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S O I S D A N I E L R O S E , T H E A M E R I C A N G U Y W H O G O T T O U T - P A R I S B A C K T O T H E B A S I C S O F F R E N C H C O O K I N G — A N D H A S R E T U R N E D H O M E T O O P E N N E W Y O R K ’ S H O T T E S T N E W R E S TA U R A N T.

S C E N E S T E A L E R

124 E S Q U I R E / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 6

“ The difference in American food and

French food,” Rose says, “is the

difference between a French summer

movie and an American blockbuster.”

Opposite: His duck, f igs, foie gras,

and black olives.

126 E S Q U I R E / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 6 127

At its best, the French table is unsurpassed in its civility, culture, and sophistication, the sole drawback a seemingly inevitable atmo-sphere of solemnity. Says Rose, “French restaurants have become too much like churches, too reverential. If they’re going to be churches, they should be like southern churches, providing a shitload of fun, not all that guilt.” For a generation that has rejected classic French food without ever trying it, that considers it a punch-drunk culi-nary calamity, Le Coucou offers an unparalleled opportunity to ex-perience food considered the finest ever created. It’s like getting a chance to go back in time and see Babe Ruth in the batter’s box.

Rose is celebrated as a chef, but the secret behind his tri-umphs in Paris, and even now at Le Coucou, is that he is New York’s latest great front-of-the-house man. He stands in front of his open kitchen, commanding yet cognizant of the esprit de corps of the kitchen brigade behind him—he would have made a second-rate Foreign Legion soldier but an impeccable officer.

Often, hearing from a server that an agonized customer had to choose one dish over another, he will send out a small taste of the one not chosen, partly as a gift and partly as a tease. His best gift, however, is that he makes the dining experience personal, never a fundamental virtue of French cuisine. He wanders through the dining room ever so casually, bringing plates to customers and schmoozing engagingly—he is Jewish, which might help. In Paris, notorious for surly front-of-the-house service, he had unknowingly and naturally become the warmest and most welcoming of hosts.

Rose was not quite an un-known when he arrived in New York to open Le Coucou. His first version of Spring, a sixteen-seat bistro located in an obscure arrondissement and featuring a single fixed-price menu, was a sensation. Before Rose, Paris had never embraced

an American-born chef. Within a year of its opening, the French newspaper Le Figaro proclaimed Spring the most difficult table to book in town.

He came back home to America with no celebrity credentials, no published cookbook, no TV show, nothing that makes a chef a “personality” in the U. S. He had no advance men, just ebullient praise from customers at Spring. Everything he’s accomplished here has been unlikely, nearly impossible, but he ap-pears unfazed by pressure.

He is not like any other chef you know. He has a single tattoo on his arm. It reads, in French, Je vis un rêve permanent (“I live a permanent dream”). When asked to clarify, he references the poet Wallace Ste-vens, the Romanian musician Gheorghe Enescu, Eu-clidean geometry, and The Odyssey. Is it any wonder he has little difficulty mastering French recipes?

“People who see the tattoo think I’m a hipster who broke a lot of rules,” he says, “but really I’m an old conservative French cook.”

T h e ye a r wa s 2 0 0 6. I n N ew Yo r k , D av i d C h a n g o p e n e d Momofuku Ssäm Bar in the East Village. The res-taurant would incite a restaurant revolution that has dramatically changed dining.

His dishes featured unexpected colors, unusual consistencies, unlikely combinations, and a touch of untidiness. His customers sat on stools or at a coun-ter in a hard-edged dining

B e fo r e h e eve n t h o u g h t a b o u t c o o k i n g fo r a l i v-ing, Daniel Rose left his Chicago home to study European culture in Paris, “because,” he says, “I thought all French girls went topless—I’d seen a movie where they were all wearing only suspend-ers.” That didn’t work out quite as he’d hoped, and neither did his first try at higher education abroad, so he decided on the next best thing: to join the “front line of life.” The year was 1999, and he set out for the French Foreign Legion.

He had always been a wanderer, having been given that privilege by indulgent parents, so he boldly marched up to headquarters—five-eight and even skinnier than he is now, not exactly a born killer, or even, for that matter, a born cook—and was promptly rejected.

“I’m sure they asked him, ‘How many push-ups can you do?’ and that was that,” says his younger brother, Zak.

