Opinions
New York Diary: Chez Daniel
In which the author and his fiancée are given $400 to eat at New York’s best French restaurant, and find themselves blown away, hubris intact. By Rosecrans Baldwin.
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Dinner was scheduled at Fred and Zoe’s for 7 o’clock on Friday. Friends from Paris were visiting and they wanted us to complete a six-some for lamb curry. We hadn’t met the Parisians, but I had seen a video of the male friend, Julien, singing along drunk to a Rolling Stones song with Fred at a party a year or two before. The video was actually quite funny, because Fred’s head stays out of the picture for the first half of the song, then comes in from the right side like a porpoise in glasses, singing the doo-doo-doo part, and Julien, who I was about to share dinner with, croons, his lips pouted, eyes open wide and infantile-ly vulnerable, as if summoning Jagger’s more innocent signatures; so of course we agreed to dinner and showed up just a hair late.
There was no dinner. At least, not with any Paris friends.
Fred met us outside his Carroll Gardens building and walked us up the four flights to his apartment. I think I was in the middle of saying something predictable (what I always say when a friend lives above the second floor) about what a good workout he must get from the long walk upstairs, and how much he must save in gym fees, when Fred stepped forward, threw open the door, and twenty people screamed at us from the dark.
With the various ways we find to die, there are probably a certain number of people killed each year by surprise parties. I bet the group’s not very big, maybe a dozen less than the unlucky ground up in turbines, a few more than children at summer camp spiked by canoes, but it must be one of the more awful ways to go, because the killers are actually active in the killing, and not only innocent but well-meaning—they thought the wild shouts and light-flicking would make you feel loved. Imagine the look on their faces, at Harry’s 40th birthday party, when rather than walk in red-faced to humbly cut the Viagra-novelty cake, lovable Harry Bauer falls flat on the porch with angina, his hand on the ticker.
We survived the trauma and realized, for the first time, someone had managed to surprise us both at the same time successfully. Thoughts of death aside, I was overjoyed, and I spent the remainder of the party quizzing Fred and Andrew on their preparations, when I wasn’t dancing in a helmet. Once the surprise wore off, and after a few minutes of catch-up and drinks, the party became any normal night of drinking and eating with the same set of friends.
Except for the gift; the gift changed things a little. Andrew and Fred had billed the party as a surprise celebration of our engagement, and got everyone to pitch in on a small white envelope that was presented to us on the couch. Flipping it over, I recognized the insignia in the return-address space and shrieked—opening it and looking over the enclosed certificate, she shrieked, and I shrieked again, even higher-pitched.
The next morning, all-shrieked out and a little hung over, I made the call from bed, just after making coffee. A woman, very pleasant, answered and took my request. She was chipper and cheery while I sounded like a toad, but somehow I communicated what we were looking for, and she noted our reservation for a Friday night, 8pm, three weeks later.
When twenty friends chip in to give you a $400 gift certificate to Daniel, you do not politely tuck it away and remind yourself to someday get around to spending it.
* * *
There are dozens, even hundreds, of top-shelf restaurants in New York. Among them, there are probably 15 that can outclass the rest in the city, go three rounds with the best of any other, and 90 percent of a test audience would still agree: the food was excellent, even transcendental, the service was perfect, the design and wine list and steak knives all superb. Not that New York is the best dining city in the world (though it may be), but that it’s one of them, and so being, counts as among the best places to eat in the world right now. Daniel, given four stars by the Times (as chronicled in Leslie Brenner’s superb The Fourth Star) and loved by most everyone, consistently floats on the top of the list.
