Eric Ripert is the chef of Le Bernardin in New York. He appears in four chapters of The Luxury of Attention, more than almost anyone else I interviewed, because his career illustrates several of the book’s arguments at once.
His calling began in his mother’s dining room in Andorra, where the table was set every day with fresh linens, china, candles and flowers. Kicked out of school at fifteen and told to find a vocation, he tried to look sad and was delighted. He calculated that a kitchen job would let him eat all the time.
His apprenticeship was with Gilbert Le Coze, his mentor and co-founder of Le Bernardin, whose advice about keeping a bad review on your desk he still repeats as if it had been spoken last week. The book also records his honesty about the kitchen he used to run. He writes in his profile that he used to be a very authoritative chef who yelled at his cooks, the style he had experienced in his own training. Around the year 2000 he saw what it was costing him, and he repudiated it.
“I couldn’t be happy if I was angry. Those emotions cannot coexist. A cook can’t make delicious and beautiful food if his hands are shaking from fear.” Eric Ripert, chef, Le Bernardin, New York
Today, he says, nobody yells in his kitchen, and even the busiest services are peaceful. Chapter 8 returns to that change as the precondition for the human touch Le Bernardin is now known for.
On perfection, he gave me the most concrete answer in the book to how long the hunt takes. Mastering a new dish can take days, months or years, and one idea for stuffed calamari took him twenty years to make exactly the way he wanted it. He names consistency as the greatest challenge for a restaurant of Le Bernardin’s caliber, since the standard cannot vary with the kind of evening a guest is having. On the pressure of three stars, he writes in his profile that he forgets about the stars and focuses on the work.
“Every morning I wake up and on my way to Le Bernardin I think about what I need to do as a chef. I’m not thinking about maintaining the awards. I believe that if we work hard and focus on what we do best, the awards will follow.” Eric Ripert, chef, Le Bernardin, New York
In the book, Eric Ripert appears in Chapter 1, The Calling, on the schoolboy who wanted to eat all the time; in Chapter 2, The Apprenticeship, on Le Coze and on the kitchen culture he gave up; in Chapter 7, In Pursuit of Perfection, on the twenty year calamari and on forgetting the stars; and in Chapter 8, The Human Touch, where his transformation around 2000 is the foundation of the care his kitchen delivers.