It’s Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s first time in Dublin, and he’s telling me that he just had his first pint of Guinness the night before. A ‘pint of plain’ may still be Ireland’s leading culinary export, but the 67-year-old chef-impresario is in raptures at the quality of produce that can be found in the Emerald Isle, with lobsters, langoustines, turbot, beef and lamb reared on the land or prised from the Atlantic Ocean adorning menus throughout the world.
These ingredients are now the stars of the menu at Jean-Georges at The Leinster, the Celtic outpost of the Frenchman’s empire, with his portfolio currently comprising a staggering 62 restaurants worldwide, from Kyoto to Las Vegas to Jakarta to Dubai to Guangzhou to the eponymous two-Michelin-starred mothership in New York.
The pincer-thin glass-and-steel island of Manhattan is where Vongerichten has been based since the Eighties. ‘New York is home,’ he says with a smile. A resident of West Village, he lives in a Richard Maier-designed condo on Perry Street (it goes without saying that he has a restaurant downstairs). Every morning – when he’s not travelling the world – he looks out over the Hudson River and contemplates his lot.
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Vongerichten’s influence on New York’s scene
Nearly 20 years ago, Jay McInerney was already of the opinion that ‘in the past two decades, no single chef has had more influence on the way New Yorkers dine out – or on the way other chefs cook and other restaurants look’. The chef’s career has been simmering away ever since, and he’s achieved something truly gargantuan with the Tin Building, transforming what had been Fulton Street Fish Market into six full-service restaurants, four counters and six bars. It’s not some Les Halles tribute either, Vongerichten insists: ‘This is a market that looks like New York.’
Vongerichten is one of those rare creatures: someone who saw the future first; a tastemaker in the same mould as César Ritz or Ian Schrager. Just as Nick Jones reinvented the starchy private London private members’ club and sold the Soho House lifestyle to the world, so Vongerichten coined a signature cuisine that you can now taste in every major city on the planet: the aromatic flavours of the East are blended with the rigour of French cuisine.
Out go cream and butter and pomp and formality, and in come fruit essences, light broths and herbal vinaigrettes. There’s an emphasis on local produce and seasonality, and how the dish looks is as important as how it tastes. The decor and ambience matter nearly as much as the food. While none of this is new today, it certainly was 30 years ago.
Finding his calling
The story of how Vongerichten became a chef has become part of his legend. Growing up in a mercantile family near Strasbourg, he was expected, as the eldest son, to replace his father in their coal business. But he was a diffident student. Frustrated, his parents took Jean-Georges to dine at a restaurant for his 16th birthday – but not just any restaurant. Auberge de l’Ill, owned and run at the time by Paul Haeberlin, was the only three-star Michelin restaurant in Alsace.
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More than 50 years later, Vongerichten can still remember in lavish detail the array of delights that were placed before him that evening. Foie gras wrapped around a truffle; mousseline de grenouilles with Riesling and watercress; medallion of venison with apples and cranberries; a poached peach, jarred in syrup for months, served with pistachio ice cream.
The teenager was transported into a dreamscape; he had found his calling. His father, needless to say, was bemused. When chef Haeberlin came to the table, Mr Vongerichten pointed to his son and said: ‘Do you need anyone to wash the dishes? Maybe he can peel the potatoes?’ The chef replied that he was actually looking for an apprentice. And that was that. Jean-Georges started in the kitchen the next day.
After three years he moved to L’Oasis, a three-star in Provence; then Louis Outhier, another three-star. Then three years with Paul Bocuse, ‘the Pope of Gastronomy’, in Lyon. Then to another three-star in Munich.
Then it was to south-east Asia, to the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. A year at the Meridien Hotel in Singapore, a year in Hong Kong, and then six months in Japan. He arrived in the United States in 1985, working briefly in Boston before moving to New York a year later. After all that travelling, Jean-Georges Vongerichten was still only 30 years old.
In the Eighties, French food in Manhattan revolved around grand, luxurious restaurants like La Côte Basque, Lutèce, La Caravelle and La Grenouille, with uniformed waiters serving silver platters of lobster bisque to Jackie Kennedy, Nan Kempner, Jerry Zipkin et al – the last gasps of the Upper East Side milieu that Truman Capote so terminally satirised.
A defining moment
It was against this blanched view of what fine dining could be that Gael Greene, the food critic for New York magazine, took precise aim. An eroticist and inveterate self-mythologist, Greene revelled in the story of seducing Elvis Presley when she was sent to interview him (and ordered him a fried egg sandwich from room service on her way out). In all likelihood, she served as the chief inspiration for Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, and at the height of her powers she savaged Vongerichten’s first operation in New York, Lafayette at the Drake Swissôtel.
It was, Vongerichten tells me, one of the defining moments in his career, and the mauling he received from Greene helped him articulate his vision. ‘I was doing this very traditional French cuisine, with lots of cream and butter, and I had to take a look around. In France, people would go out to eat for a special occasion. But in New York people went out to eat every night.’
He thought of his tenure in Asia, and he resolved to offer something different. In 1991 he opened a bistro, JoJo, that won a coveted three stars from the New York Times. His name was finally made.
The global restaurant boom
The sensibilities of pre-9/11 New York yuppies are now universal: in cities all over the world, people go to restaurants two, three or four times a week. Recessions and depressions be damned. And people want quick, light, precise cuisine, flavourful and intense, to be consumed with cocktails, not just wine, in dimly lit, sexy rooms in and out of which sleeky dressed diners come and go.
Today, Vongerichten is an amiable, smooth presence, happy to banter with me about the changing character of downtown Manhattan, but riven with passion about the state of dining today. He loves Instagram and is delighted by the constant online chatter. ‘Every day, I read criticism of one of my restaurants on Resy or OpenTable, and that’s a wonderful thing.’
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Away from the kitchen, he is a great celebrant of architecture and is very proud of his friendships with some of the leading lights in the field. Four Twenty Five, a New York restaurant that opened last December, has been designed by Foster + Partners, and his latest London outpost, ABC, is at the Emory in Knightsbridge, which was one of the last projects for the late Richard Rogers and was completed by Ivan Harbour.
Vongerichten loves the rooftop locale for his Dublin restaurant, where there are views stretching out over the ivy-clad Georgian terraces of Merrion Square, the most beautiful address in the city. The hotel is almost entirely a new-build, designed by Irish architects ODAA, and has 55 rooms and suites. It’s the brainchild of Paddy McKillen Jnr, whose father, also called Paddy, has been integral to the Maybourne Hotel Group, which includes three of the best hotels in London (and the world): the Berkeley, Claridge’s and the Connaught.
Fittingly, Vongerichten’s favourite restaurant in London is the River Cafe, the iconic Thameside Italian restaurant that was originally the employees’ canteen for Richard Rogers’ architectural practice. Today it’s still run by Rogers’ widow, Ruthie. ‘I just love it,’ Vongeritchten says. ‘Everything there speaks for itself.’
This feature was first published in Spear’s Magazine Issue 92. Click here to subscribe