Daniel is the namesake restaurant for Daniel Boulud: chef, entrepreneur, New York celebrity, recognized gourmet all-star. Called ‘one of the 10 best restaurants in the world’ by the International Herald Tribune, Daniel the restaurant regularly fluffs food writers into silent foaming comas, where adjectives can’t intrude. William Grimes, for the Times, wrote in March last year, ‘There is no food better in France than what you’ll find at Daniel.’ I found this review on Daniel’s Web site and, amusingly, they also publish a review by John Mariani from Esquire, December 1999, that includes this same line, attributed to Mariani. Most likely, it’s a mistake, since it’s highly improbable that Grimes stole it (not ethically, but statistically: who reads Esquire for restaurant reviews?); maybe Boulud appreciates it so much, it’s worth attributing twice. But maybe it’s actually true: two writers, two years apart, in the same restaurant but at separate times, felt compelled to select the very same words—No food better in France—because there was no better arrangement of language to express how fundamentally good the food was.
It does, however, require that you believe the food in France is worth bragging about in the first place (the unquestioned first law of the food trade), and not only the food of bistro- or brasserie-France, but that Michelin-starred cuisine you probably haven’t tried. French cooking has been battered and black-eyed for the last twenty years, when sauces became less important, low-fat introduced, and fusion a word applied to cuisine, but I think Americans still carry the cliché of French cooking equaling good, or at least haute (with all elitism included), and consider it a maxim as irrefutable as the cardinal home rule: No one makes fried chicken better than Mom.
A nation’s cooking is an important badge of character; judgments can and should be made about a country by its food. Americans may secretly hate the French as much as they openly despise us, but that’s only the top of an otherwise secret love affair. When a poor flunky pounds for hours in a basement, somewhere in Paris, making bread until the chef—mean rotund Pierre, chain-smoker, with tattoos in secret places—cuffs him, drawing blood from his ear, and says his baking not only stinks, but smells so bad it might have been produced in America, well…an American couldn’t help but find that dear, or at the very least, haute. Obviously the image is trite and overly romantic, but France is an important, overly romantic cliché for America; America, in whichever direction, possibly the same for France; and even if the images both countries carry are based on negative or sentimental feelings, they are more like dreams than nightmares, where the reality is not horribly-to come, but an alternate.
Walking into Daniel, the only thing that wasn’t fantasy was the price: it’s very expensive. Even with $400 to spend, and 20 friends to thank, we had to be careful what we picked. And still, as the meal went by—plate after plate, glass after glass—it wasn’t hard for us to spend more than the gift allowed, even if we didn’t have it.
* * *
The outside of Daniel is anything but subtle. Most New York restaurants are built flush to the street with maybe a sign and a few windows, or at most an awning for diners to huddle underneath, after dinner, while waiting for their cab.
Daniel, however, is built like a Broadway show, with a giant overhanging roof outside, and attracts the same audience as your average big-budget musical: old, rich, and rarely local. It’s hard not to recall the opening scene from The Player when you enter and everything appears choreographed by Altman, including the snatches of blow-by conversation: two Texans cut you off on the stairs, on vacation with their daughter who’s moaning about her feet; a young foreign playboy in jeans is on the house phone, bent over the desk then reeling back for air, shouting at someone to hurry up; a gaggle of old women go by in a huddle, pumping their blow-outs; two waiters with bright blue ties rush past, one trailing the other with hands clasped behind his back like a speed skater following the leader; slicked-up young dudes dash from the restroom to the bar, shouting over their shoulders; and finally, like St. John himself, the host snags you with eye-contact and politely asks if you’d like to go to your table.
We sit, we calm down, we order. First course arrives shortly after cocktails: chilled lobster with fresh fruit, including watermelon. This is the first round from our five-course tasting menu and we are expecting great things. Our drinks have arrived, a martini for me and whiskey for her (when she wasn’t sure what she wanted, the French waiter asked, ‘Maybe you’d like a cosmo?’ pronouncing cosmo by rushing the first half and emphasizing the second, as if he was calling a small dog. ‘No,’ she answered, smiling. ‘I think I’ve grown out of that.’), and we have gone through the wine selection with an extremely genteel and knowledgeable sommelier, and also enjoyed the complimentary introduction to Daniel’s culinary style: a three-tiered silver tray of small treats: pâté on toast with onions, sautéed fresh vegetables, and a parmesan pastry something-or-other; rich indulgences paired with the season’s light flavors.
