The United States of Arugula (52 page)

In Richman’s mind, Soltner looms as the guilty conscience of entrepreneurial chefs like Vongerichten, the man who “haunts every chef living today,” in the words of Dan Barber, the young chef at New York’s Blue Hill restaurant, quoted in Richman’s article. “His name is associated with the idea of ‘real chef’ in every sense of the word,” Barber told Richman. “French. Devoted to his craft. A purist … Nobody can stand the comparison to a guy
whose life was breathing his restaurant, living for his restaurant, engrossing himself in the minutiae of his restaurant. The iconic image of a struggling chef is so glorious.”

Vongerichten was gutted by Richman’s critique, retiring to his bed for three days after it came out. Today, having regained his color and composure, he says, “I’m not a whore! I’m just a chef who tries to please people, you know? I’m in this business to pamper people. People approach me with things every day, and I want to do things. I have a lot of ideas, so why should I stop? I just wish the foodies like Richman would understand what we do here.” He further notes that no one complained when France’s first-generation nouvelle cuisine chefs lent their names and reputations to multiple restaurants across the globe in the seventies and eighties—usually in consultancy deals that gave them less control, and required less of their time, than the partnership arrangements to which Vongerichten is committed. Working for Louis Outhier in the late seventies and early eighties, Vongerichten recalls, “I opened ten restaurants for him in, like, six years.” David Bouley first caught the attention of Drew Nieporent while serving as the guy who actually did all the day-to-day cooking at Sutter 500 in San Francisco, a restaurant where the nouvelle-cuisine celebrity Roger Vergé’s name was played up as the attraction.

What chefs sympathetic to Vongerichten say is that it’s disingenuous to compare him with Soltner, since the climate has completely changed since Soltner made his name in the sixties and seventies. Expansionism, says Batali, is as much about “keeping the talented people who work for you from going to work for someone else” as it is about making money. “If you say to your sous-chefs, ‘Stick with me and I will get you a slice of the pie,’ it empowers them and makes them do better work,” he says. And if this system also gives a chef-entrepreneur the manpower to open more restaurants and make tons of money in the process, “Well, that’s cool, too,” says Batali. “There’s nothing in the chef’s credo that says ‘Thou shalt not make any cash.’”

The chef-entrepreneurs further argue that the talent pool is so much
greater today than it was a generation ago that it would be almost churlish not to create opportunities for their staff. “You couldn’t find ten cooks who had knife skills and a palate in 1986, but today, the young guys are really seasoned,” says Vongerichten, whose stock response to the accusatory question, “Who’s cooking at the restaurant when you’re not here?” is “The same people cooking when I
am
here.”

“The chef world has grown,” says Trotter. “People like John Mariani lament that ‘This chef’s never in his restaurant,’ but what difference does it make if the person’s in the restaurant or not, unless, of course, you just want to see him? I don’t think I’ve had anything less than a stellar meal at Jean Georges, and I think he’s only been there twice out of the eight or nine meals I’ve had there. And I’ve been in restaurants where the
chef has
been there—I’m talking about celebrated and noted chefs—and the experience has been abysmal, horrific.”

Says Miller, the chef-anthropologist, “The problem with food is that it occupies this existential space that is really personal, yet at the same time, it’s also a commercial thing. Food is a very, very personal subject, and it’s a very subjective subject. And so it becomes a subject that people have strong opinions about. Somehow, there’s this strong idea that these restaurateurs and chefs are polluting the idea of what they do by ‘commercializing’ themselves. But nobody attacks Armani for having A/X, right? Or Ralph Lauren for licensing his name for fragrance. Or Richard Meier for designing cheap products for Target.”

Indeed, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a chef lending his imprimatur to multiple restaurants as long as his staff’s execution is good, the restaurant’s conceptualization is sound, and the business plan is solid. As of this writing, Batali, who has seven restaurants in New York with his partner, Joe Bastianich, and two pending in Las Vegas, has not yet had a major slip-up, nor has Colicchio, who, beyond his Gramercy Tavern venture with Meyer, has grown his own brand of restaurants under the Craft name, starting with the Craft fine-dining restaurant in New York, the more casual Craftbar around the corner, and the fast-proliferating Craftsteak and
’wichcraft restaurants—the former devoted to red meat, the latter devoted to high-quality sandwiches.
*

But Vongerichten and Puck, the most audacious of the bunch, have had their setbacks. Late in 2005, V Steakhouse became the first of the Time Warner Center restaurants to fail, proving that Vongerichten, if not the damaged sellout that Richman has made him out to be, was perhaps too eager to give life to every half-cocked notion that formed in his head—like his conceptually dodgy “deconstructed” French onion soup, served on a wide plate that held a bowl of onion broth, a separate bowl of bubbling melted Gruyère, and still another bowl containing the croutons; you were supposed to put it all together yourself.

