Le Bernardin Cookbook: Four-Star Simplicity [Hardcover]

Eric Ripert (Author), Maguy Le Coze (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

Le Bernardin, New York's only four-star seafood restaurant, is renowned not only for its impeccable cuisine but also for its understated elegance. Now the Le Bernardin experience is made accessible to everyone in more than 100 meticulously formulated and carefully tested recipes for all courses, from appetizers through dessert.

The food served in Le Bernardin's beautiful dining room is as subtle and refined as any in the world, and because fish and shellfish are often best turned out quickly and simply, the recipes in this book can be reproduced by any home cook.

Maguy Le Coze traces the origins of Le Bernardin's "simplicity" to her late brother, Gilbert, the restaurant's legendary cofounder and first chef: "Gilbert was not a classically trained chef," she says. "He had never been to culinary school. When he cooked, he made things he liked, and things he knew. He focused on the quality and freshness of the fish. He made nages and vinaigrettes because he'd never made a hollandaise or a béarnaise. He focused on flavors that were delicate, subtle, herb-infused."

Today, Chef Eric Ripert carries on that tradition with dishes such as Poached Halibut on Marinated Vegetables, Pan-Roasted Grouper with Wild Mushrooms and Artichokes, and Grilled Salmon with Mushroom Vinaigrette. And, of course, there are the desserts for which Le Bernardin is also so well known--from Chocolate Millefeuille to Honeyed Pear and Almond Cream Tarts.

Essential to the experience of dining at Le Bernardin and to the Le Bernardin Cookbook are the dynamic and charming personalities of Maguy Le Coze and Eric Ripert, whose lively dialogue and colorful anecdotes shine from these pages as brightly as the recipes themselves.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

At Le Bernardin, seafood is always the star. From the day this posh restaurant opened in New York City, it was recognized for revolutionizing the way fish was prepared. Chef-owner Gilbert Le Coze and his sister, Maguy, quickly gained an exalted four-star rating for their original, impeccable, exquisite food, which you can now reproduce at home using their recipes.

Le Coze avoided using classic sauces because, lacking professional training, he did not know how to make them. Instead, he created Carpaccio of Tuna, a kind of paper-thin sashimi on a plate, Baked Sea Urchins, and Roast Monkfish on a Bed of Sautéed Savory Cabbage with Bacon, a dish that is both rustic and rich. When Gilbert died in 1994, at just 48, his chef de cuisine, Eric Ripert, stepped in and has continued to dazzle with his own fish dishes. Ripert, who had a classical chef's training, is especially innovative in his Poached Lobster in Lemongrass-Ginger Bouillon. If following three pages of meticulously clear instructions for handling the lobsters, puréeing their coral, and much more is not for you, try the salmon fillets served in a magically cream-free but creamy lemon sauce, the Roast Cod Niçoise flavored with basil, capers, and black olives, or the saffron-and-orange-perfumed Fish Soup.

Le Bernardin's desserts are famous, too. A reasonably competent cook can create ecstasy with the Bitter Chocolate Soufflé Cake, lavish with dark chocolate, butter, eggs, and just one tablespoon of flour.

If you read mostly cookbooks, the spirited dialogue between Ripert and Maguy, their anecdotes of culinary adventures, and characteristically Gallic commentary may divert you. Typically, Maguy says, "My favorite way to eat calamari is with a nice green salad. How American!" Seems the French only ate a lettuce salad with meats until nouvelle cuisine came along in the 1970s, and Maguy still considers it an aberration with seafood. Just as her taste has changed, this book may open you to new experiences with seafood. --Dana Jacobi

From Publishers Weekly

The first cookbook from Le Coze (owner) and Ripert (executive chef) of Le Bernardin, New York City's only four-star seafood restaurant, may spark the frustration of readers who have had difficulty getting a reservation at this culinary landmark. Such an appetizer such as Poached Baby Lobster on Asparagus and Cepe Risotto or entree like Pepper and Fennel-Crusted Salmon with Shallot-Madeira Sauce and Truffle-Scented Polenta promise a nirvana-like experience that will be hard to replicate at home (despite the collection's subtitle). This is four-star restaurant fare prepared by a master (and staff), requiring of home cooks a source of ultra-fresh seafood, deftness in esthetic presentation and considerable patience. There are some widely useful tips?capitalize on fresh herbs; use top-quality ingredients?and some recipes are indeed simple, e.g., Salmon Baked with Tomato and Mint; Broiled Shrimp with Garlic Butter; and Coffee Creme are within reach of anyone. But many recipes will challenge adventurous chefs. Baked Sea Urchins require nerve and dexterity. Salmon and Black Truffle Strudels aren't even attempted at the restaurant when it's busy, says Le Coze, and Ripert admits it took him two weeks to master Lobster with Coral Sauce, Asparagus, and Mushrooms. With an introduction recalling the restaurant's history, opened by Le Coze with her late brother Gilbert, this volume illustrates the best that a restaurant cookbook can offer, as well as the drawbacks.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1 edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385488416
• ISBN-13: 978-0385488419
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 1 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,269 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #13 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Cooking by Ingredient > Meat, Poultry & Seafood > Seafood
  • #63 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > European > French

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Best Seafood Restaurant Books, May 25, 2005

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B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Le Bernardin Cookbook: Four-Star Simplicity (Hardcover)

`Le Bernardin Cookbook' by highly regarded seafood chef Eric Ripert and restaurateur Maguy Le Coze (cofounder of the restaurant with her brother Gilbert) is the first case where I wished I could give a half a star. In many ways, it is a classic restaurant cookbook which is better than average in many ways, but I usually need a little more than `better than average' to give five stars. In comparison to Rob Feenie's `Lumiere' cookbook I reviewed yesterday, `Le Bernardin' exceeds expectations in the following ways:

It is almost entirely a cookbook for all sorts of fish, based primarily on classic French recipes. This means that if you had a shelf of 100 famous restaurant cookbooks and wanted a recipe for fish, you could immediately go to either this book or Bob Kinkead's recent restaurant book, depending on whether you wanted something from Brittany or Baltimore. Oddly, this book also shares with the Kinkead book the fact that at least one recipe author (Bob Kinkead and Gilbert Le Coze) for each book was entirely self-taught.

