Daniel Boulud has just won a prestigious award. Monday, November 22, according to the French association Les Grandes Tables du Monde, its 184 peers from 25 countries named the Lyonnais “best restaurateur 2021”. The one who calls himself “the most French” of the great New York chefs is at the head of the restaurant “Daniel”, his “flagship” with two Michelin stars. He lost the third in 2010, but that didn’t stop him from continuing his journey. He who landed on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1982 never to leave. Today, the discreet 66-year-old Lyonnais, whose business as well as honors are difficult to inventory, is a real celebrity in North America.
The international star of gastronomy praises the resilience of his culinary art in the largest multicultural city in the United States which is just recovering from the pandemic. His coronation on Monday is one more reward for Daniel Boulud’s small empire of gastronomy which, by his own admission, weighs some 100 million dollars thanks to some twenty establishments – almost all of them bear his name – in the United States. United, Canada, London, Dubai or Singapore. This umpteenth prize is for the restaurateur a “professional consecration and truly a sign of friendship and support from (his) colleagues”, in an environment deemed to be very harsh in terms of competition and pressure.
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An honor also for its “teams” and “for all these young people who dream one day of becoming a Daniel Boulud or an Eric Ripert or a Guy Savoy”, do not forget to say the great chef met in his “Daniel” case, which sits on Manhattan’s 65th Street between the very chic Park and Madison avenues. He has been there since 1998 with his hundred employees who scramble six evenings a week to serve 150 place settings in a beautiful New York building with interior architecture of art deco influences and Venetian palaces. Like all New Yorkers, Daniel Boulud suffered during the Covid-19 epidemic which killed at least 34,000 people in a city brought to its knees in 2020.
Over 180 French restaurateurs in New York
Some of his establishments have been closed but “Daniel” has maintained a terrace of sheds on the sidewalk “with heating in the winter and air conditioning and music in the summer” for a few die-hards. Emerging from the pandemic, Daniel Boulud thinks that New York will remain “one of the five most attractive cities in the world” with always a prominent place in French gastronomy. The economic and cultural capital of the United States, an incredible cultural mosaic of 8.5 million inhabitants with enormous social inequalities, counts, according to the Consulate General of France, 183 French restaurateurs.
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“In love” with New York, now American, Daniel Boulud still boasts of being “the most French of all French chefs in the United States” thanks to a “cuisine which has its French references” but which “never stops to innovate “. Pheasant terrine sprinkled with sumac, venison topped with beetroot sauce, the chef practices classic French cuisine (…), but with many American products, seasonings, techniques and compositions “borrowed from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East … With its pan-fried foie gras, “it feels like the Périgord and yet we are in New York (…) a very multicultural world”, he enthuses.
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The price of “luxury” and an “exceptional dinner”? About $ 300 per person with wine and service, according to the restaurateur. “Customers want to have fun, they spend on wines, they go out a lot. We find them with a regularity and loyalty that reassure us”, welcomes Daniel Boulud who is now counting on the return of visitors from Asia and Europe.
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By rewarding him, the association Les Grandes Tables du Monde hailed the man who “for many North Americans embodies French gastronomy, even gastronomy at all”. His peers also see him as “a wise and conscientious businessman”. In fact, this boss who is happy not to have “debts”, opened in May an ultra fashionable restaurant and a little less stuffy at the foot of the new One Vanderbilt skyscraper, in the heart of Manhattan, the economic lung and global finance.
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