We spent most of our time at last night’s Culinary Institute of America Leadership Awards Gala asking chefs about Paul Bocuse, but when we caught up to Daniel Boulud — who tells us Bocuse once got him drunk when he was 14 — we also wanted to know what the status was with his two forthcoming restaurants, Boulud Sud and Epicerie Boulud, which are now slated to open the first week of May. “For the James Beards, I think,” Boulud told Grub Street.

It sounds like the corner of 64th and Broadway will be Boulud Central when the restaurants open next door to Bar Boulud, and that customers will be able to get, well … pretty much anything.

At Epicerie Boulud, the chef says, “We will have boulongerie, patisserie, charcuterie, fromagerie, glacerie, and Viennoiserie and of course sandwiches and salads as well.” He went on. “We make our own bread at Daniel and all my restaurants, so we’ll have a team of bakers. We make our own charcuterie in all our restaurants so we’ll have a team of charcutiers.”

And Boulud tells us that’s not all: “Then we’re making all the patisserie, Viennoiserie, cakes. We’re just going to do something different that we do in the restaurants. There’ll be a bar inside the restaurant where there’ll be a breakfast bar to go to a lunch bar to crêpes in the afternoon, and an oyster bar during the day and night. So you can have a glass of wine and a dozen oysters and run to the opera.”

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Filed Under: openings, bar boulud, boulud sud, daniel boulud, epicerie boulud, upper west side

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From left: Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Paul Bocuse, Eric Ripert, and Michael Chiarello

It was a confirmed love fest for Paul Bocuse last night at the Culinary Institute of America’s Leadership Awards Gala. Bocuse was named Chef of the Century by the CIA, and that seemed to sit well with just about everyone in the room — including such icons as Thomas Keller, Jacques Pépin, and Daniel Boulud — at the Marriott Marquis. Eric Ripert called him the first “celebrity chef,” Charlie Palmer said there will probably never be anyone as influential as Bocuse, and Boulud said, well, that Paul Bocuse was responsible for getting him drunk in the kitchen at age 14 (from a blanc-cassis, if you’re wondering), so he will always hold a special reverence for him. We caught up with everyone and got their takes on Bocuse, their own culinary mentors, and, of course, the truly memorable meals they’ve had over the years.

Let’s talk about Paul Bocuse …
Daniel Boulud: I grew up with Paul Bocuse. I started cooking at the age of 14, and the first week I was working I met Paul Bocuse. That was a while ago, in Lyon. The restaurant I was working for was next to Les Halles and every morning my responsibility as the young apprentice was to go and pick up the freshest vegetables, fish, meat from Les Halles and carry it to the restaurant. And Paul Bocuse was there every morning, also, buying his own food and sitting down with my boss and having coffee. And every morning they would gather around to have coffee after they chose their selection of food, so at 14 you look at all these big chefs and Paul being at the center of all of the; it’s incredible.
Jacques Pépin: I’ve known Paul for 50 years, maybe, or more. I am from Lyon, too. Certainly he did more than any other chef in the world that I can think of to bring the chefs in the dining room and to make the profession respectable and to make us who we are now. Now the chefs are stars and it’s because of Paul Bocuse … we are indebted to him for them.
Michael Chiarello: Paul made this all possible for each and every chef today, whether it’s chefs coming out of the kitchen and getting recognized in the front for going from a trade to a profession or all of the other opportunities that each and every one of us has today, we all owe to Paul Bocuse.
Thomas Keller: How can you describe Paul Bocuse except as a legend or an icon? He’s somebody who’s really exemplified the modern chef and I think that pretty much encapsulates what my feelings on Paul Bocuse are without going into a whole hour and a half narrative telling you how much I appreciate that man.
Eric Ripert: When I was young, he was my idol as a chef at the time, because he was the first chef to come out of the kitchen and become basically what we call today a celebrity chef, and when my parents were asking me, where do you want to go to eat for your birthday or what would you like for a Christmas gift, it was like, please take me to Paul Bocuse. And then when I was 13 I got Cuisine du Marché, which is his book, and I was flipping the pages and flipping the pages and looking at it, and never studying in school, and therefore at age 15 the principal called my mom and said it’s time for him to get out of here. And that’s when I started culinary school. So Paul Bocuse is responsible for me not studying, not going to school, and ending up in the kitchen!
Charlie Palmer: He’s probably the most transitional person that’s practiced our craft. He took what was once considered a job and really made it a profession, made it relevant to the way people thought about food and chefs in general. There probably will never be someone that influential as one single person. It’s amazing that starting 45, 50 years ago he was able to sustain that and really be an idol to people like me.

