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Who
Stole the Squeeze Bottle? Exquisite Mayhem at Daniel
by Peter
Kurth
The Fourth
Star: Dispatches from Inside Daniel Boulud’s Celebrated New York
Restaurant,
by Leslie Brenner. Clarkson Potter, 314 pages, $25.
Midway through Leslie Brenner’s The Fourth Star: Dispatches from
Inside Daniel Boulud’s Celebrated New York Restaurant—let’s say
somewhere around Chapter 5, "In the Weeds"—I began to feel it
was time for a murder. Not a real murder, of course—I don’t want anyone
Inside Daniel Boulud’s Celebrated New York Restaurant to die—but a murder
for narrative purposes, to juice up the story. Round about then, it
needed it.
"It’s just before noon," Ms.
Brenner writes, "and Julie, the hot-apps and pasta cook, having just
returned from visiting her boyfriend in Austin, Texas, wipes down her
station in preparation for lunch service. ‘Somebody got an extra squeeze
bottle?’” she asks innocently.
“What?” says David, the fish entremétier. Julie answers: “My squeeze bottle was stolen; let’s
just put it that way."
Doesn’t that sound like a set-up to you?
Why couldn’t Julie or David, just at that moment, have cracked from the
strain and run amok in Daniel Boulud’s Celebrated Kitchen? I can’t tell
you which kitchen it actually was, since there are so many at “Daniel,”
Mr. Boulud’s Celebrated East 65th Street establishment. There are also
corners, cubbyholes, alcoves, stairs, cellars, corridors, prep tables, garde-mangers and mise-en-places, and each is used
for a different purpose in the production of Mr. Boulud’s Celebrated—very
Celebrated—haute cuisine.
David, for instance, at the start of
"In the Weeds," a chapter devoted loosely to mushrooms and
vegetables, "is using the poaching liquid in which he cooked some
radishes to make a sauce for today’s salmon special—Roasted Salmon with
Slow-Roasted Vidalia Onions, Braised Radishes, Olive Oil, and a Lemon
Emulsion."
Bear in mind that this is one of the
simpler dishes at “Daniel.” Most of them contain ingredients so refined
and so artfully put together—"unctuous roasted baby eggplants"
and "zebra-striped mackerel," "black trumpet mushrooms,
walnuts, and a sauce made with three types of pumpkin," "sea
scallops, oysters, and sea urchins, with osetra caviar, pink radish, and
celery leaves in a horseradish-lime water"—that you can only take
Ms. Brenner’s word for it when she says that they’re delicious, which she
does a lot. In the circumstances, Julie has every right to ask David for
a squeeze bottle: "She has removed the germ from each garlic clove
and blanched them three times, changing the water each time. That done,
she turns to sautéing yellow-foot chanterelles for the risotto."
“Yellow-foot?” Did you know that chanterelles had
feet? Neither did I.
A little farther on, "Damien, a new
French garde-manger cook, has
poured the baby eels into a big wooden saladier," while Kevin—also at the garde-manger—calls out: "Frank! You got the blinis
coming, man? I need those blinis, please!" Then the phone rings.
"Yeah, what do you want?" says
Alex Lee, Mr. Boulud’s right-hand man in the kitchen(s). "Can I talk
to you after lunch? Okay."
The narrative proceeds: "He hangs up,
spoons risotto into a plate. ‘Order tartare and a risotto, followed by a
halibut and a bass.’" Frank, meanwhile, has ruined the soups. For Julie, things aren’t much better.
And Ethel Kennedy’s in the dining room!
You can see how the situation might be ripe
for murder. (Indeed, on the night President Clinton came to dinner at
“Daniel,” one of the staff remarked to the Secret Service, gesturing
toward the kitchen, "Our knives are in there, if you’re looking for
weapons.") But no: Ethel gets her meal, Kevin gets his blinis, and
Julie—well, Julie is one of the more likable and memorable characters in
a book so filled with chefs, sous-chefs, cooks, sauciers, sommeliers, peelers, dicers,
wipers, "runners" and waiters that you’ll be lucky if you
remember three or four of them by name (never mind what they did) by the
time you’ve finished reading.
Please don’t conclude from this that
there’s something wrong with Ms. Brenner’s book, or even that I didn’t
enjoy it. I did. I just wanted it in smaller portions. Ms. Brenner spent
a whole year (2000) inside “Daniel”; she’s a good reporter, and that she
manages to make The Fourth Star as
interesting as she does is no minor achievement. If, as Woody Allen once
said, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,"
then reading about food is like wishing you’d eaten it. It can’t really
be rendered in words. And there are only so many ways to depict the chaos
at the back of any restaurant—even when you’re working in two languages,
as Ms. Brenner is. For every Kevin calling for a blini, someone else is
crying in French, "Chaud!
Chaud! Chaud!" "Aïe, aïe, aïe!" or—Mr. Boulud himself
here—"Vas-y, vas-y! Arrête tes
conneries!", which Ms. Brenner helpfully translates as
"Stop your bullshit!"
For the record, the fourth star of Ms.
Brenner’s title refers to the highest rating bestowed on restaurants by The New York Times, whose food
critic, William Grimes, has just failed to do so for “Daniel” when the
narrative begins. You know by page 3 that this inconceivable blow to Mr.
Boulud’s ego will be remedied even if it kills him (and everyone else).
So there’s no real tension in the story, just chapters organized
thematically around all the screaming—one on wine, one on cleanliness
(very interesting), "Commerce," pay scales and
"Wanderlust" (the tendency of all restaurant workers, from
highest to lowest, to hop from joint to joint).
Only occasionally does Ms. Brenner seem to
understand how preposterous the whole thing is, as when David, laying out
his onions "on a sheet pan lined with Silpat—a silicon-coated baking
liner that professional cooks use for roasting all kinds of
vegetables"—wonders out loud "why home cooks don’t use them
more, since they’re available in housewares stores." Ms. Brenner
answers parenthetically: "Perhaps it’s the twenty-five-dollar price
tag per liner."
Yes, perhaps it is. That’s another reason I
found myself wishing for a murder. Since the only characters in The Fourth Star whose names have
been changed for their own protection are the customers, who pay upwards
of $200 a head to eat at “Daniel,” the victim would have to be one of
their rank. Do I need to add that this would be the perfect summer for
it?
Peter
Kurth is the author of Isadora: A Sensational Life (Little Brown &
Co.).
www.peterkurth.com
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