But back to our first course, the lobster and the fruit. It was the beginning of what we had cause to believe would be a great meal, perhaps the best. William Grimes has prepared us—There’s no reason to go all the way to France, Grimes told me in my head, when Daniel is in your own backyard, and your friends are so generous. (Incidentally, I made Grimes sound like a cross between John Cleese and John Gielgud, though I have no reason to believe he’s English; in matters of taste, when I’m taking advice from voices in my head, I just prefer them to be British, preferably out of the closet, and still able to build the types of weapons James Bond would prefer.) Unfortunately, judging by our artfully arranged and served plates, Grimes is wrong. The course is boring. At that moment, a kebab shop in Marseille could have me shivering with excitement. The lobster meat, as lobster meat goes, was fine: fresh, ok-tender, but you can get the same all across Manhattan. The more tame fruits tasted like mish-mash, while the watermelon was too sugary and starchy to work. It’s like a computer-dating match gone bad, opposites on a plate not chosen for lasting conversation, and it’s hard not to hide our disappointment. Neither of us wants to say it’s bad, but we can see the other is bored. Conversation dies fast. I watch a nearby family placate their whiny son, then watch myself wonder out loud ‘Who brings a child to a place like this?’ I am suddenly in any restaurant; I am any New Yorker blowing money out the wazoo, annoyed by everyone around him. We still have four courses to go, but even for one to be so-so, at a restaurant where the critics have to use the exact same sentence to get the excellence right, where we’ve bought the clichés, even savored them for weeks, it’s sad to watch our plates be cleared half-full.
Not until the bread man appears are we back on the good side of the night: the bread is amazing. Five or six varieties, and they’re all perfect: light, hot, dense, and crackling, each one graced by a single flavor (garlic, sourdough) on top of the simple goodness of bread. We each take two, then three when the waiter prods us. The first course slips by forgotten. Wine goes down fast. We go back to making fun of the people sitting near us, no longer frustrated but just having fun when an awkwardly paired couple sitting next to us, obviously there on business, goes through conversation like a pair of fighting weasels.
I have my mouth half-full of a garlic roll, about to rinse my teeth with wine and hoping no one sees me, when I notice a short man in a chef’s jacket on the other side of the room stare at me from behind his glasses a second too long, then beeline for the table.
He grabs my hand and I see a flash of recognition go over his face, possibly disappointment, a slight wrinkle twitch under his left eye.
‘Hello, I am Daniel.’
‘Hi, I’m Rosecrans.’
‘You know, you look exactly like Rocco DeSpirito.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yes. Of the Union Pacific.’ He shrugs. ‘It is very funny.’
‘Oh—That’s weird…’
And then, I don’t know, I decide to tell him our life story. Not the whole thing, but I do fill him in, him being Daniel, owner of the restaurant, chef extraordinaire, exactly why we’re there, and how unusual it is for us, and what a lucky treat, and what great friends we have, and the whole time he still hasn’t let go of my hand and he’s smiling, nodding rapidly at both of us.
‘Wait,’ he says, spotting another chef walking past us. ‘You have to meet Alex, my head chef!’ So now we meet Alex, and he congratulates us on our engagement, and while a hundred plates are going unfinished in the kitchen Daniel decides it’s his turn to relate our story, so he tells Alex how we’re there, and how wonderful it is, and what good friends we have, smiling very broad and annunciating clearly, despite his heavy French accent, and Alex, smiling now too though with tight lips, congratulates us and thanks us for coming to the restaurant.
‘What are you having,’ he asks, just before he leaves.
‘The five-course tasting menu.’
‘Alex,’ Daniel cuts in. ‘We will have to add a few extra courses to their meal, don’t you think?’
‘Of course,’ Alex says, serious again, and walks off, and it’s not unreasonable to think he’s just been bamboozled into cooking more plates than he needs while his boss continues schmoozing.
