As a prelude to Thanksgiving when our attention moves to great food and those who prepare it, I bring your prevenance to David Bouley.
David Bouley, the American chef who first translated French nouvelle cuisine into the New American style that shaped modern high-end cooking, died on Monday, 2/12/24 at his home in Kent, Conn. He was 70.
Mr. Bouley is the only American-born chef to receive a review from every restaurant critic for The Times since 1985, including a four-star review for Bouley from Bryan Miller in 1990 and a three-star review in 2016 from Pete Wells, who wrote, “Mr. Bouley takes paths nobody else is on, and walks farther along them than anybody else would.”
Critic William Grimes wrote: “As a chef, Bouley has it all -- elegance, finesse and flair. His flavors are extraordinarily clear and exquisitely balanced; his use of seasoning is so deft as to be insidious. Even his most complex creations have a classical simplicity to them. Bouley cooks the way Racine wrote and Descartes thought.”
When he took an interest in bread, he built a restaurant where it was the star, Bouley Bakery. When that closed, his flagship, Bouley, took over; for a time it had the most exciting bread cart in town, and maybe in the whole country. The buckwheat-walnut and coconut fiber-pistachio loaves amazed me, and not just because they contained no gluten.
...in 2017, he put down stakes on West 21st Street, with a creative hub that included a cooking school, a bakery, a test kitchen that doubled as an event space, and what turned out to be his last restaurant, “Bouley at Home”.
The event space-slash-test kitchen was outfitted with a Steinway Model B piano as well as a wall of McIntosh audio components and two massive speakers shaped like a chambered nautilus. You have to be something more than a casual music fan to put a concert grand piano and a sound system worth more than $100,000 in a room that is only occasionally used.
As the music-loving Francophile that he was, I can image Bouley kneading bread to a Bourrée by Bach. Let's listen to Glen Gould: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SONbydFly1Q.
Happy Thanksgiving! I leave you with this question. Don't you wish you could be chewing on a chunk of Bouley's honey-buttered buckwheat-walnut and coconut fiber-pistachio bread? I do!
CPW
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