Whom did you look up to in the culinary world?
Boulud: Michel Guérard, Roger Vergé, George Blanc, Gaston LeNotre, the pastry chef, was quite a mentor. I had a chance to learn cooking in the seventies when everything was changing and Paul Bocuse was changing the face of French cuisine at the time. He was definitely exporting French cuisine globally.
Pépin: He would be one of them, certainly. Craig Claiborne, the food critic for the New York Times, was a friend of mine. James Beard. And I worked with Julia [Child] for many years. Julia was a great friend and a great influence.
Chiarello: That gang of Frenchman: Bocuse, LeNotre — these were legends to me in my early beginning and all of the other French chefs that came up behind them. They set the foundation that we use in the kitchen every day, so I think … they really set the bar for excellence and we’ve been chasing that bar ever since.
Keller: You looked up to all those icons and for me, one of the books that changed my life was a book called the Great Chefs of France, and of course Paul Bocuse is in there and his entire group of great French chefs. And for me it wasn’t about their recipes, it wasn’t about their restaurants — it was really about a lifestyle, and it was the lifestyle of those chefs that really resonated with me and put me on track to become a chef.
Ripert: At that time it was Michel Guérard, Gaston LeNotre, Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé — those gentlemen were really like the first wave of artist chefs who were representing cooking and getting attention from the media and therefore were inspiring down the line young people like me and my parents and so on.
Palmer: I think we all have mentors. But I think Paul Bocuse was much more than that. He was something to aspire to, something to think if we could ever come close to that. He’s the chef of the century and there won’t be more of those, if ever, in the next century.

What were some of the truly transformative meals you had when you were younger?
Boulud: I think it was certainly my first meal in Lyon at Paul Bocuse, at Alan Chapel … and then of course after Alain Ducasse gave me some amazing meals, Guy Savoy. I think what makes an amazing meal is the great moment you share having this great meal.
Pépin: Not one. The transformative food for me was the food that I had as a kid. If I could have the greatest bread in the world and the greatest butter in the world, it’s hard to beat bread and butter.
Chiarello: As I was waiting outside Paul Bocuse hoping for just a glimpse of chef Bocuse — I couldn’t afford the meal. I was working in the south of France at the time. I just made the pilgrimage to Lyon and was kind of out by the Dumpster as he was outside checking in some produce and noticed that there was a young cuisinier nearby. He was nice enough not only to come over and say hello but bring me in and treat me to an unbelievable dinner of my lifetime at no charge.
Keller: There’s lots of meals that are transformative for me. You think of the great dining experiences that you’ve had, but you also think of the In-n-Out Burger, so meals that are transformative for me aren’t necessarily meals at a three-star restaurant, although three-star restaurant meals have been transformative as well.
Ripert: I was lucky, my parents took me at a young age to those restaurants. And sometimes it was about only the food, sometimes it was about seeing the chef, sometimes it was about the entire experience and so on. I remember going to a restaurant and then, you know the dessert cart, I decided to have all the desserts from the cart, which was three carts! So the chef came out and said, “It’s fine, but you have to eat all of them.” And I ate all of them and of course I got sick.
Palmer: At a young age, I began working in Europe as much as I could. I worked around Lyon. I worked at Alain Chapel and I remember my first meal at Bocuse, which was groundbreaking last night. Growing up, to me, it was Johnny Unitas, Mickey Mantle, and then there was Paul Bocuse, so as an American kid you can just imagine where I put him.