Daniel leaves to shake hands at another table and we’re ecstatic; this is a surprise party that no one planned, four people attended, and the gift is not so much material as enjoyably temporary and sentimental. The first course is like a bag lunch we had last week, and the mistaken identity-bit is glossed over. Daniel chose us. Daniel liked us. Daniel had no reason to be so kind. Of course he’s human, and only a chef, recognized by maybe a few hundred people in the city as someone to know, but it’s like going to a bachelor party where one of the guys drinking with you is a member of Sonic Youth, and he mentions, over your third or fourth beer, that he’s read your Web site, and actually liked it. Well, okay. Yes: He’s a dude, like any dude at the bachelor party, and he even skips out on the karaoke part. But he’s in Sonic Youth.
Back to money for a second, because it maybe explains why Daniel sensed we weren’t his regular customers, and wasn’t just overcompensating for a social blunder (though he probably was): 400 dollars is 150 more than the most I’ve ever spent on a meal, and I can’t get this out of my head during dinner. As a couple, we’re not necessarily tight with money, but money is certainly tight with us, so even if the 400 was a gift, it’s difficult to cope with blowing it on food.
That meal, the $250-dinner, was at the Gramercy Tavern, one of New York’s other exceptional restaurants, and my personal favorite (though I’ve only been there five or six times, and only once on my own dime), where I dropped $250 (of an unexpected $1,000 Christmas bonus; another gift, of a sort) on a dinner for us two years ago. I don’t remember the exact course elements, but I think we each had three rounds, and I remember eating a rabbit with cranberries that was so far from gamey it tasted like a rich hazel cream, the last flavors like a stamp of orange and rosemary.
Then, as now, $250 on a dinner is an extremely rare indulgence for us, about $200 more than an average good night out, but still nothing to regret, even if I worry over the wine selection and fear the rude sommelier who avoids the cheap bottles. In my book, food is nothing to skimp on, and, assuming you get what you pay for, it’s worth the money. Good food, besides the innate you-know-it when it’s halfway swallowed and your eyelids flutter, is a blessing, something to be savored, and should show the chef’s close attention, craft, and personal taste, but never before it’s off the fork; a simple plating that elicits an ‘Ooh, that looks nice,’ is enough. Ingredients should be fresh and not trendy. Subtle beats brazen, fresh beats frozen. And the dish, ultimately, should include a little whimsy, preferably in the way the ingredients are matched, like a sigh on top of an argument.
So when our next course, a seafood appetizer, was held for a special interruption, we smiled and sat silently while the waiter carefully put down our plates and pointed to their elements and whispered, from Monsieur Daniel, then left us to our steaming hunks of foie gras, blasted gold and glowing in the shallow white bowls, the skin glistening in brown sauce and juices, both servings specially cut—get this—in the shape of hearts.
I don’t know; is Boulud a romantic? Is executive chef Alex sentimental? It took us nearly thirty seconds to realize they were to be eaten and not stuffed in our pockets for safekeeping.
And the courses continued. And continued. And then there was more. Now, looking back, I wish I had a way to bottle their flavors; the words mean so little when compared to those tastes. We pushed our away through the oncoming plates: a clam, battered and broiled, floating on a green-specked butter sauce; a scallop like pudding; blackened sea bass; another fish; lamb that cut like butter, went down like cream; tender squab.
At one point I noticed the cheese cart going by and asked our waiter if we could possibly have some cheese after dinner, and that I’d be willing to pay since it wasn’t on the menu we chose. ‘No no no,’ he said, a little miffed. ‘You will have it before dessert. Please—Don’t worry.’ When it came, we chose three that looked good and nasty and the waiter, a little disappointed, told us he’d fix us his own plate of selections; he included our three, and added six more, from my region, he said.
The check came eventually, after coffee and brandy, a basket of madelines and homemade ice cream, mango sorbet with cake, a tray of chocolates and lemon squares. And somehow, the only thing we were charged for was our original menu and the wine, not even our cocktails at the start. The restaurant at that point was only half-full; we used the bathroom one more time and left, gladly since we were so full. In total, the restaurant padded our order with six extra courses, plus drinks. Because I sorta look like a chef?
