Magic Chef

David Bouley: Magic Chef

December 24, 1990

Perhaps it is not necessary to be crazy, obsessed, monomaniacal and (if not megalomaniacal) to thrive in New York. And yet so many. Earl David Bouley in this pantheon. Although it seems deceptively mild, soft-spoken, retirement, too good to be the Woody Allen of the range. Bouley knows he is mad. Everybody moment of its existence focuses on his obsession, the majesty of a dinner in his most charming place on Duane Park, the pace, quality products, deep sea divers who stalk its urchins, farmers planted the seeds chosen. Would any normal woman can understand this fixation eat? "They inevitably leave when they see the guy is crazy," said Bouley.

Planted between buildings TriBeCa the late nineteenth century, this town house merchants butter and egg, Bouley could be an inn on the sunny road to Arles and Avignon. Behind the heavy door of carved wood (salvaged from a church), there are cases of apple and pear flavor into and beyond the cutting room with its graceful pastel arches - a miracle of computers, plywood and gypsum board - built by his brother Martin contractor and restaurant crew slowly, slowly, slower than the creep of days before the opening - a cathedral as a place of worship for Bouley.

Never mind any idea of how a meal should be trained. Tonight you dine to beat Bouley, masterful, sensual. Initially, you think the kitchen should be in chaos - the boys are flying like little sparrows Brown, and food does not appear. It is a mistake. The kitchen, immaculate, with its range of facility that allows leaders to face the other, functions as a dazzling ballet. The slightest misstep causes mild sarcasm biting the head. With its sub-chief, a friend of the days of learning of Roger Verge at Moulin de Mougins, Bouley communicated without words.

Give him credit for creating the magic, the soft light filtered, avoidance of flowers, the richly furnished Country passages that lead not to follow in a luxury hotel, but the toilet - so beautiful that the artist is come to France to hang the door was stunned. The kid from Connecticut, born one of nine children of a family of French immigrants, struck out from his days lining chefs - Bocuse, Girardet, Lena´tre - Limoges and must have real space between tables, the offerings of jewelry as the above command, the sweet treats in a coda that marks a house of serious ambition.

We laughed at the pretensions of its first menu, with its 1001 map markers - "hen the New York State milk fed organic," "organic oysters Fisher's aŽle-grown", "scuba-dived scallops from Casco Bay. "But these days, it is not that map, or maybe we just get used to it.

Bouley wheat germ the way the Indians did. He stuffs his duck with lavender flowers mind and uses whole fields of fresh herbs and their flowers every week. Currently, he is smitten pout, an ugly creature with a texture of monkfish-like that "sweet because it feeds on barnacles and algae." Recently, his divers has discovered a bed of scallops Jacques rare beyond the scope of trawlers. They arrive on Duane Street "always moving and jumping."

The woman in his life is Adelma Simmons of Coventry, Conn., Dean Farm Herb Caprilands. It was discovered as a kid riding his bike, a scholar of history and architecture. Today she is 87 and still thrills him with his knowledge and his kitchen, his use of garlic flowers and flowers of oregano. Every Sunday, when the restaurant will be closed, he headed north or south to visit farmers, to encourage them to cultivate what he needs. He was reading the new seed catalogs, as a child.