Likewise, in the early nineties, Puck and Barbara Lazaroff lost half a million dollars on a Los Angeles wurstbar and brewery called Eureka, a misbegotten attempt to capitalize on the microbrew craze of the time. And when Puck sold his frozen-food company to the commercial food giant ConAgra in 2001, on the condition that he remain in charge of quality control and that he receive royalties from the sales of the products bearing his name, he was dismayed to discover that the ConAgra versions of his frozen pizzas were not up to the standards he’d set when he owned the company. “They changed everything, because they said they can fabricate it cheaper,” Puck says. “I believed them because I thought, ‘Well, they have a $25 billion company—they know better than me.’ But they fucked it up. So now we just have to restart everything with ConAgra, the way we had it before.”

Sometimes, too, Puck’s entrepreneurial zeal can get the better of him, leading him to embrace a genuinely stupid idea, such as the prepackaged latte in a self-heating can. In 2005, Puck licensed his name to a beverage company that sold coffee drinks in specially made cans equipped with a button that, when pressed, triggered a chemical reaction that brought the drink’s temperature to 145 degrees. Not only was the commercial value of the product dubious—how hard is it to find a hot cup of coffee in the United States?—but Puck grew disenchanted when he heard reports that the cans were exploding, melting, or overheating. (The tech firm that developed the cans questioned the veracity of these reports.)

By dint of having so many irons in the fire, Vongerichten and Puck have been able to overcome their miscues and move on, but other chefs, as they strive to be entrepreneurial like the big boys, may not be so fortunate. Colicchio admits that the possibility of even a single failure “scares the hell out of me. I wake up every morning asking myself, ‘What the hell am I doing this for?’” he says. “‘Do I need another restaurant? Do I need a restaurant in Dallas? Christ!’ But at a certain point—I don’t know if you get addicted to the deal, but you start chasing these deals.”

Besides, Colicchio says, he’s just rolling with the times and the opportunities they present. “If André Soltner were a thirty-six-year-old chef today,” he says, “he would be in Vegas.”

“Ehh, maybe not,” says Soltner when this idea is put to him. “The Japanese approached me in the eighties and offered me fantastic money to open in Japan. They said, ‘We’ll use your name, and we’ll call it Lutèce.’ I said, ‘What do you want, exactly, from me?’ They said, ‘We want you three months a year in Japan.’ But then I thought, ‘If I go for three months to Japan, I still have the Lutèce in New York, and people will start to say, ’Lutèce is not the same.’ When I was working, I went to the theater maybe once every two years or so. I spent the money one time, and the star actor was either sick or tired, I don’t know—but he was replaced. I was really disappointed, you know? I never forgot that. Because people came not to Lutèce; they came to André Soltner.”

Projecting Soltner into the present day is really a futile exercise, rather like using Elias Sports Bureau statistics to project how Babe Ruth would have hit against Roger Clemens; their eras were so different that it’s impossible to draw a valid conclusion. To his credit, Soltner doesn’t presume to know how Vongerichten would have functioned in 1963, nor does he knock him for operating the way he does. “You have never heard me criticize Jean-Georges or the others,” he says. “Maybe some of them criticize me, but the ones who say I was not ambitious enough—what are they talking about? I left at the top. I had four stars when I retired.” Standing in the vegetable garden of his Catskills home, he gestures at the view of Hunter Mountain across the way. “Do you think I did so badly?”

THE EMERGENCE OF
Las Vegas as a magnet for celebrity chefs began more or less as a fluke, when Puck was hard up for money. “I used to go to Vegas a lot because I’m a big fight fan,” Puck says. “When I went with friends, I’d say, ‘Where are we gonna go eat afterward?’ and in the hotels, the food was always bad steak or bad continental.” So when he was felt out about doing a Vegas restaurant by the real estate developer Sheldon Gordon, he was receptive to the idea.

In the early nineties, Gordon was building the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace, a shopping-mall annex to the casino-hotel complex. The Forum Shops were an exciting, controversial project to be part of, something of a Vegas revolution in that they would offer visitors to the city an attraction that was not gambling-related. Still, after giving the matter some thought, Puck decided he was already overextended, busy as he was at the time with ramping up Granita, his and Barbara Lazaroff’s latest restaurant, in Malibu. He called Gordon to say thanks but no thanks.

