DANIEL BOULUD'S AMERICAN DREAM

The French-born New York chef has built an international restaurant empire, but remains hungry

- KRISTEN BIELER

IT’S Thursday at 1 p.m. in the kitchen of Le Pavillon in New York. Chef and owner Daniel Boulud is arranging crispy, crushed Yukon Gold potatoes around fillets of grilled black sea bass on plate after plate in rapid fire, then speedily garnishing each with pine nut gremolata. Lunch service had started out calmly enough, but amidst the tightly timed business lunches, a bunch of large groups just ordered the elaborate sixcourse tasting menu. The kitchen’s engine begins humming in a higher gear. Two dozen cooks are heads down, brows furrowed at their stations. Servers are scrambling. A few tempers flicker.

“We’re getting pounded!” says Boulud, smiling with obvious pleasure. At 68 years old, the renowned chef and restaurateur is clearly as energized as ever by the adrenaline jolt of a high-octane professional kitchen.

Le Pavillon is one of Boulud’s most ambitious new undertakings, a grand, soaring restaurant on the second floor of One Vanderbilt, the new $3.3 billion 77-floor skyscraper located across the street from Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan. “We opened in 2021 in the middle of the pandemic, but I knew New York would come back, and that people would want luxury,” Boulud explains.

It’s named in honor of the original Le Pavillon, which reigned as New York’s grande dame of French haute cuisine until it closed in 1971, ushering in the now-bygone era of the “Le’s and La’s” as Boulud refers to them—La Caravelle, La Grenouille, Le Périgord, La Goulue, among others.