Fourth Star: Dispatches from inside Daniel Boulud's Celebrated New York Restaurant
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Within every fine restaurant there exist two worlds: the elegant, hushed environment of the dining room and the chaotic, explosive, high-tension scene behind the swinging kitchen doors. The ability to create dishes that are utterly sublime and turn them out at breakneck pace while simultaneously juggling kitchen crises, coddling demanding patrons, and managing overworked staff is what defines a four-star chef. In The Fourth Star, award-winning author Leslie Brenner goes inside those swinging doors to explore the realities behind Daniel, capturing the dramas that arise in the insular, high-pressure milieu of a world-class kitchen. New York’s food establishment had been stunned when Daniel Boulud’s newly opened flagship restaurant was awarded only three stars from the New York Times. From that moment on, it became Boulud’s unspoken mission to regain the four-star rating that he’d previously garnered during his tenure at Le Cirque and then at his own first restaurant. That he was striving to do all this on an unprecedented scale, turning out nearly four hundred meals in a few short hours of service—meals that had to be absolutely perfect every time—made this goal all the more ambitious.Brenner paints a portrait of a remarkable French chef at a pivotal moment of his career, as Boulud relentlessly drives his staff to the peak of excellence. The Fourth Star provides full access to every aspect of Daniel, investigating everything from the maître d’s table assignment policies to the internecine politics of advancing up the culinary ladder.Filled with delectable, undercover details and moving personal drama, Brenner’s chronicle is an addictive read about the inner workings of a super-lative restaurant. The Fourth Star is destined to satisfy restaurant lovers, professional cooks, and armchair chefs alike. Kirkus Reviews Fine dining, politics, and a host of strange characters meet in this engaging, behind-the-scenes look at one of New York s hippest restaurants. Daniel is a place both to be seen and to eat well, at a fabulous cost: The average dinner cover, meaning the cost of a meal for one person, including beverages, but not including taxes and gratuities, is $184. The experience, suggests restaurant reviewer, food historian, and novelist Brenner (Greetings from the Golden State, 2001, etc.), is worth every bit of the cost; one of the many virtues of her insider s look at the workings of a grand restaurant is its explanation of how costly it is to keep such a place running. (Just keeping a decent wine cellar on hand is an expensive proposition: Daniel s holdings are valued at $800,000 money, Brenner points out, that is tied up in inventory and not earning interest.) Writing with a flair for on-the-street reportage, the author conveys such details as squabbles between chefs and sous-chefs, the curious ways of customers, many of whom the floor and kitchen staff rightly despise for their whiny demands, and the extraordinary problems attendant at every turn in bringing pleasure to people by way of the plate. Brenner is also superb at context; her disquisition on the general decline in American fine arts and the concomitant rise in the living arts is worth the price of admission. Non-foodies may not appreciate the drama around which she organizes her narrative: chef/owner Daniel Boulud s quest to recapture a coveted four-star rating that had been stripped away for hotly contested reasons. But those who revere food will find Brenner s approach as riveting as a good mystery, and just as much fun. A finetreat for food buffs, less snotty than Anthony Bourdain s Kitchen Confidential but just as revealing on how a fancy meal makes it way to the table.