Then Granita started to experience huge cost overruns. Says Lazaroff, “Wolf always likes to say
[Austrian accent]
, ‘You know,
Baba-waa
spent too much money building
Gwa-neeta
.’ Of course, I wasn’t given enough of a budget in the first place.” Gordon, who kept a home in Malibu, caught wind
of Granita’s problems and offered Puck and Lazaroff a $500,000 signing bonus if they agreed to come on board at the Forum Shops. “We used the $500,000 to finish Granita, and then we started to build Spago Las Vegas,” Puck says. “We opened there in December 1992.”

“It proved very fruitful, and, after that, it made sense to keep going,” says Lazaroff. “And, boy, did Las Vegas need some decent food.”

When Puck caught wind of the MGM Grand’s plan to install a Mexican restaurant on its premises, he thought that the hotel would be better served with “something a little bit more modern, more Southwestern,” and recommended Mark Miller to the MGM management. They’d never heard of Miller. “So I called up Mark and said, ‘Send them your cookbooks, send them all your press stuff,’” Puck says. “He sent everything, and they built him a Coyote Cafe there. Then they got Emeril to do an Emeril’s there, and that pretty much got the ball rolling in Las Vegas.”

Within a matter of a few years, chefs were no longer rebuffing the idea of having a Vegas presence, instead viewing it as a mark of their entrepreneurial acumen. Matsuhisa opened a Nobu at the Hard Rock Casino and Resort. Vongerichten opened his Prime steak house in the Bellagio, and was joined there by Todd English, who opened an Olives, and the Maccioni family, which opened a Le Cirque. Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger opened a Border Grill at Mandalay Bay. The Venetian featured not only restaurants by Lagasse (a branch of his New Orleans–based Delmonico Steak House) and Thomas Keller (a second location of Bouchon, the casual bistro he opened down the street from the French Laundry), but a post-Soltner version of Lutèce that survives the original.

The rush of chefs to Las Vegas, which has since grown to include such longtime holdouts as Batali, Boulud, Guy Savoy, and Bocuse, verily infuriated the critic John Mariani, who inveighed against the city’s “‘Who-cares-if-the-chef’s-never-here?’ attitude” in his newsletter,
Virtual Gourmet.
“Does anyone seriously believe these fellows will be spending a major part of their time there?” he wrote in 2004. “Can you see the 78-year-old Bocuse shuttling back and forth between Lyons and Las Vegas every two weeks?”

“John Mariani is living in the seventies,” Batali says. “He’s still consumed by the fantasy of going to the three-star Michelin restaurant where you’re greeted by the mama out front while the papa’s in the kitchen, and the little boys are busing the plates. It’s a beautiful little world, and there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but there’s no reason for
me
to live in it.”

Batali is realistic enough to understand that his Vegas customers won’t be as sophisticated as the ones who come to his New York flagship, Babbo, for fennel-dusted sweetbreads and warm lamb’s tongue vinaigrette with chanterelles and a three-minute egg. “I’ve been to Vegas like everyone else and seen the casino customer with the credit card around her neck on a lanyard, taking puffs of a cigarette through a tracheotomy hole,” he says. “But the whole point is, the food that people eat in Vegas now is better than anything that was available to them fifteen years ago. And at the celebrity-chef-owned restaurants, it’s all being made by hand. It’s not like McDonald’s. Our osso buco doesn’t come from some central osso buco–expediting place in Kansas.”

Clark Wolf, the restaurant consultant, puts it more succinctly. “If this means that people in Vegas are eating at a Spago or a Nobu instead of from a steam-tray buffet,” he says, “doesn’t that mean that we”—by which he means the children of the food revolution—“have
won?”

Wolf knows whereof he speaks, because he consulted on perhaps the strangest collision of highfalutin epicureanism and the mammon-sleaze-cheese atmosphere of Las Vegas: the Cypress Street Marketplace. On the surface, there’s nothing especially strange about it: it’s a dining area adjacent to the Forum Shops at Caesars where tourists are invited to stroll a simulated market street, load up picnic baskets with a variety of fresh foods from various stations—roast turkey from the “Hand Carved” station, bisque from the “Lobster & Chowder Company” station, Carolina slow-roasted pulled pork from “Bar BQ,” Chinese pot-sticker dumplings from “Ah So”—and then retreat to picnic-style tables, where attendants help them unload their baskets. Though Wolf frets that the Caesars people didn’t execute his vision as well as he’d hoped, he reveals that his model for the venue was none other
than … Fourth Street in Berkeley. It’s a delightful, cosmic food-world joke: the co-opting of the California Birkenstock scene by the Sin City capitalists. The Caesars Palace publicity materials describe how guests enter the marketplace “under a modern interpretation of seven life-size California Cypress Trees,” enjoying an “eclectic style [that] marries contemporary elements with Old World Italy and New World Napa Valley.”