Among all the great cooks who made New York their playground during the go-go nineties, David Bouley has a special place. Like Batali, Jean-Georges, and Daniel Boulud, he’s run seminal restaurants (notably the original Bouley, which opened in the late eighties). He’s pioneered culinary trends (nouvelle American cuisine, the sous vide bag) and helped train many great chefs (Dan Barber, Anita Lo, Eric Ripert).
Unlike his other superstar brethren, however, Bouley has rarely strayed far from his New York roots. His restaurants have generally opened in that little three-block corner of southwestern Tribeca known to my gourmet friends as Bouley Land. And like many residents of this lunatic city, he’s had his dramas—shuttering several of his operations, battling creditors, and shaking his fist wildly at the fates. Through it all, he’s persevered and survived. Among his generation of hypertalented New York superstar chefs, you could say Bouley’s the quintessential New Yorker.
His latest quixotic venture is the long-awaited high-end Japanese establishment Brushstroke, which opened about a month ago in an angular ground-floor space on Hudson Street, a location the chef’s fans will recognize as the former home of his doomed French brasserie, Secession. Before that, the narrow, high-ceilinged room housed the excellent multi-star Austrian restaurant Danube, a place famous for its delicately puffy Wiener schnitzel and its glittering Klimt-style murals. Now the room has been redone again, by Bouley and his Japanese partner (Yoshiki Tsuji, head of the Tsuji Culinary Institute, in Osaka) in the spare, woodsy style of a Shinto shrine.
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