We went home bloated but still in love with the French—I was nauseous in the cab because foie gras, apparently, does not mix well with the Williamsburg bridge. Back in Brooklyn, three and a half hours later, nearly midnight, we called Andrew and his (now) wife and they came over for drinks, like any Saturday night. We told them the story, then told it again. Recently, I found the bill listed on my credit card statement, and remembered the night over, prompting this story.
$400 at New York’s best French restaurant, even when the restaurant comps most of your dinner, is still not enough. Rule one of good eating: Always tip the waiter big when he deserves it.
There was no dinner. At least, not with any Paris friends.
Fred met us outside his Carroll Gardens building and walked us up the four flights to his apartment. I think I was in the middle of saying something predictable (what I always say when a friend lives above the second floor) about what a good workout he must get from the long walk upstairs, and how much he must save in gym fees, when Fred stepped forward, threw open the door, and twenty people screamed at us from the dark.
With the various ways we find to die, there are probably a certain number of people killed each year by surprise parties. I bet the group’s not very big, maybe a dozen less than the unlucky ground up in turbines, a few more than children at summer camp spiked by canoes, but it must be one of the more awful ways to go, because the killers are actually active in the killing, and not only innocent but well-meaning—they thought the wild shouts and light-flicking would make you feel loved. Imagine the look on their faces, at Harry’s 40th birthday party, when rather than walk in red-faced to humbly cut the Viagra-novelty cake, lovable Harry Bauer falls flat on the porch with angina, his hand on the ticker.
We survived the trauma and realized, for the first time, someone had managed to surprise us both at the same time successfully. Thoughts of death aside, I was overjoyed, and I spent the remainder of the party quizzing Fred and Andrew on their preparations, when I wasn’t dancing in a helmet. Once the surprise wore off, and after a few minutes of catch-up and drinks, the party became any normal night of drinking and eating with the same set of friends.
Except for the gift; the gift changed things a little. Andrew and Fred had billed the party as a surprise celebration of our engagement, and got everyone to pitch in on a small white envelope that was presented to us on the couch. Flipping it over, I recognized the insignia in the return-address space and shrieked—opening it and looking over the enclosed certificate, she shrieked, and I shrieked again, even higher-pitched.
The next morning, all-shrieked out and a little hung over, I made the call from bed, just after making coffee. A woman, very pleasant, answered and took my request. She was chipper and cheery while I sounded like a toad, but somehow I communicated what we were looking for, and she noted our reservation for a Friday night, 8pm, three weeks later.
When twenty friends chip in to give you a $400 gift certificate to Daniel, you do not politely tuck it away and remind yourself to someday get around to spending it.
There are dozens, even hundreds, of top-shelf restaurants in New York. Among them, there are probably 15 that can outclass the rest in the city, go three rounds with the best of any other, and 90 percent of a test audience would still agree: the food was excellent, even transcendental, the service was perfect, the design and wine list and steak knives all superb. Not that New York is the best dining city in the world (though it may be), but that it’s one of them, and so being, counts as among the best places to eat in the world right now. Daniel, given four stars by the Times (as chronicled in Leslie Brenner’s superb The Fourth Star) and loved by most everyone, consistently floats on the top of the list.
Daniel is the namesake restaurant for Daniel Boulud: chef, entrepreneur, New York celebrity, recognized gourmet all-star. Called ‘one of the 10 best restaurants in the world’ by the International Herald Tribune, Daniel the restaurant regularly fluffs food writers into silent foaming comas, where adjectives can’t intrude. William Grimes, for the Times, wrote in March last year, ‘There is no food better in France than what you’ll find at Daniel.’ I found this review on Daniel’s Web site and, amusingly, they also publish a review by John Mariani from Esquire, December 1999, that includes this same line, attributed to Mariani. Most likely, it’s a mistake, since it’s highly improbable that Grimes stole it (not ethically, but statistically: who reads Esquire for restaurant reviews?); maybe Boulud appreciates it so much, it’s worth attributing twice. But maybe it’s actually true: two writers, two years apart, in the same restaurant but at separate times, felt compelled to select the very same words—No food better in France—because there was no better arrangement of language to express how fundamentally good the food was.