The story behind this book is about as endearing and as interesting as they come. `Le Bernardin' was originally opened in Paris by brother and sister Le Coze in 1972, after the siblings spend their early life together helping their parents run a struggling little restaurant on the coast of Brittany. After an initial splash and failure based on no experience, they ultimately succeeded in Paris. They followed this with opening the Manhattan restaurant in 1986, just as culinary consciousness in New York made it worth their while to open a restaurant which specialized in fish. All of this would be very ordinary if it were not for the incredible affection brother and sister had for one another, ended with the death of Gilbert at the age of forty-eight in 1994, just a year or two after hiring classically trained Eric Rippert as executive chef at the Manhattan restaurant.

The recipes, many the creation of unschooled Gilbert, tend to be much more original than what you may find in the standard fish cookbooks by Mark Bittman, James Beard, and Alan Davidson. None of the classic bistro recipes for mussels (which you will find in Tony Bourdain's `Les Halles' book) are here. While some tend to the involved, fish recipes tend to be involved primarily in the preparation of stocks, nages, butter sauces and court bouillons. If you get the techniques for doing these things well, many of the recipes devolve into very simple preparations, befitting the generally fast cooking times for fish.

Each recipe has a separate headnote from each author, and the counterpoint between them is almost worth the price of the book in itself. It is not uncommon for Madame Le Coze to really hate a recipe that Monsieur Rippert has just praised up and down the avenue. She usually comes around in the end, but the honesty is so unexpected that you start looking forward to contretemps in the next recipe dialogue.

The recipes are organized in a very satisfactory way for a restaurant book on fish. The first chapter is an especially good collection of recipes for the basics. These are for the stocks, nages, butter sauces and court bouillons cited above. This is one of the few cookbooks I can thing of which includes a shrimp, lobster, and clam stock recipe. And, near and dear to my heart is the fact that the chicken stock recipe cooks for only three hours! The following eight chapters on fish dishes is just a little mixed, in that two chapters represent courses, `Salads' and `Appetizers' while six chapters represent the techniques `Raw Fish', `Poached and Steamed Fish', `Sautéed Fish', `Roasted Fish', `Grilled Fish', and `Shellfish'. The penultimate chapter on `Big Parties' gives seven over the top recipes for entertaining, most giving eight servings rather than the usual four to six servings. The last chapter on desserts seems relatively long, giving 31 recipes, including three for basics such as pastry cream, hazelnut-almond cream, ganache, and sweet pastry dough. With all the pastry books available, you will not be buying this book for the desserts, but it does add to the book's value. As usual, some of the dessert recipes are quite involved.

There are no chapters or separate recipes for vegetables, as all the vegetable side dishes are included in the recipe for the seafood. This means many of the fish recipes may not be as complicated as they seem from their length if you removed the vegetable garnish, but that would take away the cachet of serving a dish as done at the great and famous Le Bernardin!

Ultimately, this book deserves more than four stars because it is a restaurant cookbook that is more valuable than a source of instructive recipes to read. It has lots of great fish recipes that can be made by an amateur at home, as long as you have access to high quality ingredients. My only disappointment in reading the book is the feeling that there is simply no way I would be able to get the kind of fresh fish used by Le Bernardin unless I opened a restaurant in an Atlantic seaport.

The mantra for this book that should be intoned as you look for a recipe is to respect the differences between the fishes. Things that work for skate will not work for tuna and vice versa. Respect the fish and you will be rewarded.

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The fish master, June 1, 2000

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Robert F. Weir "robfweir" (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Le Bernardin Cookbook: Four-Star Simplicity (Hardcover)

I've eaten at Le Bernardin a couple of times and although I occasionally felt overwhelmed by the NYC high-powered patrons, I always left the table impressed and glad to pay the high pricetag. Meals there are tremendous. I was afraid I might be intimidated by this book but was pleasantly surprized. Not only was the book beautiful in presentation, layout and illustration, but the introductions, recipes and ingredients were very useable, easy to execute and a gastronomic success when I tried them. This is a book for every cookbook library.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Four-Star Simplicity with Seafood, December 4, 2002

By 

rodboomboom (Dearborn, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Le Bernardin Cookbook: Four-Star Simplicity (Hardcover)

I'm really into seafood, and this is the cookbook for that genre.

The sophistication of taste and presentation is the ultimate maxization of the fresh seafood.

One is impressed instantly upon perviewing the recipes and trying them of the intense experience this chef has had with the ingredients and prep techniques.

Four-star chefbooks are typically intimidating due to all the ingredients and steps, but here it's minimal, yet turns out utmost in culinary heights.

Try these, they'll be knockout dishes! Pan-Roasted Grouper with Wild Mushrooms and Artichokes (served with unbelievable pork jus); Roast Monkfish on Savoy Cabbage and Bacon-Butter Sauce; Black Bass in Cabbage Packages with Purple Mustard Sauce; Yellowtail Snapper with Garden Vegetables.

Accompaniments are worth paper as well, with monster dinner dessert of "Earl Grey Tea and Mint Soup with Assorted Fruit;Gruyere and Potato Cakes.

Tough one to match in my extensive collection!