NYC chef avoids limelight, lets food become star of the show

 
When Andrew Carmellini was growing up outside Cleveland, he had a tendency to get a little wild.

“I was a real hyperactive kid,” the chef said, sipping a beer at the Dutch, his often-thronged restaurant in SoHo. “They would probably give me Adderall these days.”

His mother, Victoria, a skilled home cook, came up with a more organic cure. “She would give me polenta and measuring spoons,” he said. “She said it was the only thing that would calm me down.” He remembers sitting on the kitchen floor, ritually stilling himself by scooping out the grains and carefully leveling each spoonful with his finger.

At 42, with a French restaurant called Lafayette scheduled to open in NoHo in April, Mr. Carmellini is still finding calm at the center of the kitchen. Compared with the showboating, game-show-hosting cooks who crowd the national stage, he stands out for being so reticent and self-contained that in a group, he almost doesn’t stand out at all.

The New York restaurant scene overflows with name-brand chefs — David Chang, Scott Conant, Tom Colicchio — who are familiar enough that fans stop them in the streets. In terms of technical skill and commercial savvy, Mr. Carmellini is viewed as every bit their equal. But his restaurants, notably the Dutch and Locanda Verde, his Italian tavern in TriBeCa, are much better known than he is.

In other words, Mr. Carmellini is what successful chefs in New York used to be like before they became rock stars. Think of him as George Martin among the Beatles, elegantly expressing his vision from behind the scenes. Or, in the words of Tien Ho, a fellow chef, now at Montmartre, who has been friends with him since Mr. Carmellini ran the kitchen at Café Boulud a decade ago, “a cook’s cook.”

“A cook’s cook is a person who is so dedicated to his craft, and so much more interested in how to roast a piece of meat than being on television,” said Mr. Ho, who, back in the Café Boulud days, worked as Mr. Carmellini’s saucier.

Mario Carbone, another veteran of the Café Boulud era who has become a chef and entrepreneur, with his comrade Rich Torrisi, behind spots like Parm, Carbone and Torrisi Italian Specialties, remembered Mr. Carmellini (known in kitchen circles as A. C.) as “an encyclopedia of food.”

“He was that guy who knew everything,” Mr. Carbone said. “A. C. was, to us, pretty close to God. He had all the answers. Put a wild turbot in front of that guy, and watch what he does. Watch how he schools somebody on that.”

Indeed, the best way to get a sense of what makes Mr. Carmellini tick is simply to stand alongside him in the kitchen. You could find him there the other day, grinning at a stove beneath the Dutch, talking in short, quiet bursts about the historical roots of various dishes and running through some Gallic specialties with Damon Wise, his new chef de cuisine at Lafayette, and Jen Yee, the pastry chef.

Mr. Wise placed a couple of peppercorn-crusted duck breasts into a frying pan. He melted a knob of butter, tipped the pan and used a spoon to baste the surface of the duck with the bubbling fat. “The long-lost art of the arroser,” Mr. Carmellini said wistfully, using the French term for the technique. “In 1992, everyone was cooking like that. And then everybody started putting everything in bags.”

He was referring to sous vide, the method of slow-cooking food by zipping it into plastic sacks and letting it sit for a long time in warm water. At Lafayette, those bags will be banned. Mr. Carmellini wants to stress more old-school methods of gastronomy.

“I’m going to try not to sous vide anything over there,” he said. “It takes some of the love out of cooking, for me. It takes out some of the fire and smells and caramelization. Some things are just better roasted in a pan.”

IN THE CURRENT VOGUE for “personal branding,” specific chefs tend to be associated with specific territories. Say “Mario Batali” and, even though the orange-clogged figurehead is involved in more projects than anyone can count, the name evokes a style of rustic, earthy Italian cooking that’s indisputably part of his imprint. The same goes for chefs as diverse as Mr. Chang, Gabrielle Hamilton, Wylie Dufresne, Masa Takayama and Michael Psilakis: we feel we know that thing they do, even when they do a lot of things.

Mr. Carmellini does a lot of things, too, but the unifying thread is not as clear-cut as it can be with many of his contemporaries. He has an Italian restaurant, Locanda Verde. He has an American restaurant, the Dutch, where kimchi and tamales share space on the menu with fried-oyster sandwiches and barrio tripe. He’s about to open a French restaurant, Lafayette, which will come equipped with a rotisserie station and a full bakery. So what does that tell us about his brand?

“Three expressions of things that I love,” is how Mr. Carmellini explained it. “My brand is food.”

And he lets the food do the talking. In his eyes, each place represents something he’s personally passionate about cooking and eating. “I’m the same way with music,” he said. “I like all sorts of things. There’s great music in every genre. But it has to elicit an emotional response.”

