Arrive Magazine - January/February, 2008

The Last Supper

Arrive asked Boulud what he’d eat on his last day on earth. “Eat?” he replied. “If it were my last day on earth, I’d be more interested in drinking wine rather than eating.” But he gave it some thought and came up with a simple plan. “I’d eat nothing but pig and potatoes. I’d cook each one hundreds of different ways. And it goes without saying that absolutely every part of the pig, from ears to tail, would be used.”

“All downtown restaurants were closed, so he set up a kitchen on a barge near Ground Zero,” recalls chef Bradford Thompson, formerly of Mary Elaine’s in Scottsdale, Ariz., a James Beard Award–winning protégé of Boulud who remains close. “He organized volunteers and hardly slept until the Red Cross was ready to take over. It was hurting him so much to see what the city was going through and what the rescue workers were going through. And he sat down with them and talked about it with them and let them share the struggles they faced. It was such a human side to him.”

There’s also a whimsical side, one that occasionally lends itself nicely to generous publicity, as Boulud is a bit of a press darling. At one point, French farmers were raising a stink about American fast food. Boulud was asked by a reporter at the time if he was capable of making a great French version of the hamburger. Certainly he could, he responded. In impromptu fashion the next day he went to his kitchen, came up with a combination of fine ground chuck, short ribs braised for 12 hours in red wine, foie gras and truffle and—voilà!—his famous $32 hamburger was born.

“We thought it could be a flop,” Boulud says. “I didn’t want to bastardize the American hamburger. I just wanted to give it a French interpretation and add some flair. I still sell hundreds of these burgers a week, and it’s still $32. That’s pretty good, considering that beef and everything else in it has gotten so much more expensive.”

A regular parade of A-list customers also help keeps Boulud on Page Six and in other columns. NASCAR champion and part-time New Yorker Jeff Gordon is a regular. (“He gave me one of his racing gloves to display. He saw Michael Schumacher’s racing suit here and said, ‘If you have one of his, you must have one of mine.’ ”) Lance Armstrong is a fan and friend, too, and presented him with a yellow Tour de France jersey as a token of his appreciation. Sean Combs, going back to when he was Puff Daddy, has enjoyed the white truffle. (“My server brought it to his table, let him smell it, and then started shaving it on the plate,” Boulud says. “Puff Daddy said, ‘Shave that b——! Keep shaving that b——!’ He was not trying to be impolite. It was his way of saying ‘Go for it!’ My waiters, of course, never get rattled by such things.”)

Then there was a visit by another VIP, Bill Clinton, while he was president. “My apartment is above my restaurant,” Boulud says, “and the Secret Service guys used that as what they call the POTUS hole, where they hang out and the president will come to refresh himself or take a nap, whatever he needs. They messed up my phone lines for quite some time after that. Those Secret Service guys, they’re good at taking things apart but not so interested in putting it back together nicely.” (For the record, Boulud notes that he refused to let Secret Service dogs sniff around in his kitchen. “I know what’s in my kitchen,” he told them, “and there’s nothing dangerous in there.”)

And, of course, Boulud has become quite a celebrity himself, with regular appearances on the Letterman/ Regis/Today show circuit.

“The first time I was on Regis, I was promoting a newsletter,” he says. “I told the audience, If you send me a pre-stamped envelope, I’ll send you a copy of my newsletter for free. I got 10,000 letters with envelopes. But my newsletter was too big for them! I lost a lot of money trying to keep my promise. This taught me about the power of television.”

Today, his own show, After Hours, is in its second season on Mojo. It depicts what chefs do late at night, after the kitchen is closed. They gather in their various restaurants, drink wine, tell stories, and come up with new creations to feed each other. It’s the kind of on-the-fly, improvised science approach that has suited Boulud well for years.

“We never went to school to be scientists,” he says. “But we are self-proclaimed scientists. We understand the transformation of food and ingredients into a great meal. There are heating and cooling elements to it, but there is always science with a heart involved, too. To practice it well, you must have a sixth sense about precision when it comes to taste. To transform something into a perfect taste—even the greatest of scientist cannot match the natural instinctive feeling of a great chef. We are constantly seeking a new perfection with every dish.”