Not true, says Daniel. He was sent away, he says, because the Foreign Legion was flooded with battle-scarred former Yugoslavian soldiers “with blood dripping from their knuckles” and they didn’t need him. “The guy at the gate in a white kepi with no teeth looked at me and said, ‘There is nothing for you here.’ ”

Asked what his new identity—a prerequisite—would have been had he been accepted, he says, “I was going to pretend I was Canadian. I thought I could pull that off.”

I f n o t h i n g e l s e , Ro s e h a s a l way s b e e n i n t r e p i d . N o t a l way s f o c u s e d , sometimes imprudent, but never anything except the cleverest guy around.

He was at times a cabana boy at his uncle Herb’s pool; or a kid ma-gician with two doves, Dave and Doug, both female, and a pet snake that often found its way into his sister’s underwear drawer. (“We had a shrieking sister,” says Zak.) He was director of a local sailing school on Lake Michigan even though he knew little about sailing; a college lab assistant specializing in cat dissection; and a rather blessed child who was never told no by his parents until the day he informed them that he planned to kayak from Texas to Guatemala and needed to buy a gun for the trip. “I think my parents are still on antianxiety medication from that,” he says.

None of his adventures had anything to do with food.His early life prepared him for almost everything except combat

and what he has now become: the foremost interpreter of classic French food in the world today. At age thirty-nine, he is lauded for his downtown-Manhattan restaurant, Le Coucou, where he offers French food of impeccable character, slightly adapted from the de-finitive versions found in cookbooks dating back to the early nine-teenth century—the very beginning of haute cuisine.

Think of his food as Nouveau Escoffier—fresher, livelier, and more stimulating than the traditional cream-laden constructions that glo-rified, and at the same time stupefied, the French table for centu-

ries. Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of the three-Michelin-starred Le Bernar-din, ate at Le Coucou several months ago

and said, “I haven’t seen anyone talented like this in a long time.”Rose’s veal terrine comes with milkweed pods that burst with

tingling juices, a startling variation on the traditional pickle. He calls the pods “a wink to foraging.” The lamb chops—Ripert raved about them—are accompanied by small tomatoes stuffed with braised lamb shoulder and chard. He does quenelles de brochet in a lobster sauce and garnished with a lobster claw—quenelles probably predate Napoleon.

When he decided his menu required a chicken dish—what Man-hattan restaurant survives without one?—he spent months search-ing for an acceptable bird. “For him, it is products,” says his friend Gregory Marchand, chef-owner of the restaurant Frenchie, in Paris. “He is so much in love with products.” Finally, Rose settled on a halal butcher shop in Ozone Park, Queens, where no chef of classic French cuisine had gone before.

Once, in Paris, at his restaurant Spring, he served me fried sole alongside blood pudding. Dismayed, I asked him if he was intend-ing to introduce a weird version of surf and turf to France, and he replied that the combination was inspired by geography, not per-versity. “The sole is from St.-Jean-de-Luz, in the Pays Basque,” he says. “The boudin came up on the same truck.” They were perfect together, on the plate as well as on the road.

Most diners think there’s nothing left to learn about classic

French cooking; he believes otherwise. He is certain that Auguste Escoffier, the premier French chef of a century past, knew what he was doing, but he does not feel all possible efforts have been ex-hausted in uplifting the cuisine. Rose appears to have perfect pitch where French food is concerned, an innate ability to extract maxi-mum flavor from dishes that have been around since the guillotine.

“French cooking,” he says, “is a codified encyclopedia of things that most people find pleasurable. It might be sole seventy different ways. The dishes are tried, tested, and approved pleasure providers.”

At a time when any dining other than casual appears moribund in Manhattan, Rose and Le Coucou stake a bold claim to a new era in fine dining. The excitement accompanying the opening in June was reminiscent of the glory days of the legendary New York restau-rant inaugurations of the late ’80s and early ’90s, which heralded the advent of Le Bernardin with Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze, Res-taurant Daniel with Daniel Boulud, and Bouley with David Bouley.

Le Coucou provides the chance for diners to relive what so many feared was all but gone, barely a memory: French food as a thrill-ing restaurant option. It came along just as interest in such food was fading. Rose isn’t reinventing the cuisine; he is revitalizing and adding luster to once-beloved dishes that have become like faded paintings by an Old Master in the Louvre. He can make a hundred-year-old recipe strikingly vibrant. His assistant at Spring, Aurielle Valat, says his gift is making French cuisine joyous and generous—“that’s the way he captures French tradition, mak-ing it even better than the way you fantasize it. He makes magic.”