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Filed Under: foodievents, charlie palmer, daniel boulud, eric ripert, jacques pepin, michael chiarello, paul bocuse, thomas keller

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Crowds flocked to the Tobacco Warehouse in Dumbo on Friday night for the New York City Wine & Food Festival’s Burger Bash. Twenty-two burgers (and their makers) competed for the title, with Shake Shack taking top honors from the judges, and Bobby Flay getting the People’s Choice award for his nacho burger. With burgers on the brain, we asked around about whether the hamburger’s seemingly unstoppable cultural juggernaut has any obvious culinary successors. “I think that tacos and pizza are just as exciting as burgers,” said Jonathon Sawyer, a sentiment echoed by Katie Lee, while Bobby Flay observed that “fried chicken seems like it’s getting its run.”

Spike Mendelsohn, whose Good Stuff Eatery was serving a bánh mì burger, thinks the Vietnamese sandwich is going to take over the world “very soon.” But it was Rachael Ray who had the most absolute vision. “The hot dog is already sexy,” she told us. “I think the next thing is to shrink them down to slider-size dogs and corn dogs — I myself make a deviled corn dog where the batter is super-spicy … it’s pretty yummy.” Andrew Carmellini — who tells us that he “may or may not” do a burger at his new spot the Dutch — evaded the issue. “I don’t know. I don’t trend,” he told us. “I hate trends. I never follow trends.” Time will tell — and until then, spend your time checking out what you may have missed at the event in our slideshow.

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Filed Under: burgers, andrew carmellini, bobby flay, burger bash 2010, fried chicken, hot dogs, jonathon sawyer, katie lee, rachael ray, tacos, the dutch

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Sawyer, fully recovered and burger-ready.

“I forage all the time,” Jonathon Sawyer told us at the Burger Bash on Friday night. The chef of Cleveland’s Greenhouse Tavern was slinging a Provençal-inspired lamb burger that was devoid of mushrooms — not a terribly notable omission until you realize that Sawyer had to book it to the hospital recently thanks to a mushroom-foraging trip gone wrong. “The majority of the time [we forage], we do it for greens,” Sawyer explained to us about his adventure with poisonous fungus. “Every once in a while, we find mushrooms that we trust. Normally I check against three different journals — I do the Audubon, I do the Smithsonian, and then I do an online one. I was so hasty because I found so many, I didn’t check in all three and I had a false chanterelle.” Could it have been the seasonally topical Jack-o-Lantern mushroom? Whatever it was, Sawyer soldiered on. “My wife took me to the hospital; I was fine,” he said. “I just threw up for about an hour and had to get some liquids. It was more of an embarrassment that it was anything else.”

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Filed Under: occupational hazards, burger bash 2010, foraging, jonathon sawyer, party chat

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At Friday night’s packed, manic Burger Bash at the New York Wine and Food Festival, perennial second-place-holder Bobby Flay finally got his chance to be in the spotlight. “I’ve never won,” he told us just minutes before being landing the People’s Choice award. “I come in second everywhere: Miami, here. I told [NYCWFF impresario Lee Schrager], if I come in first I’m giving it back. I don’t like it. I like being second.” But Flay’s likely not too torn up about landing a popular vote of confidence for his burger, considering that he’s finally making good on his promise to bring his Jersey, Philly, Long Island, and Connecticut chain Bobby’s Burger Palace to the good people of Manhattan. “We’re looking for a space right now,” he told us, and for that we can thank peer pressure: “Based on my friends’ and my wife’s demands for a Bobby’s Burger Palace closer by, we’re now looking for a space in New York.” As for a location, that’s less of a sure thing, since Flay is holding out for perfection. “We were kicking [the idea of a location] around today, actually,” he told us. “We thought about the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, downtown, Alphabet City, Union Square … It’s going to be the right real-estate play in the right place.”