It does, however, require that you believe the food in France is worth bragging about in the first place (the unquestioned first law of the food trade), and not only the food of bistro- or brasserie-France, but that Michelin-starred cuisine you probably haven’t tried. French cooking has been battered and black-eyed for the last twenty years, when sauces became less important, low-fat introduced, and fusion a word applied to cuisine, but I think Americans still carry the cliché of French cooking equaling good, or at least haute (with all elitism included), and consider it a maxim as irrefutable as the cardinal home rule: No one makes fried chicken better than Mom.
A nation’s cooking is an important badge of character; judgments can and should be made about a country by its food. Americans may secretly hate the French as much as they openly despise us, but that’s only the top of an otherwise secret love affair. When a poor flunky pounds for hours in a basement, somewhere in Paris, making bread until the chef—mean rotund Pierre, chain-smoker, with tattoos in secret places—cuffs him, drawing blood from his ear, and says his baking not only stinks, but smells so bad it might have been produced in America, well…an American couldn’t help but find that dear, or at the very least, haute. Obviously the image is trite and overly romantic, but France is an important, overly romantic cliché for America; America, in whichever direction, possibly the same for France; and even if the images both countries carry are based on negative or sentimental feelings, they are more like dreams than nightmares, where the reality is not horribly-to come, but an alternate.
Walking into Daniel, the only thing that wasn’t fantasy was the price: it’s very expensive. Even with $400 to spend, and 20 friends to thank, we had to be careful what we picked. And still, as the meal went by—plate after plate, glass after glass—it wasn’t hard for us to spend more than the gift allowed, even if we didn’t have it.
The outside of Daniel is anything but subtle. Most New York restaurants are built flush to the street with maybe a sign and a few windows, or at most an awning for diners to huddle underneath, after dinner, while waiting for their cab.
Daniel, however, is built like a Broadway show, with a giant overhanging roof outside, and attracts the same audience as your average big-budget musical: old, rich, and rarely local. It’s hard not to recall the opening scene from The Player when you enter and everything appears choreographed by Altman, including the snatches of blow-by conversation: two Texans cut you off on the stairs, on vacation with their daughter who’s moaning about her feet; a young foreign playboy in jeans is on the house phone, bent over the desk then reeling back for air, shouting at someone to hurry up; a gaggle of old women go by in a huddle, pumping their blow-outs; two waiters with bright blue ties rush past, one trailing the other with hands clasped behind his back like a speed skater following the leader; slicked-up young dudes dash from the restroom to the bar, shouting over their shoulders; and finally, like St. John himself, the host snags you with eye-contact and politely asks if you’d like to go to your table.
We sit, we calm down, we order. First course arrives shortly after cocktails: chilled lobster with fresh fruit, including watermelon. This is the first round from our five-course tasting menu and we are expecting great things. Our drinks have arrived, a martini for me and whiskey for her (when she wasn’t sure what she wanted, the French waiter asked, ‘Maybe you’d like a cosmo?’ pronouncing cosmo by rushing the first half and emphasizing the second, as if he was calling a small dog. ‘No,’ she answered, smiling. ‘I think I’ve grown out of that.’), and we have gone through the wine selection with an extremely genteel and knowledgeable sommelier, and also enjoyed the complimentary introduction to Daniel’s culinary style: a three-tiered silver tray of small treats: pâté on toast with onions, sautéed fresh vegetables, and a parmesan pastry something-or-other; rich indulgences paired with the season’s light flavors.