Rose prepares quenelles de brochet

in a lobster sauce. Right: The dining room,

with chandeliers inspired by Istanbul’s

Hagia Sophia.

F O R A G E N E R A T I O N T H A T H A S R E J E C T E D C L A S S I C F R E N C H

F O O D W I T H O U T E V E R T R Y I N G I T, T H A T C O N S I D E R S I T

A P U N C H - D R U N K C U L I N A R Y C A L A M I T Y ,

L E C O U C O U O F F E R S A N U N P A R A L L E L E D O P P O R T U N I T Y T O E X P E R I E N C E

F O O D C O N S I D E R E D T H E F I N E S T E V E R C R E A T E D .

[continued on page 136]

area. Chang was revolutionary, original, oddly idealis-tic, and, it turned out, transformative. His was the food of momentary gratification, food without a past and, it often seemed, without a future. Nothing has remained the same since he opened Ssäm Bar. Today, in New York, his influence is extensive. Res-taurants invent dishes that are sampled, served, forgotten, replaced. Dining out is akin to gasping. No one sits down at a ta-ble and takes a deep breath.

That same year, Rose opened Spring in a section of Paris where nobody dined. Work-ing alone in his tiny kitchen, he prepared every plate himself, often bringing the food to customers. He helped clean up after the workday was done.

He was counterrevolutionary, traditional, absolutely idealistic, and, it turned out, perhaps the last great hope for French cui-sine and the traditions that accompany it. Without French restaurants, young men are doomed to propose marriage to young women at their local Chipotle Mexican Grill. His was the food of memory, of stability, and of an almost immeasurable past. His signa-ture dish at Spring was pigeon, popular in France since the Middle Ages and a particu-lar favorite of Louis XIV, the Sun King.

“The difference in American food and French food is the difference between a French summer movie and an American blockbuster,” Rose says. “Both are made by talented people. The French movie has some boring parts. It’s too long. It’s provoc-ative. There might be parts you don’t under-stand. Judgment is suspended until you see the whole picture. American culture is ex-pressed in sound bites. It’s what you should be eating now. American food has no story.”

He reminded customers—yes, French cus-tomers—why their cuisine had always been thought of as the best, why it was unmatched. Even France doesn’t do classic French cui-sine particularly well any longer, not be-cause the chefs are inept but because they have moved on to newer interpretations that are not nearly as interesting as the old ones.

Two weeks after he opened Spring, his first wife ran off with a German, leaving him alone. He kept going. He fell through a trapdoor in the middle of his kitchen and injured his arm so severely that he couldn’t reach the top shelves of his pantry. He kept going. He served skewered pigeon hearts en brochette as part of his Valentine’s Day menu du marché. Prac-tically his only friend in Paris was his assistant at the restaurant, Elisa C-Rossow, a twenty-year-old who walked in and asked for a job. “We became really good friends,” she says. “He had nobody else to talk with. He was so depressed after his wife left that he was sleep-ing on a banquette in the restaurant because he did not want to go to the apartment where he had lived with his wife. I would wake him up and tell him to take a shower at my apartment on the corner and come to work.”

He rallied. Each day, he rode his scooter to the farmers’ market by the Place des Fêtes metro station to buy fresh meat and vegeta-bles, loading up a metal box welded to the back. Each night, the customers came, always curious, ever patient because the first course wasn’t served until everyone with a reser-vation had arrived. Spring was more like a nightly dinner party than a restaurant. There was a romance to Rose’s food, as there is to any beloved cuisine, something absent from the often delicious but generally distant food of the innovative chefs following Chang.

Fo r t h e f i r st t i m e, Ro s e i s n o t a l o n e. H i s p a r t-ner at Le Coucou is Stephen Starr, the Phil-adelphia restaurateur whose vast portfolio is inching closer to fine dining. Starr says of Rose, in wonder, “He stays in his restau-rant, and in his head he wants to make ev-ery dish and serve it to the customer per-sonally.” The two are tenants of Aby Rosen. Rosen is a real-estate mogul who did much to end the tradition of fine dining in New York by kicking the Four Seasons out of the Seagram Building, which he owns, but he now appears to be stimulating its rebirth by harboring Le Coucou.

