David Bouley is a Restless Soul

I’ve been eating David Bouley’s cuisine for a long time, in fact all the way back to the days when he was cooking at Montrachet. When he left, I followed him to his first restaurant on Duane Street (where Scalini Fedeli is now located,) and I had three or four meals there before he closed the place. A few years later he opened Bouley Bakery at the corner of West Broadway and Duane Street, and that is where I really cut my teeth on David’s cuisine.

For the first eighteen months the Bakery was open, I had a weekly reservation. Or to put it another way, I controlled a table for four every Tuesday at 8:00. This was a primo piece of real estate to control at the time as the Bakery only had a dozen or so tables when it first opened and reservations were hard to come by. And while I only used the table somewhere between two and three dozen times, I was able to give it away to friends and business associates who were happy to get a hard to get reservation, especially on short notice.

During that time, which stretched from the end of 1997 into 1999, I became quite familiar with the food David liked to serve. But regardless of how many times I ate at the restaurant, the kitchen would never serve me the same dish twice. In fact it was typical for my dinner guests to be served a dish that I had eaten in the past, while I was served something completely different. At first I didn’t realize what was going on. But after I caught on I asked the Maitre‘d what the deal was and he told me that they keep index cards in the kitchen listing every dish they ever served me.

Now 55 years old, a time when most chefs are resting on their laurels and thinking about working less, David Bouley is once again trying to reinvent himself. He moved the restaurant to the northeast corner of Duane and Hudson Streets, and the elegant space he constructed is reminiscent of his first restaurant, containing all of the usual Bouley touches from the racks filled with apples in the entry to the vaulted arches in the dining room. Like all of his other restaurants, one feels like they have been transported to the French countryside.

Given the familiar surroundings, I was surprised to find that David has revamped his menu. Starters of Bigeye tuna with hearts of palm, garlic chops and a yuzu/miso dressing, and sea urchin on a yuzu flavored sea urchin gelée with osetra caviar were much more Japanese in their approach than the cuisine at his last restaurant. The tuna was cut a bit thicker than you usually see for sashimi. In fact it was more Carpaccio than sashimi, and it paired perfectly with the sauce and the crunchy garlic chips. And the intensely flavored sea urchin dish was at the same time a masterpiece of minimalism which could have easily come from the Urasawa or Masa kitchens. I was slightly less enamored with a sashimi of scallops wrapped over a Kumamoto oyster served in a seaweed sauce and garnished with caviar. The dish was conceived well, but the seaweed sauce dominated the dish.

Dungeness crab and egg whites in a truffled dashi was the dish of the night for me. The dashi is one of the few holdovers from the last menu, but since it was included in my favorite dish, I was happy to see it appear at dinner. But what a dish: rich and decadent, like an unctuous egg drop soup flavored with truffle and spiked with clouds of crab meat. The next dish, black cod topped with a sweet onion foam and truffle dust was nearly as good as the crab. A bit more Spanish in style than the previous dishes – it was especially reminiscent of Jordi Roca’s cuisine – the thinly cut fish was a perfect pairing for the light as air foam. The only gripe I had was that the dish was so subtle that it was a bit overpowered by the previous dish, and David should consider switching them in his rotation. Then an organic Connecticut farm egg served atop steamed polenta in a coconut - garlic broth. Lush in texture, it was breakfast in the middle of the meal (sorry about the picture but it is difficult taking a photo of a very white egg in a very dark restaurant.)

Maine Day Boat Lobster sugar snap peas and pinot wine sauce was sweet as sugar. Unfortunately foie gras with quince purée, pruneaux d'agen vieux-armagnac sauce and golden apples was the worst dish of the night. The foie gras wasn’t bad but the sauce was watery and not concentrated enough. And finally, baby lamb served with a wedge of stinky cheese (I forget the type) but the combination was unexpected and fabulous. For dessert I had the hot Valrhona chocolate soufflé with ice creams of Vermont maple, vanilla ice creams and chocolate sorbet.

We didn’t drink badly either. A 1999 Coche-Dury Meursault Rougeots gave pleasure that was well beyond its status as an advanced Village wine, but the winner of the evening was a 1989 Raveneau Chablis Clos that was shockingly good. And a bottle of 1990 Rousseau Chambertin was very good and really intense, but with another ten years of development in the cellar it would be significantly more enjoyable. In fact twenty years wouldn’t hurt either.

So I was pleasantly surprised with the new Bouley. It wasn’t a perfect meal, but the new dishes caught my attention and made me sit up and take notice. In fact given how many restaurants I need to visit these days, I am surprised to find myself in the position of wanting to return in the near future. I guess in conclusion, it’s to the benefit of all diners that David Bouley is a restless soul who continues to try and find new ways to define himself. Let’s hope we haven’t seen the end of his doing that.

04/22/2009 | Comments (2)