Squinting into the summer sun by a pool in Sag Harbor, Long Island, Eric Ripert turns to me and says, "I want to leave the chef that I am. I want the cooking to fill me again." Executive chef and part owner of Le Bernardin, Manhattan's fanciest, best-known seafood restaurant, Ripert may be the most accomplished chef of his (the postbaby boom) generation. He has been cooking professionally since the age of 15. He has run the kitchen at Le Bernardin since 1994, when its owner Gilbert Le Coze died, suddenly and tragically early, of a heart attack. To everyone's amazement, Ripert, just 29, was able to maintain the restaurant's four New York Times stars—the youngest chef in the city ever to carry that mantle. Every year, the Zagat Survey rates his food the best in New York, the most demanding, most competitive restaurant city in the country. He is in the top rank of chefs nationwide, at the pinnacle of his profession, yet he wants to leave the chef that he has become? Exactly how is it that cooking doesn't fulfill him?
Ripert senses that he is losing himself as a cook—like he's been checking for a pulse and not able to find one. His days are glutted with meetings and business decisions, menu writing and staffing issues, calls from the press and PR people. He travels continually—charity appearances from California to Maine, promotional tours, consulting in Palm Springs, being wooed by Vegas. Indeed, his image seems to be everywhere—in the pages of GQ, in the Times, on the Food Network.
It is, he admits, an exciting life. But he no longer actually cooks. It's the fundamental irony of his profession—the more successful you become, the further you are taken from the work that made you a success in the first place, from what you most love doing. This is not, of course, uncommon, but it's particularly dramatic in the celebrified orbit of chefs. When "chef" is your title but "cook" is your core, you can watch your true self recede further and further into pretense or, worse, nothingness. And so, in coming to Sag Harbor, ostensibly to write a cook¬book, Ripert is in fact searching for a way of returning to cooking, a way to remain connected to the source.
Born in Antibes in the south of France in 1965, Ripert was ten when his family moved to Andorra, a dime-size country in the Pyrenees, separating Spain and France. "When I was a kid at school, obviously I was a bad student," he says, "which is why I ended up in the kitchen." At age 15 he was required to take vocational training. Though he didn't much like it, he did find that he had an affinity for "the refinement of table service." His mother, with whom he often cooked, urged him rather to learn to cook, telling him, he says, "Be a chef, and you can be anything. Be a waiter, and that's all you'll ever be."
After graduating, Ripert applied only to Parisian restaurants that had three Michelin stars. "For me, to do less than Paul Bocuse was not worth doing." He took a job at La Tour d'Argent, where he learned the basics of classical cooking, then moved on to the famous Jamin.
"Everything I have I owe to Robuchon," Ripert now says of Jamin's chef-owner, Joël Robuchon. "He is a god. No one comes close to accomplishing
what he does." (Ripert calls the dishes he makes at Le Bernardin cafeteria food compared to those at Jamin.) To Ripert, Robuchon was and is more than a mentor—he is like a godfather. But when I ask him to talk about his three years with the chef who is considered one of the best of the entire century, Ripert grows quiet.
"The street Robuchon was on was very dark. It was heavy. Whenever I remember him, I always see this dark, dark street." Recalling the agony of anticipation of upcoming work weeks under Robuchon, Ripert says, "On Sunday afternoon, your stomach is like wooo… Then you go for dinner on Sunday night and don't even see what you're eating. Then you go to sleep and you don't sleep. Then it's six o'clock in the morning and you're exhausted. Many times I thought I'd take the car to the airport and get out of there."
At Jamin, food was considered nothing less than sacred. You didn't carry a red pepper to your station in your hand; you carried it on its own tray. Mushrooms were individually sautéed. In his role as poissonnier, Ripert would make seven or eight sauces for each service (lunch and dinner, Monday through Friday) including lobster, fennel, fumet, and verjus. Robuchon would taste them all, and if he didn't like one he would tell Ripert—harshly, and without explanation of any sort—to throw it out. In fact, silence from the chef was your only praise.
Ripert remembers trying to complete an already complicated plate with two dozen dots of bright red coral sauce around the periphery—placing them not with a tiny squeeze bottle but off the tip of a spoon—while the kitchen reverberated with the sound of Robuchon yelling at the cooks. Such behavior is common in kitchens, but, says Ripert, Robuchon was unusually brutal. If a grain of rice came back on a plate, Robuchon would humiliate the cook in charge of the dish's preparation. Some regular diners apparently knew to eat every morsel for fear the unfortunate cook would be destroyed.
Somehow Robuchon saw that Ripert was different from the other cooks, and he treated him almost paternally—though he was by no means immune from Robuchon's wrath. So impossible and controlling was Robuchon that he made his cooks sign a book every time they went to the bathroom: time in and time out. Ripert eventually got so fed up with this that he began writing not only times in and out but also descriptions of the events themselves. When Robuchon picked up the book to check it, he turned crimson. Ripert never saw the book again.
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