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.
"When I talk about working for Robuchon, I feel like I am talking about the war," says Ripert. Despite this, he remains close to his former mentor, and they speak frequently. Ultimately, Ripert says, he endured Robuchon because it was a great honor to work for him. It was an experience he knew he had to go through in order to become a great chef himself. And he's glad he did.
In the spring of 1989, Ripert was sent by Robuchon to Washington, D.C., to work for Jean-Louis Palladin. Originally from Gascony, Jean-Louis—as he is universally known throughout the cooking world—was famous for having become, at age 28, the youngest chef ever to earn two Michelin stars. The bushy-haired, near-sighted chef had made a name for himself cooking meat and offal with the powerful flavors of southwestern France. "To me, no one equals the force of Jean-Louis—those flavors, that intensity," Ripert says of his friend. "I learned technique from Robuchon, but Jean-Louis is my taste and spirit."
Ripert's experience with Jean-Louis was his awakening as a cook; he likens the process to going from Catholic boys school to Woodstock. "It was," says Ripert, "the discovery of myself. The opening of my instinct. I never knew that I had talent. In France it was taboo to say 'I have talent.' But I discovered that what I did have was discipline. And knowledge. And, with these, I developed instinct. Now I touch an onion, and something is happening inside me. I understand the nature of that onion. I have a sensitivity in my hands. The hand and the mind have to work together."
Ripert had always dreamed of living in New York City. So, after his 18-month contract with Jean-Louis ended, he immediately found work with David Bouley, who had done a short stage at Jamin. Then, in 1991, Gilbert Le Coze, chef-owner of Le Bernardin, called Ripert to ask if he would take command of Le Bernardin's kitchen, replacing Eberhard Müller. Both Ripert and Le Coze initially balked at what they perceived as the other's arrogance, but Le Coze set the tone of the relationship they would ultimately have with an odd request: to join Ripert on vacation in Spain before he began work at the restaurant. By the time the young cook took command of the kitch¬en, he and Le Coze were close friends.
Ripert was 26, and, by his own admission, became a tyrant in the kitchen himself, a fact he now regrets. Just three years later, in July of 1994, Le Coze died at age 48, shocking the entire restaurant community. Ripert was stunned. "We were friends," he says, "but it was more than friendship. It was almost like a father-son relationship. Gilbert had no children, and I had lost my father when I was young. It was as though someone from my own family passed away." But there was still the business to run. Ripert heard rumors that with Le Coze no longer at the helm, Le Bernardin would quickly lose its coveted New York Times stars and that, scenting disaster, the food critics would soon descend. That September, before the start of what both he and Maguy Le Coze, Gilbert's sister and co-owner of the restaurant, knew would be a stressful season, he took two weeks off to regroup. Before he left, Maguy told Ripert that she wanted a completely new menu. One that was entirely his own.
"I knew what I had to do," he recalls. He and Maguy then waited anxiously for the New York Times review, which eventually ran in the spring of 1995. It began, "Four stars are easier to get than to keep…" And from that moment on, Ripert never looked back, not simply carrying on Le Coze's philosophy but taking fish cookery to new heights, simplifying it, purifying it—bass ceviche with cilantro and mint, halibut poached in a saffron broth, skate spiced and roasted. "Each fish," wrote the Times, "has been stripped to its basic elements and dressed up to emphasize them." In a matter of months, Ripert had been rocketed from invisible chef de cuisine to the realm of celebrity, a status that has increased yearly. And that has carried him inexorably away from cooking.
In his search for a path by which to return to the wellspring of his culinary artistry—cooking whatever he felt like, cooking dishes that reminded him of cooking with his mother—Ripert concocted an idea for a book: a book about the art of cooking and spontaneous creation and the creative mind. The concept is so odd that despite his celebrity no publisher was eager to take it on. But so confident, so sure of himself and his mission, is he that he began the book in the summer of 2000 anyway, at the house with the pool near Sag Harbor.
"I haven't cooked meat in so long. It makes me happy!" He is searing a pork loin in an enamel pot. "Meat is very sensual. Fish is delicate. With fish you have to be almost discreet." He makes a fist. "Meat, you cook with your guts." He is cooking in a way he has not cooked since he was a boy: vegetable salads, quick sautés of fish with a vinaigrette for a sauce, hearty curries and rustic one-pot stews with powerful seasonings. "This really reminds me of cooking with my mother," he says as he creates a lobster nage, a broth he seasons with jazzlike intuition—cumin and coriander, fennel, a fresh hot chile—and finishes with a classical touch of fresh tarragon.
The entire week we are there is filled with discoveries. "I never realized how important shallots are to me," he says with something approaching wonder as he minces some. Dicing lemon confit for a Moroccan tagine, he says, "Lemon confit is something I cannot cook without." The vehicle for these discoveries is spontaneous home cooking, rustic and simple—until Ripert touches the duck, which he will sear, then roast to rare, then use the bones to make a stock. "Classical food I cannot f— up, I'm sorry," he says, scraping browned bits off the bottom of the pan with a wood spoon. "I do it out of fear! Joël and Jean-Louis would never forgive me!"
The real revelation comes on the last day of my visit. Ripert does something he'd vowed not to do this week. He prepares a dish from the restaurant—a croque-monsieur, the traditional grilled ham and cheese sandwich. It's a straightforward, elegant dish that he created in 1997 in honor of his father's mother, Émilienne, shortly after she died, and has served in homage to her ever since. In this version, he replaces the ham with smoked salmon and adds lemon zest and chives. So why make a croque-monsieur here, today, in Sag Harbor, given his desire to leave behind, as he said, the chef that he had become? He doesn't answer immediately. Wary of talking about his beliefs, Ripert is worried he'll sound like a flake. He meditates daily. He reads Buddhist and Christian literature, and lights candles continually. "Flames," he says to me, "break through the darkness, help to connect you with the spirits."
If you are a cook, and such beliefs are a part of who you are, they must inform your cooking or you are not truly cooking. I'm not sure that Ripert quite realizes it yet, but this oddball book idea—to combine the art he loves with the work he loves—is really the beginning of a journey for him. It is an exploration of who he is and who he will be. It is a book about his soul as a cook.
Dicing an apple for a dish he calls salade Monique, after his mother, he ¬finally explains why he had to make the croque-monsieur. "Cooking is spiritual," he says. "We have a tendency to forget that." When you cook—that is, when you really cook—you're paying attention to season and place, to God-given ingredients that are close and fresh. When you are a cook, you pay attention to the past. You remember your mother. You thank the chefs who taught you. When you are a cook, you welcome ghosts, and you honor them. He smiles. "My grandmother's spirit," he adds simply, "was in the house with us that night."
CHEF'S SECRET
From Eric Ripert: In the kitchen it takes discipline and knowledge to develop instinct. The hand and the mind have to work together.