But back to our first course, the lobster and the fruit. It was the beginning of what we had cause to believe would be a great meal, perhaps the best. William Grimes has prepared us—There’s no reason to go all the way to France, Grimes told me in my head, when Daniel is in your own backyard, and your friends are so generous. (Incidentally, I made Grimes sound like a cross between John Cleese and John Gielgud, though I have no reason to believe he’s English; in matters of taste, when I’m taking advice from voices in my head, I just prefer them to be British, preferably out of the closet, and still able to build the types of weapons James Bond would prefer.) Unfortunately, judging by our artfully arranged and served plates, Grimes is wrong. The course is boring. At that moment, a kebab shop in Marseille could have me shivering with excitement. The lobster meat, as lobster meat goes, was fine: fresh, ok-tender, but you can get the same all across Manhattan. The more tame fruits tasted like mish-mash, while the watermelon was too sugary and starchy to work. It’s like a computer-dating match gone bad, opposites on a plate not chosen for lasting conversation, and it’s hard not to hide our disappointment. Neither of us wants to say it’s bad, but we can see the other is bored. Conversation dies fast. I watch a nearby family placate their whiny son, then watch myself wonder out loud ‘Who brings a child to a place like this?’ I am suddenly in any restaurant; I am any New Yorker blowing money out the wazoo, annoyed by everyone around him. We still have four courses to go, but even for one to be so-so, at a restaurant where the critics have to use the exact same sentence to get the excellence right, where we’ve bought the clichés, even savored them for weeks, it’s sad to watch our plates be cleared half-full.
Not until the bread man appears are we back on the good side of the night: the bread is amazing. Five or six varieties, and they’re all perfect: light, hot, dense, and crackling, each one graced by a single flavor (garlic, sourdough) on top of the simple goodness of bread. We each take two, then three when the waiter prods us. The first course slips by forgotten. Wine goes down fast. We go back to making fun of the people sitting near us, no longer frustrated but just having fun when an awkwardly paired couple sitting next to us, obviously there on business, goes through conversation like a pair of fighting weasels.
I have my mouth half-full of a garlic roll, about to rinse my teeth with wine and hoping no one sees me, when I notice a short man in a chef’s jacket on the other side of the room stare at me from behind his glasses a second too long, then beeline for the table.
He grabs my hand and I see a flash of recognition go over his face, possibly disappointment, a slight wrinkle twitch under his left eye.
‘Hello, I am Daniel.’
‘Hi, I’m Rosecrans.’
‘You know, you look exactly like Rocco DeSpirito.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yes. Of the Union Pacific.’ He shrugs. ‘It is very funny.’
‘Oh—That’s weird…’
And then, I don’t know, I decide to tell him our life story. Not the whole thing, but I do fill him in, him being Daniel, owner of the restaurant, chef extraordinaire, exactly why we’re there, and how unusual it is for us, and what a lucky treat, and what great friends we have, and the whole time he still hasn’t let go of my hand and he’s smiling, nodding rapidly at both of us.
‘Wait,’ he says, spotting another chef walking past us. ‘You have to meet Alex, my head chef!’ So now we meet Alex, and he congratulates us on our engagement, and while a hundred plates are going unfinished in the kitchen Daniel decides it’s his turn to relate our story, so he tells Alex how we’re there, and how wonderful it is, and what good friends we have, smiling very broad and annunciating clearly, despite his heavy French accent, and Alex, smiling now too though with tight lips, congratulates us and thanks us for coming to the restaurant.
‘What are you having,’ he asks, just before he leaves.
‘The five-course tasting menu.’
‘Alex,’ Daniel cuts in. ‘We will have to add a few extra courses to their meal, don’t you think?’
‘Of course,’ Alex says, serious again, and walks off, and it’s not unreasonable to think he’s just been bamboozled into cooking more plates than he needs while his boss continues schmoozing.
Daniel leaves to shake hands at another table and we’re ecstatic; this is a surprise party that no one planned, four people attended, and the gift is not so much material as enjoyably temporary and sentimental. The first course is like a bag lunch we had last week, and the mistaken identity-bit is glossed over. Daniel chose us. Daniel liked us. Daniel had no reason to be so kind. Of course he’s human, and only a chef, recognized by maybe a few hundred people in the city as someone to know, but it’s like going to a bachelor party where one of the guys drinking with you is a member of Sonic Youth, and he mentions, over your third or fourth beer, that he’s read your Web site, and actually liked it. Well, okay. Yes: He’s a dude, like any dude at the bachelor party, and he even skips out on the karaoke part. But he’s in Sonic Youth.