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Filed Under: openings, bobby flay, bobby’s burger palace, burger bash 2010, party chat

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If you enjoyed the strange, twisted tales of a chef caught tonguing turtles, an Olive Garden patron attacking a man during his son’s birthday party (as well as a McDonald’s customer freaking out over McNuggets), and of course a woman shredding a reservation book because she wasn’t seated quickly enough, then you’re really going to like our new recurring feature: The James Weird Awards. The weirdest of this week’s weird restaurant news, straight ahead.

• A 21-year-old man dressed in a child-size banana costume was arrested in Port Angeles, Washington, after allegedly exposing himself to an employee at a local Wendy’s. When police arrived on the scene, the banana man was already in his car but exited with a shotgun in his hand and started yelling “something or other about white supremacy,” according to police. [Newsfeed/Time]

• A homeless man walked into a Spokane, Washington, Arby’s bathroom on Tuesday night, and when he came out the place was empty and closed, or so he told police. He microwaved some cheese sandwiches before being discovered and subsequently locked inside the restaurant by a night janitor. When he tried to flee through a side door in an Arby’s coat and hat, police caught and arrested him. He was charged with burglary and — shockingly — possession of methamphetamine. [Spokesman-Review]

• A voyeuristic Sarasota, Florida, restaurant owner was arrested for videotaping female employees while they changed in an employee dressing room. [ABC 7 Florida]

• The executive chef of Burlington, Massachusetts, Capital Grille’s love of radio-controlled cars, coupled with his stupidity, cost him his job. The guy was fired after police discovered that he stole credit cards from diners to buy the toy cars at a hobby shop. [Salem News]

• Buffalo police arrested a man after hearing a cat meowing from the trunk of the man’s car during a traffic stop. They discovered the unfortunate feline “marinating” in oil and chile peppers within a cage. The cat was cleaned up and taken in by the local SPCA. [Crime Scene/WP]

• A Baltimore man, described by police as a “prolific petty criminal,” got out of paying restaurant bills by faking seizures. He gets points for creativity, but shouldn’t city restaurant owners have caught on a little sooner? The guy has 80 arrests and 40 convictions since 1985, the majority of which are for theft-of-service crimes. [Baltimore Sun]

• After being asked to leave a Mexican restaurant in Silicon Valley, a man pulled out a handgun and fired one shot into the floor. He fled on foot, and was caught and arrested by police, who found the gun, ammunition, and — again, shockingly — methamphetamine in his pockets. [Mercury News]

• A man was arrested in Greensboro, North Carolina, for breaking into a Red Lobster in the early morning hours and trashing the restaurant after making himself a shrimp pizza and eating some cake. At least he left the lobster tank intact. [WXII 12]

• A Milton Mills, New Hampshire, man plead guilty to indecent assault and resisting arrest charges stemming from a July incident in which he led police on a nude chase through town. The man, who previously worked at a local restaurant, said he was protesting the work conditions at the establishment by visiting it in the buff. Right. [Portsmouth Herald]

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Filed Under: the james weird awards, bizarre, petty crime, restaurants, theft, weird

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Allegretti, the flatiron namesake of chef Alain Allegretti, has shuttered for renovations until September 9, according to an outgoing message. When we asked for details, a rep merely confirmed that it is “closed for renovations for the month of August.” After opening two years ago, the Provençal restaurant got two stars from Frank Bruni and four out of five stars from Jay Cheshes. Our own Adam Platt bestowed a single star on the restaurant, to the chef’s chagrin. A few months ago, a member of eGullet had a “very good meal” there but asked if it was always so empty.

Also closed for renovations (in order to help bring the building up to fire code, according to Eater) is Xie Xie, the Hell’s Kitchen Asian sandwich shop from current Top Chef contestant Angelo Sosa.

And Gansevoort 69, in the meatpacking district space that previously housed Florent and then R&L, is closed for two months. A sign on the door says, “See you in the fall.”