One of the wonders of the restaurant is that it operates at all, given Rose’s almost to-tal inexperience in running such a complex venture. His second wife, Marie-Aude Rose, the first cook he hired at Spring—she had ear-lier cooked at the three-star Pierre Gagnaire in Paris—says, “Here he only has to focus on food and his kitchen team. In France, he was frustrated, because if something went wrong, he was the one who had to call the plumber.”

None of Rose’s skills came from nature or nurture, and certainly not from need. He grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, his fam-ily well off. Nor was food fundamental to his existence. Celebrated French chefs write of memorable family meals, of childhood kitch-ens overflowing with benevolent grand-mothers, of licking wooden cake spoons. His brother, Zak, says, “I don’t remember him ever cooking when he was under our parents’ roof. I can’t say he showed his in-nate ability to me.” The only exception, by family accounts, was when Rose briefly be-came a vegan, cooking seitan and other meat substitutes at home. His sister, Nicole, says of that effort, “None of it tasted good at all.”

His cooking philosophy emanates from two productive stretches at St. John’s, a progressive college in New Mexico. (He dropped out, went back, and dropped out again.) There he studied ancient Greek, part of an incoming freshman’s curriculum. He can, when prompted, recite the first line of The Iliad in ancient Greek. He says, “I only remember the first line of everything.”

At age eighteen, he was learning to engage with the world in a certain way. “The pro-fessors at St. John’s would come up with the essential questions, and we had to come up with the answers.” And therein lie the les-sons behind his culinary accomplishments. He would later use these lessons to analyze

recipes and do with them what others could not. When he resolves a problem, the answer will come to him through a process difficult to explain, one related more to the Socratic method than to the Julia Child method. French chefs who have risen through the apprentice system, a test of culinary man-hood, do not think this way. Most of them rarely get past middle school. At eighteen, they’ve reached a position in the kitchen somewhere between peeling potatoes and overseeing the storeroom.

He began cooking after being rejected by the Foreign Legion and obtaining his degree from the American University of Paris. He was twenty-one, way behind schedule for a French chef. After graduating in 2000, he moved on to the Paul Bocuse cooking insti-tute in Lyon. The school soon sent him to a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Brus-sels, where he was unhappy.

“What an idiot I was,” he says. “The chef was doing exactly what I love now. I never said goodbye. I ran away in the middle of the night.” He returned to the school, and the di-rector immediately sent him off again, this time to a small restaurant in Brittany under Chef Jean-Luc L’Hourre. “It had no stars, just a simple tasting menu for forty-eight euros and an all-lobster menu for seventy-two,” says Rose. “Jean-Luc taught me about sacrifice and taste and exploration of prod-ucts, how to give them coherence.”

That set the pattern for his early culinary life, because L’Hourre worked alone, pre-paring every dish himself, assisted by interns like Rose and a dishwasher named Lulu. “I learned to love cooking, products, seasons. I learned to embrace the sacrifices necessary to be good at the job. Now I don’t do anything that doesn’t remind me of Jean-Luc.” From there he moved to Le Pré du Moulin, outside Avignon, a one-Michelin-starred restaurant still in business under Chef Pascal Alonso. “Pascal showed me the power of simple cooking, everything just right. A strawberry dessert tasted like strawberries—satisfying, efficient, nourishing.”

What Rose offers, besides cooking talent, is a story, a startling and absolutely unlikely one. His friend Marchand says, “Daniel be-ing an American in Paris is a great story.” So, too, is Rose’s decision to open a restau-rant in New York with barely any formal training. Nobody would say he was ready, but he seldom seemed equipped for any of the challenges in his life. He has not changed. He remains exactly as he was in Paris in 2006, when he unlocked the doors of the first, tiny Spring and ended up sleep-ing on a restaurant banquette.

Earlier this year, Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, now the maître d’ at Le Coucou, walked in to apply for a job while construction was under way. He says, “The room was gutted, sheets of plastic hanging down. The stove had ar-rived, and I said to Daniel, ‘It’s so beauti-ful, I want to lay down on it.’ Daniel replied, ‘I slept on it last night. My apartment isn’t ready and I had no place else to go.’ ” ≥

Daniel Rose[continued from page 127]

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