The Dutch, Locanda Verde and Lafayette reflect different aspects of Mr. Carmellini’s quest “to acquire culinary knowledge,” Mr. Chang said. “Andrew was Google before there was Google.”

Besides, there’s nothing arbitrary about that troika of enterprises. For years, Mr. Carmellini knew he wanted to oversee one French, one Italian and one American restaurant in New York, and he has been deliberate in mapping out the gradual pace of their arrival, as well as their prime real estate. He always knew, for instance, that he wanted each one to be on a corner.

“There’s something about the feeling of a great corner spot,” said one of the chef’s business partners, Luke Ostrom. “There’s this romantic idea about corners in general. It’s a good way to start your experience when you walk through the door.”

Mr. Carmellini’s sense of how a restaurant is supposed to feel, and how a dish is supposed to taste, runs deep. Venture into a conversation about his upbringing, and he’ll talk mostly about food. His mother, of Polish extraction, would regularly bake mulberry pies (with fruit that she and her son had picked from the nearby fields) and potica, a yeasty Polish poppy-seed cake. Paul Carmellini, his father, would gather family members together in Cleveland during the holiday season for days of sharing homemade wine, grappa, sausage and brovada, a Friulian dish of fermented turnips.

By the time he hit high school, Andrew Carmellini was already washing pots in a Cleveland catering hall. “They gave me free beer,” he said. “Which is nice, when you’re 14 and 15.”

While still in his teens, he joined the kitchen crew at a local Italian restaurant. “I was good,” he recalled. “I was a good line cook. I could bang out 500 covers, no problem.” He spent time, later, at Chez Fran?ois in Vermilion, Ohio, but signs of restlessness had already begun to emerge: he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, and one day he and a friend journeyed into Manhattan with the sole objective of dining at Le Cirque.

“It was my first dinner in New York,” he said. “I drove my 1973 Maverick, and I parked it right around the corner.” Mr. Carmellini was 18. His friend, Dante, hadn’t brought along the requisite necktie, so the ma?tre d’ forced him to don a shame-inducing replacement: a bolo.

Mr. Carmellini still remembers the squab dish he ate that night, and how it haunted him — he wanted to figure out how to extract such succulent liquid from the meat. “French cooks are the masters of jus,” he said. “That’s one of the things I wanted to learn from working with a French guy.”

His grandmother, who came from Italian and French stock, had always seemed determined to make that happen. She put a copy of Jacques Pépin’s seminal “La Methode” into A. C.’s hands when he was about 11.

Years later, she spotted a photo in USA Today of Daniel Boulud, then casting his spells at Le Cirque, and Sirio Maccioni, the restaurant’s ringmaster, beaming beside a heap of truffles. She told her grandson to find his way to New York and work there. Eventually he did just that, winding up as a sous-chef at Le Cirque in the latter half of the 1990s.

“Gotta listen to Grandma,” Mr. Carmellini said.

ALONG THE WAY there were also years of cooking in Italy and France, and stints at Lespinasse (with Gray Kunz), San Domenico, Café Boulud, A Voce — even, early on, as a private weekend chef for Gov. Mario M. Cuomo in Albany. (Mr. Carmellini also wrote two cookbooks in collaboration with his wife, Gwen Hyman.)

“He definitely did it the old-school way,” Mr. Carbone said of his former boss’s career path. “He only worked in great kitchens.”

And in his 20s, Mr. Carmellini managed to dodge the Preening Young Visionary phase that would become so common with the cresting popularity of the Food Network. “I guess I took my time a little bit,” he said. “I wanted to run restaurants for other people, first. I wanted to have that practice first. If you want to be a great chef, you can’t rush it too much.”

He still moves at his own pace. As research for Lafayette, he spent months in France, cooking and eating in villages like Saint-Paul-de-Vence. An entire day last fall turned into a quest to sample nearly every good croissant in New York. He approaches the realm of deliciousness with the methodical patience of an archaeologist.

Mr. Ho remembers Mr. Carmellini’s ultimate advice as “just cook the food that you love.”

“He hated the word ‘concept’ for a restaurant,” Mr. Ho said. “Because food is not a concept to him.”

At the Dutch the other night, Mr. Carmellini and Mr. Wise could be found playing around with a spin on mouclade, which is traditionally a curried bowl of mussels, but in their hands had morphed into an aromatic mix of mussels, herbs, clams and black sea bass.

The chef dipped a spoon into the sauce, which was fragrant with white wine, thyme, olive oil and the brine of the shellfish. The act seemed to have a soothing effect on him. “That is one of my favorite flavors in the world,” Mr. Carmellini murmured.

You might say he was measuring polenta all over again.