Inside The World of Le Bernardin: Review

Inside the World of Le Bernardin," by Eric Ripert and Christine Muhlke, is the most fun book you'll ever read about a restaurant you love.
Chaotically organized and seemingly random in its choice of topic from page to page, it's full of more intimate backstage details than any great eatery has ever shared about itself.
Of course, "On the Line" is self-promotional. It celebrates Le Bernardin for changing "how Americans ate fish" - a justifiably immodest boast from a place built on the misleadingly modest mantra of "great fish, prepared simply."
But the book is also shaded with past tragedy - the death in 1994 of original chef Gilbert Le Coze at age 48 - and by a gnawing sense of how precarious the whole magnificent enterprise is today.
Gilbert's sister, Maguy Le Coze, who founded Le Bernardin with him in 1986, owns it with the great chef Ripert. Their serene stewardship and the restaurant itself has seemed as permanent as Manhattan schist.
But Ripert and Muhlke buried their lead - the "secret," revealed on Page 11 and echoed later, that "the lease on Le Bernardin runs out in 2011." Ripert hopes to "successfully renegotiate," but guarantees nothing.
In that light, repeated descriptions of bad plumbing and a too-small kitchen sound like a prelude to uncertain talks with landlord Equitable. And the whole book can be read as a testament to the glory that was, should the end come.
"On the Line" is a strange fish itself, full of sidebars and fact boxes like the ones usually found in trade paperbacks. Ripert and Muhlke had to overrule editors who wanted a conventional approach - i.e., the same one that puts readers of other books written by chefs to sleep.
Like most restaurant tomes, "On the Line" does include recipes you can't replicate at home. If your progressive marinated fluke quartet doesn't come out like Le Bernardin's, well, you're not Ripert or Chris Muller, his chef de cuisine.
But the greatest pleasure lies in a ton of demystifying minutiae about a place with three Michelin stars, four New York Times stars, and the Zagat Survey's top food rating - accolades that for once actually mean something.
The pantry stocks Heinz vinegar, Hunt's tomato paste and Libby's sauerkraut. Muller can't stand chatty kitchen workers and "long hair in particular drives him nuts."
Then there's porter Fernando Uruchima's daily schedule, from 6:30 a.m. till 5 p.m., for checking in deliveries and seeing to myriad indispensable tasks ("10:17 - adds to to-do list, 'No live sea urchins. Check squid!' ")
Ecuadorean -born Uruchima is one of a marvelously multicultural team. Muller, who's been there since 1993, is from Wisconsin, and pastry chef Michael Laiskonis hails from Detroit. But we also meet Martinique-born executive sous chef Eric Gestel, Barbados-born saucier Vincent Robinson, Moroccan-born maitre d' Ben Chekroun and Austrian-born wine director Aldo Sohm.
But the most haunting photo is of Maguy and Gilbert Le Coze - surely the most beautiful siblings ever to migrate from Paris to New York - sharing a rowboat in Central Park.
It's a reminder of mortality you can't help relate to the great institution they created. Long live Le Bernardin.
source: newyorkpost