Customer Reviews

Chef Daniel Boulud: Cooking In New York City

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I admit I enjoyed a voyeuristic pleasure from the behind the scenes peek the book offers of daily life at Boulud's restaurant.
The chef seems so fun and fast moving and like he's actually daring you to read on and try a recipe. In the very least, I know I'll try to recreate one of the yummy sounding staff meal dishes. As for the beautifully illustrated eight course tasting menu I guess I'll just read longingly - or - go ahead and make reservations.

At first glance many of the recipes in this book appear surprisingly complex,in fact the kinds of dishes only professional chefs would prepare in a world class restaurant kitchen. As you flip the pages, you realize this is the whole point. This lively book is, in fact, meant to be a glimpse into the kitchens and wine cellars and dining rooms of Daniel Boulud's three NYC restaurants. The photo journalistic approach has gives you the impression you are watching a documentary about life behind the scenes in these wonderful fairy tale like places where every hors d'oeuvre, soup, terrine, entree, dessert, petits fours, etc, etc is the result of complex preparation, incredible attention to detail and the font of creativity and spirit that are conjured up beind the scenes by master chef, Daniel Boulud.

If you're looking for great recipes by Daniel Boulud that you can actually and easily cook at home, try "Daniel Boulud's Café Boulud Cookbook" or his more recent "Daniel's Dish". It's clear from these that the chef has as great a talent for the simple as for the sublime. The former will be a joy to try for your next dinner party the latter are better left to Boulud and his brigade of 40 or more cooks. Vive la difference !

This book may look like a work of culinary photojournalism, being a chronicle of a day in the life of Chef Boulud at his three Manhattan restaurants. While the book has some of the ingredients which would comprise such a work, it is actually a book of recipes from his three restaurants hung on a rather thin framework of the day in the life of a major restaurant kitchen.
The framework text can be read in less than an hour and contains several errors in punctuation and word usage which a copy editor should have corrected. The design of the text presentation is equally poor. There are shifts in font to signify changes in topic or voice. Some pages of text look like something out of Alice in Wonderland or Monty Python with staggered letters and words and poor choices of text / background color contrasts. Very difficult to read, what little of it there is.
As in some other recipe books I've seen, a minority of the photographs display the food and it's preparation while the majority of the photographs show restaurant workers and celebrity friends of Chef Daniel hamming it up for the camera.
This leaves the recipes. In 234 pages, there are a scant 80 recipes, all of which are presented as being from one of Boulud's restaurants, and, most are indeed recipes one would not likely make at home. There is a high incidence of unusual and expensive ingredients such as pig's head, and some downright bizarre, such as piballes worms. Many of the recipes are also very long in the preparation. Unlike every other cookbook I have reviewed up until now, I did not bother to actually make any of the recipes therein, as it was apparent that except for a few, mostly breads and desserts, these were not the kind of dishes the average person would make, even for entertaining. (This is not typical of restaurant cookbooks, as I find no difficulty making many of the recipes in Mario Batali's Babbo cookbook.) A good case in point is the db hamburger made with truffles, foie gras, and comfit, oh my.
Most recipes include a wine recommendation giving a specific vineyard and year, about which I can have no opinion except that it does nothing to enhance the value of the book for me. A type of wine such as `chardonnay' or `merlot' would have been quite good enough. I will give a small nod to their wine recommendation of `beer' for some of the dishes.
The book includes a list of sources, a requirement for these recipes with many unusual ingredients.
In all, I think the only value to purchasing this book is if one wishes to dine at one or more of Daniel Boulud's restaurants often and wish to know what goes into his stuff or, if one wishes to create a restaurant menu very similar to Boulud's fare. One may find some value to looking through this book at a library if one wants to research variations on a particular recipe.
In sum, recipes may be good, but there are too few and the presentation is poor. Other restaurant / celebrity chef books do much better.

Nice book of DB, he is an inspirational chef whose work I am fond of. This book (though a bit out dated) is really cool, the bread recipes are classic.

What a delight to peek behind the swinging door at one of the top restaurants in the world. The people who make Daniel run day to day - that's what intrigued me about this book. These men and women take feeding people very seriously. The philosophy of Daniel Boulud radiates in everything that is done at Daniel - soigne. They take care of people and don't miss a beat from the flowers to the wine, the great service, and of course the food. Brenner introduces the reader to all of the people who make it work from the farmers to the seafood purveyors, cheese shops, wine reps, cooks, maitre d's, pastry chefs, pr people, owners, and of course the guests (don't forget the VIPs). Brenner does a fabulous job of putting the reader behind the scenes.

Being a novice food person, many many of the terms I didn't know. It might be helpful to have a glossary or even a floorplan of the restaurant (maybe the hardcover edition has this). Also, when writing dialog, Brenner often has one person asking a question of someone else but it never gets answered. Or there might be an answer but it's to a different question in a different conversation altogether. I'm sure the confusion of the reader parallels the confusion of a worker in a restaurant kitchen. Regardless, it was at times very hard to follow. I would have liked to have read more about the servers, who are called captains at Daniel. The sommelier, reservationists, bartender, maitre d', cheese person and many others all had a lot of coverage, but the servers, who really present the face of the restaurant to the client, were not covered in detail.

I expected a lot form this book, as Mr. Boulud's previous book was very good. But this one is not so much a book of recipes or cooking techniques as it is a lot of pictures of wine bottles, Mr.Boulud's daily life and so on. Also, a lot of pages made up of huge fonts which say too little but look too much. Recipes are not good at all, if you can find any. For example between pages 240 and 260 there is no single recipe but a lot of photographs of everything except recipes. I personally wouldn't give a try to any one of his recipes. The price for this book should be no more than $5. Hence, please don't waste your money.

Much more than a typical cookbook,but if you want to know what makes Daniel Boulud the best chef in New York City-read this book. Great chef- great man-great book.
Wm. Altshuler.MD

I received this book for free as a wedding favour, where the reception was held at Daniel, his restaurant. I would not recommend paying for it, unless you enjoy reading other people's yearbooks. That's what the format of this hardcover reminds me of, a high school yearbook with the collections of photographs and fond memories retold.

Having made 4 of the recipes from this cookbook, I can tell you each one is a journey in researching and tracking down very hard-to-find ingredients. The amount of time and work invested in doing all this is never completely rewarded by how the dish turns out.

From the time I wound up going to the city's main wholesale fish importer to get peeky-toe crab, to the many trips and phone calls to local co-ops and organic markets to nail down some Meyer lemons... I can say the best part of the dish was the stories I had to tell my friends about making it, and not so much eating it.

Why do I torture myself again and again making these? Well, like I said, it makes for good stories, and I do learn about certain ingredients I never would have heard of in my life before. I just wish the food that I ate at the end of the day was as memorable.

Just want to mention the author's restaurant in NYC. I have visited several 1-3 star restaurants in Europe and I can't understand how Daniel is regarded as a three star restaurant. I spent $1000 on a taste menue for two. First it was only eight courses - I'm used to at least 12. The selected wines were good but out of the eight courses only one gave me a close "wow" experience. For a three star place ALL courses should give me a "wow" factor! Also one of the corses was ordinary duck/goose liver - what is that??? Even though it's good I can buy my own can of goose liver... Another thing, we didn't wear our best but ok because we travelled light on our way to a djungle tour in Costa Rica. We were kind of treated like second class people. One recommendation: Spend your money elsewhere!