Back to money for a second, because it maybe explains why Daniel sensed we weren’t his regular customers, and wasn’t just overcompensating for a social blunder (though he probably was): 400 dollars is 150 more than the most I’ve ever spent on a meal, and I can’t get this out of my head during dinner. As a couple, we’re not necessarily tight with money, but money is certainly tight with us, so even if the 400 was a gift, it’s difficult to cope with blowing it on food.
That meal, the $250-dinner, was at the Gramercy Tavern, one of New York’s other exceptional restaurants, and my personal favorite (though I’ve only been there five or six times, and only once on my own dime), where I dropped $250 (of an unexpected $1,000 Christmas bonus; another gift, of a sort) on a dinner for us two years ago. I don’t remember the exact course elements, but I think we each had three rounds, and I remember eating a rabbit with cranberries that was so far from gamey it tasted like a rich hazel cream, the last flavors like a stamp of orange and rosemary.
Then, as now, $250 on a dinner is an extremely rare indulgence for us, about $200 more than an average good night out, but still nothing to regret, even if I worry over the wine selection and fear the rude sommelier who avoids the cheap bottles. In my book, food is nothing to skimp on, and, assuming you get what you pay for, it’s worth the money. Good food, besides the innate you-know-it when it’s halfway swallowed and your eyelids flutter, is a blessing, something to be savored, and should show the chef’s close attention, craft, and personal taste, but never before it’s off the fork; a simple plating that elicits an ‘Ooh, that looks nice,’ is enough. Ingredients should be fresh and not trendy. Subtle beats brazen, fresh beats frozen. And the dish, ultimately, should include a little whimsy, preferably in the way the ingredients are matched, like a sigh on top of an argument.
So when our next course, a seafood appetizer, was held for a special interruption, we smiled and sat silently while the waiter carefully put down our plates and pointed to their elements and whispered, from Monsieur Daniel, then left us to our steaming hunks of foie gras, blasted gold and glowing in the shallow white bowls, the skin glistening in brown sauce and juices, both servings specially cut—get this—in the shape of hearts.
I don’t know; is Boulud a romantic? Is executive chef Alex sentimental? It took us nearly thirty seconds to realize they were to be eaten and not stuffed in our pockets for safekeeping.
And the courses continued. And continued. And then there was more. Now, looking back, I wish I had a way to bottle their flavors; the words mean so little when compared to those tastes. We pushed our away through the oncoming plates: a clam, battered and broiled, floating on a green-specked butter sauce; a scallop like pudding; blackened sea bass; another fish; lamb that cut like butter, went down like cream; tender squab.
At one point I noticed the cheese cart going by and asked our waiter if we could possibly have some cheese after dinner, and that I’d be willing to pay since it wasn’t on the menu we chose. ‘No no no,’ he said, a little miffed. ‘You will have it before dessert. Please—Don’t worry.’ When it came, we chose three that looked good and nasty and the waiter, a little disappointed, told us he’d fix us his own plate of selections; he included our three, and added six more, from my region, he said.
The check came eventually, after coffee and brandy, a basket of madelines and homemade ice cream, mango sorbet with cake, a tray of chocolates and lemon squares. And somehow, the only thing we were charged for was our original menu and the wine, not even our cocktails at the start. The restaurant at that point was only half-full; we used the bathroom one more time and left, gladly since we were so full. In total, the restaurant padded our order with six extra courses, plus drinks. Because I sorta look like a chef?
We went home bloated but still in love with the French—I was nauseous in the cab because foie gras, apparently, does not mix well with the Williamsburg bridge. Back in Brooklyn, three and a half hours later, nearly midnight, we called Andrew and his (now) wife and they came over for drinks, like any Saturday night. We told them the story, then told it again. Recently, I found the bill listed on my credit card statement, and remembered the night over, prompting this story.
$400 at New York’s best French restaurant, even when the restaurant comps most of your dinner, is still not enough. Rule one of good eating: Always tip the waiter big when he deserves it.
—Published October 15, 2002
