David Bouley: Magic Chef

        Perhaps it is not necessary to be crazed, obsessed, and monomaniacal (if not megalomaniacal) to flourish in New York. And yet so many are. Count David Bouley in that pantheon. True, he seems deceptively gentle, soft-spoken, retiring, too handsome to be the Woody Allen of the range. Bouley knows he is mad. Everyone moment of his existence is focused on his obsession, the majesty of a dinner in his charming country auberge on Duane Park, the measured pace, the quality of products, the deep-sea divers who stalk his sea urchin, the farmers who planted the seeds he chooses. Could any normal woman possibly comprehend this consuming fixation? “They inevitably leave when they see the guy is nuts,” says Bouley.

        Planted among the late-nineteenth-century TriBeCa buildings that house the city’s butter-and-egg dealers, Bouley could be a sunny inn on the road to Arles or Avignon. Behind the heavy carved wooden door (salvaged from a church), there are cases of apples and pears perfuming the entrance and beyond, the soft pastel-edged room with its graceful vaulted arches – a miracle of computer, plywood, and Sheetrock – built by his contractor brother Martin and the restaurant crew slowly, slowly, slowly in that creep of days before opening – a cathedral as a house of worship for Bouley.

        Never mind any concept of how a meal should be paced. Tonight you dine to Bouley’s beat, magisterial, sensuous. At first, you imagine the kitchen must be in chaos – the waiters fly about like small brown sparrows, and the food does not appear. That’s a mistake. The kitchen, immaculate, with its center range that permits the chefs to face one another, works like a dazzling ballet. The tiniest misstep provokes the chef’s soft jabbing sarcasm. With his sous-chef, a friend from apprenticeship days at Roger Vergé’s Moulin de Mougins, Bouley communicated without words.

        Give him credit for creating magic, the soft, filtered light, the flower-filled escape, the richly furnished nether passages that lead not to suites in a luxury inn but to the restroom – so magnificent that the craftsman who came from France to hang the door was stunned. The kid from Connecticut, born one of nine children to a family of French émigrés, star-struck from his days understudying the great chefs – Bocuse, Girardet, Lenôtre – must have Limoges and real space between tables, the jewel-like offerings that precede ordering, the sweet tidbits in a coda that marks a house of serious ambition.

        We giggled at the pretentiousness of his first menu, with its 1001 geographic markers – “the New York State milk-fed organic hen,” “the organic Fisher’s-Island-cultivated oysters,” “the scuba-dived sea scallops from Casco Bay.” But these days, he's not so cartographic, or maybe we’ve just become used to it.

        Bouley germinates wheat the way the Indians did. He stuffs his duck wit lavender flowers and uses whole fields of fresh herbs and their blossoms each week. At the moment, he’s infatuated with loquette, an ugly critter with a monkfish-like texture that “tastes sweet because it feeds on barnacles and seaweed.” Recently, his divers discovered a bed of rare scallops beyond the reach of trawlers. They arrive on Duane Street “still moving and jumping.”

        The woman in his life is Adelma Simmons of Conventry, Connecticut, doyenne of the herb farm Caprilands. He discovered her as a kid riding his bike, a scholar of history and architecture. Today, she is 87 and still thrills him with her knowledge and her cooking, her use of garlic flowers and oregano blossoms. Every Sunday, when the restaurant is closed, he drives north or south to visit farmers, to get them to grow what he needs. He’s been reading the new seed catalogues like a child anticipating Christmas. Below the restaurant, he has packed root vegetables in earth into clean garbage cans. “With the lids closed, they can last till February or March,” he says. Most restaurateurs treasure eating out with their families on Sunday, seeing what other chefs are up to. Bouley would rather be talking to a farmer. "They know so much,” he marvels.

        He sounds too sincere to be real. But that’s the true Bouley. Gifted and a bit loony. Like the best usually are.

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