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Filed Under: temporary closings, alain allegretti, allegretti

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Let’s say you used one of those sites that offer dining discounts to buy a gift certificate you no longer want. Don’t fret! A new site, Lifesta, lets you sell your voucher to someone who didn’t read about the restaurant’s rat problem on Yelp. “It’s a marketplace,” says co-founder Eran Davidov, noting that sellers often offer the deals at the same price they paid for them, or just slightly higher to account for the site’s 99 cent transaction fee and 8 percent commission. “People will buy or not.” But is this kind of thing kosher? Or is it on the same questionable ground as reservation scalping?

Davidov tells us: “We did go through the terms of the big sites like Groupon and there were no limitations about charging money or reselling certificates that we were able to find. They might change their terms of use at any time [to prevent it], but we don’t really think that’s a likely step for them.” Such a restriction, he says, would probably translate into fewer sales by the discount sites, since consumers would be assuming more risk that their certificates would go to waste, unused and unsalable.

Current deals include a $25 Groupon certificate from late May that the bearer can exchange for $75 worth of wine from Wine Insiders and two $25 gift certificates to 10 Downing going for $8 each.

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Filed Under: deals, discounts, lifesta

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After reading about it on Tribeca Citizen, we couldn’t resist trying MaxDelivery’s Super Max Snack (SMS, get it?) service this afternoon. Here’s how it works: You send a text to 32075 including your name, your address, zip code, and any additional notes for the delivery guy. Within a minute or two, you’ll get a reply indicating your request was successfully processed, and then, once the delivery goes out, another message telling you when to expect your free snack. Sure enough, within twenty minutes of receiving initial confirmation we got a call from the delivery guy telling us that he was at the elevator with what turned out to be a brown paper bag containing a Stonyfield strawberry smoothie, a Snickers bar, and an apple. There was also a coupon for $10 off our first order of $20 or more on MaxDelivery.com. As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch (for everyone, anyway): Snacks are limited to one per person and are available to the first 30 requests sent between the hours of noon and 5 p.m. daily.

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As you know by now, Gordon Ramsay’s new cooking competition show MasterChef premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on Fox. Basically an American Idol for chefs, the spinoff of the BBC original pits 50 amateurs from across the country against one another, with the winner receiving $250,000 and a cookbook contract. But has the show won over the TV critics? We perused the papers to find out.

GOOD
“It gets off to a fast start as a flurry of hopefuls nervously present their signature dishes to the panel in hopes of getting an apron. The surprise: Ramsay isn’t the scariest judge this time. (That would be Joe Bastianich, whose glare could cook anyone’s goose.)”
—Matt Roush, TV Guide

“The show manages to be hugely entertaining and involving thanks mainly to the judges’ personalities and the ability of the producers to spot emotionally charged stories when they see them … The golden moments in this series are poignant and personal, not brash. There are enough of them — including teary pleading heightened by pre-commercial teases — to keep viewers from defecting.”
—Barry Garron, Reuters

BAD
“In a country that doesn’t need one more great chef as much as it needs millions to know how to produce a dinner that doesn’t come out of a take-out container, I’m not sure why there’s another cooking show focused on restaurant-quality presentations those of us at home can’t smell, much less taste.”
—-Ellen Gray, Philadelphia Inquirer

JUST OKAY
“It’s not great TV, but compared with the concentrated incompetence of Hell’s Kitchen, it’s delicious.”
—Keith Staskiewicz, Entertainment Weekly

“‘American Idol’ with food, or ‘Top Chef’ with amateurs … There are no great claims to be made for this series … But there are no great claims to be brought against it, either.”
—Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times

“Instead of ranting obscenities at professional chefs, as he does on Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen, Ramsay is bellowing them at amateur cooking contestants. But otherwise this show is pretty much identical to the others.”
—Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald

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Filed Under: tv land, gordon ramsay, joe bastianich, masterchef

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Butcher Bay.

