Fourth Star: Dispatches from inside Daniel Boulud's Celebrated New York Restaurant - Leslie Brenner - Hardcover - 1ST

One Daniel Boulud, This Is Your Day Thursday, January 4, 2000 The fourth day of the new millennium. But to the chefs and captains at Daniel, the line cooks and dishwashers, the sommeliers and maitre d's and bakers and office assistants and reservationists and publicists and runners and busboys, it's business as usual. Behind them: the $650-a-head four-course New Year's Eve millennial gala dinner they turned out five nights earlier; before them, 354 covers: a busy Thursday night. It's 5:20 p.m., and in the main kitchen on the ground floor, the cooks are going through their last-minute preparations: tucking square stainless-steel canisters of garnishes, cut earlier that morning, into refrigerated units at their knees, completing their mise en place. In a restaurant kitchen, cooks prepare everything they can hours before they have to actually begin a meal service. The mise en place is the organizational foundation of the professional kitchen; without it, the cook, and therefore the restaurant, would be lost. To accomplish it, cooks have been downstairs in the prep kitchen since five o'clock this morning, simmering stocks, making sauces, cutting garnishes, peeling, slicing, dicing vegetables, portioning out meats, poultry, and fish. Now they arrange all their prepared ingredients within arm's reach so no time will be wasted as they cook during the press of dinner service. The first seating will begin at 5:45, unfashionably early in New York, where everyone wants to dine at eight, but at a restaurant as hot as Daniel, one takes what one can get. For despite the fact that Daniel received only three stars from the New York Times seven months earlier, Boulud's tremendous talent is lost on no one. Many culinary-world insiders feel that Grimes's three-star pronouncement was ill-deserved. Some think he reviewed Daniel too soon after opening, before the ambitious restaurant had a chance to find its rhythm, solve early staffing problems, and work out kinks. Others postulate that in his closely watched first reviews, Grimes didn't want to do the expected. There had been talk of star-inflation under Reichl's tenure; perhaps Grimes was eager not to fall victim to the same criticism. So where exactly did Grimes find fault with Daniel in the fateful review? "Mr. Boulud has painted himself into a corner, of course," he had written. He went on to explain that Boulud had already "earned an unassailable reputation as one of the city's most brilliant talents. By now," he continued, "diners expect nonstop fireworks when he gets within fifty feet of a stove, and he has encouraged those expectations, promising to outdo himself at the new Daniel." Grimes apparently did not get those nonstop fireworks. But are nonstop fireworks a prerequisite to a four-star review? In a system in which four stars is the maximum, should the attainment of four stars require not only perfection but ceaseless stupefaction and dazzlement, or should it be enough to be one of the three or four best restaurants in the city? The Times review notwithstanding, in January 2000, Boulud is still widely considered to be one of New York City's best chefs--and in fact one of the best in the country. Not only has Daniel received four stars from the New York Observer and the Daily News, but it was also named best restaurant in New York City in a Gourmet magazine readers' poll and voted top restaurant in the country by Food & Wine's readers. In the Robb Report, influential critic John Mariani named Daniel Boulud best chef--not just in the country, but in the world; the International Herald Tribune has dubbed Daniel one of the ten best restaurants in the world as well. Tables, therefore, are not easy to come by. In the garde-manger, a corner of the kitchen just large enough to allow three to stand comfortably, a cook pipes aBrenner, Leslie is the author of 'Fourth Star: Dispatches from inside Daniel Boulud's Celebrated New York Restaurant - Leslie Brenner - Hardcover - 1ST' with ISBN 9780609608081 and ISBN 0609608088.