http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/dining/david-bouley-restaurants-tribeca.html 2016-09-23 06:52:32 David Bouley Plans to Retool His Restaurants, and Himself At 63, the influential TriBeCa chef will shut Bouley and reopen it in a smaller space with a mission of health. === David Bouley Sitting at a table at The long-influential chef, snowy-haired and preternaturally vigorous at 63, looked up from the pad to make sure he was getting through. Then he continued. “Bouley is Relocating,” he scribbled, to a new space that will accommodate only 20 to 25 seats and open only five days a week. If these messages seem unusually direct for Mr. Bouley — the word “talkative” doesn’t begin to get at his loquaciousness, and the word “mercurial” doesn’t begin to describe his Truth be told, Bouley is closing — that is, the Bouley that New Yorkers have come to know and critics have come to laud during its on-and-off existence over the course of nearly 30 years in three locations. (In March, Pete Wells After selling the space at the corner of Duane and Hudson Streets that houses it, Mr. Bouley intends to do something unheard-of among elite chefs. He wrote this part down with a black marker, too: “Bouley is on sabbatical.” In recent years, Mr. Bouley has become obsessed with issues of health, so much that a single question about an ingredient can elicit a two-hour solo symposium on, say, diabetes, inflammation, fiber and the importance of gut bacteria. He likes to pass along a list of all of the doctors and medical authorities with whom he has developed alliances and friendships. He recently impulse-bought 300 copies of “ Mr. Bouley’s plan is to follow that obsession as far as it will take him. For 18 months or so, possibly starting in November, he plans to engage in a deep study of the relationship between health and food. “I want to learn more about that,” he said. “Then I want to share it with you.” He will take nutrition classes at New York University and hobnob with holistic doctors in France. He will travel to Japan, Peru, Cuba and Switzerland to consult experts. He will do short, intensive bursts of study in Cambridge, Mass., with the goal of completing the executive M.B.A program at Harvard Business School. “You graduate with a diploma and the whole gown ceremony,” he said, with wide-eyed enthusiasm. He is writing a book called “Living Pantry,” about healthful eating, and plans to create websites and apps under the same rubric, in addition to his existing entrepreneurial projects like After the sabbatical, Mr. Bouley said, he plans to reopen Bouley on the second floor of a townhouse at 17 Harrison Street in TriBeCa. The current space can accommodate about 120 diners; the next Bouley will have room for a fraction of that. Optimizing health will become the restaurant’s mission. Each night, Mr. Bouley and his team will create tasting menus engineered to address a wide variety of dietary restrictions and medical concerns. This is done now at Bouley, as it is at many elite restaurants, but at the new Bouley, there will be a more active effort to guide and educate diners. “I’m not opening a restaurant that’s going to be a clinic,” Mr. Bouley said. Nevertheless, his missionary zeal comes through in conversation. “We’re in trouble in this country,” he said. “We have to turn this around. I really believe in this.” The way he sees it, food is a cure. He speaks about the many customers (including the musician “Food should give you calories that you burn off, not calories that you store,” Mr. Bouley said. “You’re never going to get fat on avocado oil. Fat doesn’t make you fat. Sugar makes you fat.” He has strong feelings about Ideally, the new version of Bouley will incorporate all of these ideas, serving as a kind of laboratory of delicious nutrition. “I would love to be his pupil,” Dr. Pedre said. “I’ve learned things from him. It has triggered questions in my mind and broadened my understanding.” For many of the top chefs who have passed through Mr. Bouley’s kitchens over the years, his shift in direction comes as no surprise. Mr. Bouley, born Dan Barber Where on the field the ball is going can remain a mystery. “He had no game plan,” Mr. Barber said. “He had ingredients, and he was flinging them together. Anyone can do that and look impressive, but with him you would taste it, and it was magical.” The push for innovation could be relentless. Exhaustion was a given. The staff meal was eaten standing up. After dinner service ended, at around 1 a.m., Mr. Bouley would take his crew to Chinatown for a wee-hours repast, then to the Fulton Street fish market to survey the morning’s catch. “People tell stories of his face collapsing because he was so tired,” Mr. Barber said. Out of that crucible, though, came fresh, herbaceous food that changed the way many New Yorkers ate. Along with Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Mr. Bouley led a culinary vanguard — “a light style of French cooking, which paved the way for many, many, many things,” said A very short list of the rising talents and strong personalities who have paid their dues with Mr. Bouley includes Eric Ripert, César Ramirez, Amy Scherber, Alex Ureña, Anita Lo, Galen Zamarra, Kurt Gutenbrunner, Brian Bistrong and Bill Yosses. The restaurateur Drew Nieporent famously teamed up with Mr. Bouley in the mid-1980s at Montrachet, which earned “I could’ve filled Shea Stadium,” Mr. Nieporent recalled. “It was a whirlwind moment.” But the kitchen fussed over dishes to such an obsessive degree that waits could be punishing. “You needed to bring ‘War and Peace’ to read between courses,” he said. Mr. Bouley’s tenure at Montrachet lasted 13 months. Mr. Nieporent fired him just as Mr. Bouley had begun murmuring about breaking away to open his own place. Mr. Mendes said Mr. Bouley’s influence can be felt all over New York and throughout the country, even though younger, ingredient-fixated chefs are not always aware that they have inherited Mr. Bouley’s belief system. “He was probably one of the most poetic chefs I’ve ever worked for,” Mr. Mendes said. “He would often say, ‘Talk to your ingredients.’” In recent years, as a new generation of chefs has achieved celebrity, Mr. Bouley’s visibility has seemed to fade. He expresses a weariness with the pressures of business, especially as “the cost of every freaking thing,” as he put it, goes up — from insurance to linens. “I mean, it’s ridiculous how expensive everything is,” he said. “I feel like I’m on a treadmill. The costs are so high. At the end of the day, I can only charge so much.” When Bouley moves and reopens, he said, he will have pared down the team to a skeleton crew of chefs. “I don’t want so many employees,” he said. “I don’t want any hierarchy in my dining room” — no captains, assistants or bussers. He plans to move his other restaurants and projects — Brushstroke, Ichimura at Brushstroke, Bouley at Home, a wine bar, his test kitchen — into a single building elsewhere in TriBeCa in early 2017. He hopes to retain some longtime Bouley employees by finding them jobs in that complex. He expresses little sadness over the passing of the existing Bouley — which he insists, Sharpie in hand, is only relocating. The restaurant, like his others (Danube, Bouley Bakery, Upstairs at Bouley), has always been a movable feast. Bouley, which opened at 165 Duane Street in 1987 and occupied that space until 1996, relocated once before “I feel pretty good,” Mr. Bouley said, repurposing a nugget of wisdom he said he had picked up from the Japanese chef “I’m looking forward,” he said. “I’ll take the antiques with me.” As Mr. Bouley discusses all his plans, he seems to be cramming four or five sentences — and thoughts — into the space that most people would use to express one. In “my crazy brain,” as he described it while leaving Ichimura at Brushstroke and stepping briskly through the street traffic of TriBeCa, he dreams of masterminding “a whole different concept of a restaurant.” “Here it is,” he went on. “Gastronomy and science, meeting together. I want to learn how to do that better.” There was no soccer ball present, but he seemed to be kicking something down the sidewalk, and he did not seem inclined to ease into whatever is expected of a chef nearing retirement age. “I just go my own way,” he said.