The big news at last night’s Community Board 3 meeting: Nick Morgenstern of the General Greene was recommended for a beer and wine license at 511 East 5th Street, the seemingly cursed former home of Butcher Bay and Seymour Burton. He plans to open an eleven-table restaurant called Goat’s Town in late October that will serve “continental” cuisine, and there’ll be at least one $75 entrée, as a board member pointed out to assuage one neighbor’s fears that the place would attract a loud and rowdy crowd.

The most contentious hearing of the evening: The board recommended the denial of Sin Sin’s application to transfer its liquor license to new owners, citing 72 complaint calls to 311 between January 2009 and yesterday. “I really feel uncomfortable transferring such a problem place to a person that doesn’t have a track record managing a nightclub or bar/restaurant,” said one board member (one of the applicants owns three Dunkin’ Donuts locations in the financial district). “It’s such a huge leap from where you are now.” One of the twenty opponents to Sin Sin’s application said she had driven six hours down from Maine on Wednesday specifically to attend last night’s meeting. “What we are talking about is drugs … people are clearly using this corner to traffic drugs,” said another.

Also on the docket:

• A partnership called Justified LLC (they also own International Bar) won approval for its full liquor application for the former Lilly Coogan’s space at 102 First Avenue.

• The board approved a renewal application from Double Down Saloon.

• It also approved an application from the 13th Step to operate a sidewalk café at its 149 Second Avenue location.

• A beer-and-wine-license application for a Japanese restaurant specializing in ramen at 121 Ludlow Street (formerly Chickie Pig’s) was denied on the basis that the immediate area is one of the worst in the neighborhood in terms of complaints to 311 and the police. The board chair specifically cited Ludlow Street and Rivington Street as “the worst corner in the 7th Precinct” according to the NYPD.

• The board approved of Ajaccio Inc.’s plans to open a bar and lounge at 40 Avenue C. One of the applicants was a part-owner of Eastern Bloc.

• The board approved a sidewalk café application from Ballaro Caffe Prosciutteria at 77 Second Avenue.

As always, all final decisions are up to the State Liquor Authority.

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Filed Under: openings, cb3, community board 3, east village, nick morgenstern, sin sin, the general greene

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Dinevore.com, a New York food-ranking site launching next month, aspires to be the “Rotten Tomatoes of restaurants,” founder Jeremy Fisher told Grub Street. The site aggregates reviews from Michelin, New York, the New York Times, the New York Post, Bloomberg, Gayot, and Time Out, and a weighted average, or “Dinescore,” is applied to each restaurant based on reviews.

The site will contain excerpts from and links to reviews, Fisher said. Dinevore users can agree or disagree with reviews. The more users agree with a particular critic, the heavier that critic is weighed. Though the concept of assigning numerical values to restaurants based on external criteria has more in common with NBC’s Feast Rank, Fisher considers Urban Spoon and Yelp to be his competitors. Feast has “metascores but are focused primarily on breaking restaurant news,” Fisher told Grub Street. “We think it’s great that they’re helping to familiarize restaurant-goers with the concept of a metascore.”

Feast’s algorithm and source list is a “state secret,” according to the website, which concedes that “prime-time mentions, such as a big newspaper review, can swing Feast Rank significantly,” while “smaller mentions signal buzz and impact scores temporarily.”

Feast’s ranking system is more sophisticated than simply a compilation of reviews, said founding editor Ben Leventhal. “The Feast Rank extends far beyond the relatively small set of ‘usual suspects’ and critics who have traditionally had a great deal of control around the public perception of restaurants,” he told Grub Street via e-mail. “It changes in real time.” Leventhal’s working on “a dramatically different evolution of the Feast, including important changes to how we present the Feast Rank,” he added.

Dinevore.com is currently password protected. Curious Grub Street readers should send an e-mail to request preview access.

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Filed Under: food.com, ben leventhal, dinevore, feast, food websites, jeremy fisher

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