuse. Anyway, when I think of New England in the fall I like apple cider with a grating of nutmeg.” Finally, butter, because such a hearty, rustic dish cries out for nuttiness.

This recipe, composed by Kunz on the spot—oven-crisped chicken with maple-shallot-vinegar glaze—turned out to be the most popular recipe in the book. In the same manner that a musician can “hear” a complex melody in his head and know it is good music before he ever picks up an instrument, Kunz is always hearing taste melodies.

When Kunz finally made the break from Lespinasse, he learned, to his surprise, that simply being an acclaimed chef is not enough to attract the backing needed to succeed in New York. The restaurant consultant Adam Block (who is advising all the Time Warner chefs except Vongerichten) tried to help Kunz set up a new venture. But as the deals fell through, the two parted ways. Block’s affectionate but clear-eyed assessment was that great chefs do not necessarily make great businessmen; their ambitions rarely match up with the restaurant Realpolitik of profit margins. Kunz finally came to understand that “I had to go through a learning curve, a very steep one for how to comport myself in the business world.”

Two years later, after Kunz agreed to give Block oversight of his business strategy, the consultant helped bring the chef into an arrangement with Vongerichten for the restaurant Spice Market, which is scheduled to open in mid-January. There, Kunz and Vongerichten have devised a modern menu based on Southeast Asian street food. Next, Block got Kunz into the Time Warner deal. Kunz’s restaurant there, Café Gray, will be fine dining, but on the casual side—a place along the lines of Atelier in Paris, the creation of another demigod escapee from formal haute cuisine, Joel Robuchon.

Kunz invited me to a first tasting of proposed recipes. Among the things dished out were our chicken with maple-shallot-vinegar glaze, risotto and mushroom ragout, and an experiment: a moderately tweaked sole Colbert, a fried fish with herbed butter that is a French classic. Looking over this menu, Kunz’s wife, Nicole, commented, “Where’s Gray Kunz?” She had put her finger on something. The food was good, but something was missing—his other food languages.

“I need to Kunzify it more,” he said.

This is precisely what he did in the next week’s tasting. Not Eastern, not Western, just Planet Gray. He started with a creamy, herb-rich, and piquant mulligatawny soup accented with preserved lemons, bracingly hot curry, kaffir-lime leaf, and lemongrass, served in a demitasse cup with a lattice of crisped taro on top. Most impressively, the second run at sole Colbert was a more confident example of Kunz’s ability to transform classic recipes by giving his Asian instincts free rein: a panko (Japanese breadcrumbs) crust seasoned with cardamom and coriander seed, the center of the fish filled with coins of spiced, braised lettuce stems. A brasserie dish, for sure, but a global brasserie recipe.

“What I tried to do at Lespinasse I want to do at Café Gray in a more casual and affordable way,” he explains. “Not dumbed down, just not truffled up.”

Kunz and Keller are now in countdown mode; Per Se is set to open on February 16 and Café Gray sometime in early March. Keller is closing the French Laundry for a four-month renovation while he and Cunningham devote their time to fine-tuning the New York operation. Keller is aching to begin, thinking constantly about the minutiae of Per Se. On a drive back from Yountville, he talked at length and more deeply than I would have thought possible about plates, telling the story of his risotto bowl, which has about four inches of lip on each side and is three and a half inches deep.

“I wanted something that would keep the risotto warm and all at the same depth,” Keller said. “While walking through the museum at Reynaud in France, I came upon a piece called a trembleuse. It was made for Marie Antoinette, so that she could have soup in her coach without spilling it. The solution was a wide plane with a very deep center. And I said, ‘That’s what I want for our risotto.’ ”

Chefs, when they are not thinking about making food, are thinking about how to serve it. Kunz and Keller think about such things all the time. Yet I never heard either obsess over their roll of the dice at Time Warner Center.

With a tone that is either fatalistic or just plain confident, Keller said simply, “If the building makes it, we all make it.” He turned to look out the window at the fog bank rolling in off San Francisco Bay.