Gregory Gourdet is again in New York to open his new mission. He’ll flip 50 this summer time.
Picture: Lanna Apisukh
“We don’t need to eat the whole lot. We are able to simply style a bit of of the whole lot,” says the chef Gregory Gourdet in a barely conspiratorial tone as we sit all the way down to our overly bountiful luncheon of black-eyed peas, fluffy jollof rice, and diverse fiery soups and proteins (grilled fish with rice and plantains, a bowl of okra soup) on the Ghanaian restaurant Accra Specific, which opened not way back in a storefront area on one hundred and twenty fifth Avenue in Harlem. “I’m a New Yorker, so that is very a lot a full-circle, coming-home second for me,” says Gourdet, who will flip 50 this yr and who grew up within the metropolis within the late ’90s, earlier than he was employed straight out of the Culinary Institute of America by Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s chef de delicacies, Didier Virot, and spent near 9 years working varied jobs inside the Jean-Georges empire.
Virot was a household buddy, “in order that was my in,” says Gourdet, whose goggle-size horn-rimmed glasses, backward baseball cap, and perpetually breezy disposition make him appear much less like one of the vital completed cooks of the previous decade (varied James Beard Awards, TV appearances, and “finest new restaurant” nods from a number of publications) and extra like a daily who’s dropping in for a fast lunchtime snack. However after 25 years within the enterprise, Gourdet now has a rising empire of his personal, and he has spent the morning tending to his newest high-profile mission, the ambitiously often-Haitian-accented Maison Passerelle, one in every of 5 venues he’s overseeing in his position as culinary director of the brand new Wall Avenue department of the grand Parisian division retailer Printemps.
Maison Passerelle is a lavish 85-seat mission with two entrances, one in every of which is simply previous the designer-shoe part, the place you should buy your pair of Christian Louboutins for a number of thousand {dollars}. The menu contains a formidable (and usually scrumptious) number of fat-cat specialties (Cane Syrup Glazed Duck for $72, spaghetti with lobster for $60, strip steak rubbed with Haitian espresso for a whopping $150), though as our modest lunch proceeds ($77.49 complete), Gourdet, who lives in Portland, Oregon, begins to reminisce in regards to the homecoming moments he’s been experiencing across the metropolis over these previous few weeks and months. He takes out his cellphone and exhibits me an image of him standing on the snowy garden in entrance of the previous household home the place he grew up in Laurelton in Queens. Once I point out that I’d visited the unique Accra restaurant on the suggestion of a Ghanaian cab driver a few years in the past, Gourdet says that his father, who was a health care provider by coaching, drove a cab for some time when the household first got here to New York from Port-au-Prince, and he remembers sleeping within the again seat as the daddy and son rumbled from place to position round city.
When Gourdet was 4 years previous, his mother and father despatched him again to Port-au-Prince to reside together with his grandparents for a yr after his sister was born, and it was there that he skilled the primary Proustian reminiscences of homestyle Haitian cooking: Scotch-bonnet chiles from the backyard, plantains with salt cod, contemporary sugar cane and grilled corn from road distributors. His mom was additionally a wonderful residence cook dinner, and on holidays again in New York, the household would journey out to his grandmother’s home in Newark for Creole rooster, or keep within the metropolis for Tante Cecile’s rice and beans. Gourdet’s ambition in these days was to change into a health care provider, and he bounced round via a collection of colleges and scholarship applications — St. Andrew’s prep college in Delaware, backdrop to Lifeless Poets Society; NYU undergrad for premed; the College of Montana, the place he studied wildlife biology, of all issues — earlier than making use of to the Culinary Institute.
“I used to be getting C’s and D’s in chemistry, and I believed, Jesus, that is means too arduous. Though wanting again now, baking is chemistry, meals is biology by way of local weather change and seasonality, so finally all of it made sense,” the chef says because the little railroad eating area begins to empty out and deliveries of components for the night service start coming in via the entrance door. Culinary college “was the primary time I beloved what I used to be doing and truly cared about college,” he says. “I bear in mind sneaking round throughout all my practicals, getting extra components so my meals tasted higher, getting extra meat for my consommé so it was, like, double-flavored. Nobody taught me the best way to do it. I simply figured it out.”
Since then, Gourdet’s profession has adopted a serendipitous trajectory via the totally different culinary epochs of the previous quarter-century, from the nine-year stint with Vongerichten on the finish of the ’90s star-chef period (he ended up working the kitchen at a JG Chinese language idea known as 66), to the nice Portland renaissance of the mid-aughts (“Once I received there in 2008, Pok Pok, Beast, Le Pigeon, and Paley’s Place have been all taking place — it was like being in Haight-Ashbury at the start of the psychedelic ’60s, for higher or worse”), to the unusual vagaries of reality-TV stardom (he got here up with the title for his first restaurant, Kann — sugarcane in Haitian Creole — on a victorious episode of Prime Chef’s “Restaurant Wars”), to the blossoming of a brand new technology of cooks who’ve discovered their collective voices and types by touring again, down the previous foodways, to the eating traditions of their ancestors.
Alongside the best way, Gourdet, like lots of his friends, struggled with issues of dependancy and drug abuse, which, he says, are nonetheless all too widespread within the pressurized lifetime of the skilled kitchen and which he was fortunate to outlive. He’d developed a style for daylong drug-fueled raves in school: “Velocity, crystal meth. Ecstasy was new; Particular Okay was new. All that stuff — you title it!” he says in his terminally merry means. When he began engaged on the road at Jean-Georges after which at Nougatine, nice rivers of alcohol entered the equation. Gourdet was finally fired from the 66 kitchen by his mentors (“I’m nonetheless very near them. Actually, I believe they simply held on to me a bit of longer than they need to have”), and located himself working at a random restaurant out in San Diego, the place one morning at seven, after one other 12-hour consuming binge, he flipped the automotive he was driving on a freeway.
“That was not a come-to-Jesus second; that was an I-almost-died second,” Gourdet says now, as we end lunch and prepare to go out into the new sunshine. The automotive landed, miraculously, on all 4 tires, and although he walked away from the accident, the police took him to the ER and browse him his rights as he lay, nonetheless drunk, in a hospital mattress.
In AA parlance, there’s an idea known as “doing a geographic,” which suggests eradicating your self out of your addictive environment, which is how Gourdet discovered his means, in the end, to Oregon, the place he fell on and off the wagon earlier than getting sober for good (“I’m 16 years sober on March 30 — that’s my sixteenth birthday”). He wrote his wonderful cookbook based mostly on his new wholesome life-style, Everybody’s Desk, which received a James Beard Award in 2022, started working marathons, and eventually, with assist from his mom (who taught him most of the previous household recipes), opened Kann, the restaurant that put him on the nation’s map, in an area subsequent to Le Pigeon with an open wooden hearth in homage to the open-fire barbecue of the Caribbean.
Chef Gourdet’s mother and father reside in Atlanta now, the place his sister works in AIDS analysis on the CDC, and I see her title pop up on Gourdet’s caller ID as we’re leaving (“Trump’s slicing all the roles, so she’s hella freaking out”). Once I ask if he considers himself to be a late bloomer, on the age of fifty, he ponders the query for a second in uncharacteristic silence. “I used to be engaged on the road at JG in my early 30s. I didn’t open my very own restaurant till I turned 46. I used to be washing dishes alone at 1:30 within the morning on my birthday at Kann — that’s how I turned 47,” the chef says as he will get prepared to go again downtown to return to work. “You would say I’m a late bloomer, however I don’t really feel that means, actually,” he says, laughing his infectious giggle. “I believe I’m extra like a type of a whirlwind.”