The Birthday Party

Three star chefs (and ELLE alums) cook us up a celebratory dinner for our quarter century and dish on the fashion of food, then and now. Ruth Reichl takes notes

Lisa Hubbard

When ELLE arrived stateside 25 years ago, along with its modern perspective on style, it also imported the French media's ahead-of-the-curve food coverage. Pre–Food Network and dining blogs, ELLE reserved an unprecedented number of gorgeously art-directed pages for cuisine culture. There were even tear-out recipe cards! To celebrate our birthday and our ongoing love for the art of eating, we invited a star trio, who, as still nascent luminaries, cooked for these pages decades ago, to reinvent those recipes and create a feast that represents who they, and we, are today: fresh, ever-changing, delicious.

When David Bouley walks into ELLE's photo shoot an hour late, the other chefs laugh. "You're always late," Eric Ripert says. "You don't change at all."

But they have changed, these three great chefs, in the 20-odd years since they first created recipes for ELLE's lush food section. When the magazine covered him in 1991, Jean-Georges Vongerichten had just opened his first restaurant, the minuscule JoJo, in New York City, hoping that his reputation for making French food lighter by replacing butter and cream with vegetable stocks would bring customers flocking. Had you told him he'd become the head of a vast restaurant empire—Jean Georges, Spice Market, ABC Kitchen, and so on—he would have said you were insane.

In 1993, Eric Ripert's destiny as a major media star and Top Chef judge was also far in the future; newly arrived at New York's Le Bernardin, he was helping legendary chef Gilbert Le Coze change the way restaurants served fish. "Gilbert was a purist," Ripert says. "For him, fish was so delicate and sacred, he didn't even want to cook it." Nobody could have foreseen that Le Coze would soon die, tragically young, of a heart attack in 1994, leaving Ripert to carry his torch with his sister Maguy Le Coze and make Le Bernardin The New York Times' current longest-running four-star restaurant.

And in 1991, the remarkably sensual menu at Bouley had already transformed New York's food sensibility, but David Bouley had yet to discover the Japanese aesthetic that would transform his own. "The purity of Japan will change the world," he says now—and the others nod in agreement.

In the intervening years, each chef has had a profound effect on the way we eat. "I came from France in 1986," says Vongerichten, "to cook French food. But I looked around and thought, This food's too rich; the meals too long; the Italian restaurants are packed—we have to change."

They took their French training and turned it inside out. In France, technique was everything, but in America, they began putting ingredients first. And when the ingredients didn't exist, they changed that, too. "In those days," Vongerichten says, "the farmers would come into your restaurant with seed catalogs: `What do you want us to grow for you next year?' "

Now the ingredients they requested—lemongrass, heirloom apples, black currants, baby beets—are widely available, and the competition to invent the latest, coolest cookery is intense. The four of us sat down to sample the spectacular dishes they created when we asked them to envision an ELLE twenty-fifth-anniversary dinner party menu and to talk about how things were, how they've changed, and where they're going, in the obsessed-over world of haute food.

ELLE: How have restaurants changed since you came here from France in the '80s?

Eric Ripert: The position of the chef [here] has changed a lot. It was like a mini revolution. In Paris, I worked with Joël Robuchon, and if you are coming to Robuchon, you will eat what Robuchon gives you. And you shut up, as a client.

David Bouley: It was so different back then in New York City. People used to walk in thinking they were going to tell the waiter what [I should] cook for them.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten: Really, it was Le Bernardin that changed things.

JGV: [Le Coze] would die before he made something he did not want to cook.

DB: He was very progressive....

ER: Now the client comes to you because they like your style. And young eaters are adventurous and curious. They come in for an experience.

DB: They challenge you.

ER: And at the same time, they don't mind being challenged.

ELLE: Have prices changed?

JGV: At the time, there were only a few fine-dining restaurants. Five, six, seven. Now there is more competition. I was doing more expensive food in 1988 than I'm doing now. At the first New York restaurant I worked in, Lafayette, the tasting menu was $150; today at Jean Georges it's $148.

ER: That's pretty interesting when you consider how the prices have gone up. Back then, you could buy sea bass for $2.50 a pound; today it's $8 or $9.

ELLE: How have ingredients changed?

JGV: Everything is so much more eclectic. I discovered grains in New York. In France, the only grain I knew was wheat. When ELLE asked me to do recipes [in the early '90s], I had a Jewish girlfriend, so I thought I'd make a variation of kasha varnishkes.

ER: New York is so cosmopolitan, with so many different nationalities; you're getting inspired by the Koreans, the Irish, the Japanese, the Jewish, and the Latinos.

DB: Robuchon was using soy sauce in 1981, you remember? No other French chef was doing that. Now everybody does.

JGV: Soy sauce and butter—it's the best sauce in the world. Bring a spoonful of each to a boil and add lime juice.

ELLE: How will we eat in the future?

ER: Molecular gastronomy is dead. Our generation is all about the primacy of ingredients. Things keep getting lighter. Escoffier [the early-twentieth-century chef who remade French cooking] meant to make food lighter by replacing meat stocks with butter and cream. Then nouvelle cuisine came along, trying to make food lighter by taking away the butter and cream. And then, Jean-Georges, you made it lighter with the vegetable juices. Today, there's the Japanese influence, making the food lighter again.

ELLE: Okay, last question: Women in the kitchen? Has that changed?

DB: It's totally a coed environment now. That macho thing? It's over.

JGV: They do come, the women, but they don't stay; the drop-off is enormous. It's very hard to be a mom and a chef.

DB: It requires a lot of sacrifice. But I notice that women understand complex things faster than some of the guys. They get it like that, in a second. It's amazing.

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