Mini-Review

Le Bernardin Cookbook: Four-Star Simplicity

Siblings Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze grew up in their family’s modest hotel/restaurant on the seacoast of Brittany. Handsome, stylish, talented, and devoted to one another, together they ran two immensely popular Paris restaurants (both called Le Bernardin) before opening New York’s Le Bernardin in 1986, which is consistently rated by everyone from Michelin to Gourmet as one of the best seafood restaurants in the world.

When Gilbert Le Coze died suddenly in 1994, executive chef and culinary star Eric Ripert took over the kitchen and eventually went into partnership with Maguy, who continues to run the dining room. This volume of recipes, family stories, and kitchen conversation is the collective effort of chef Ripert and Maguy Le Coze and is a tribute to Gilbert and his style of cooking, as well as to the success of Le Bernardin restaurant.

With a few exceptions, this book is about fish, fish, and more fish. Fish is the authors’ collective passion, fish is what Le Bernardin restaurant is all about, and virtually every recipe concerns the preparation of seafood — entrées, appetizers, soups, and salads that are poached, steamed, sautéed, roasted, grilled, or raw.

The core of Le Bernardin’s food philosophy was developed by Gilbert, who had no formal culinary training; it has been amplified by Eric Ripert, who has had plenty. The approach is essentially this: Use absolutely the freshest possible seafood, and prepare it simply and elegantly to showcase its own flavor. The story goes that because Gilbert was never trained to make traditional French sauces, he used his exceptional palate and vivid imagination to create his own methods for developing flavor. While still unmistakably French, these inventions are generally less finicky and more healthful than traditional styles. This perspective is carried out in every recipe. “Understand the products, respect the differences, be disciplined.”

Too frequently, books written by chefs are not targeted toward novice or even average cooks, and restaurant recipes often do not gracefully translate to the home kitchen. This truism both does and doesn’t apply to this book. The inherent difficulty here lies in the fish itself. Many of the varieties used — grouper, sole, skate, sea urchin, soft-shell crab, sushi-grade tuna, black bass — are just not very available to consumers who don’t live in a cosmopolitan area or have a close personal relationship with a reliable and sophisticated fishmonger. And the rule at Le Bernardin is that any fish lingering more than 24 hours is not fresh enough and is discarded. Individuals (who don’t get daily deliveries like restaurants do) simply do not have that luxury.

However, the good news is that there are numerous killer recipes for shrimp, salmon, lobster, mussels, scallops, halibut, and other readily available products. The preparations are well-explained and many can be easily (but not rapidly) executed at home. They rely primarily on combinations of fresh herbs and vegetables, vinaigrettes, and stocks rather than on complicated rich sauces; the brilliant, often unexpected, results can be far more arresting than the sum of the parts. One such dish is Seared Salmon With Olive Sauce, a relatively uncomplicated combination of filleted salmon strips on a base of sliced potatoes, drizzled with a sauce of sun-dried tomatoes, aromatics, and three kinds of olives. The alchemy of flavors is divine.

One of the most intriguing chapters is on salads. “Salad” generally means something different to the French than it does to most Americans. Maguy relates a story about her brother raging at New Yorkers’ requests for simple green salads, “yelling that he didn’t get up at three o’clock every morning to hunt in the fish market so he could serve ‘a nice green salad.'” Le Bernardin salads are warm or chilled concoctions of seafood with vegetables, greens, legumes, and herbs. Many are completely suitable as main courses, which is good, because they require considerably more trouble than usual for a salad. For example, for the lovely Scallop Salad with Asparagus, Portobellos, and White Truffle Oil, the scallops are poached, the asparagus is blanched and then roasted, the portobellos are roasted, and the mesclun and tomatoes are dressed in vinaigrette.

The principal exception to the seafood standard is the section on the seductive desserts served at the restaurant, all of which are interesting and a number are relatively easy to accomplish, such as Bitter Chocolate Soufflé Cake with only six ingredients, or a vanilla-and-rum rice pudding with dried fruits. Other recipes, like the signature Variations of Caramel, are so complicated and time-consuming that Maguy candidly advises readers not to bother.

This is not a book for beginners. But for those who are comfortable with a variety of cooking techniques, understand something about fish, have some time, and are looking for a bit of adventure, Le Bernardin Cookbook provides the means to prepare transcendent, four-star dishes.

This article appears in January 11 • 2002.